Remembering Jean Franco

Remembering Jean Franco Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes When I applied to graduate school in 1990, I was a very eager undergraduate at Harvard who had also spent a year and a half studying at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. My goal was to continue to hone my expertise in gay and lesbian Latin American literature. I was terrified of yet infinitely attracted to New York City. I still remember trembling as I deposited a token to ride the subway for the first time, well before the existence of MetroCards. How different could it be from São Paulo? Growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I rode buses nonstop, traversing the route from Miramar to Old San Juan, home of numerous bookstores, museums, and cultural institutions; to Santurce to go to the theater; and to Río Piedras for events at the University of Puerto Rico. Living in a city with public transportation, but furthermore one with significant cultural life and a large Puerto Rican population, was always the goal. And when I applied to Columbia, there was no such thing as the Internet, at least not in terms of gaining information about prospective faculty. All we had were printed catalogs with names, which I devoured. This is how I learned about Jean Franco and about what was then called the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now known as the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. And I did not know that Jean Franco was a woman. Gender is tricky, as the feminist philosopher Judith Butler has shown, and names can encapsulate ambiguity. Case in point: I recently served as an external PhD dissertation evaluator at the Université de Montréal, and it turns out that my first name, "Lawrence," is feminine in French, which led to all the formal communications referring to me as "madame" and "l'examinatrice." I must confess that this was not terrible, particularly since, as a gay man, camp humor allows for all sorts of negotiations, and I have been performing in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010. I don't know if Jean ever saw me in drag, but she certainly knew I was gay! But the truth is that when I am "Larry" or "Lawrence," I tend to think of myself in the masculine. And to my enormous fortune, Jean was not only a woman, but a feminist, and one radically committed to LGBTQ matters, who was able to introduce me and all her students to some of the most brilliant minds in Latin American thought, whether it was in her graduate seminar on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (an entire semester!), where I ended up writing a research paper on representations [End Page 205] of race (indigeneity and blackness) in Sor Juana's villancicos, or in a class on Latin American popular culture, where I wrote a paper on the Puerto Rican rapper Lisa M (a paper that, curiously enough, just appeared thirty years later in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, with significant revisions). And it was in Jean's classes where we first read and then met the Chilean feminist Nelly Richard and learned about the complex performances of the Yeguas del Apocalipsis (which have just made it into the collection at MoMA) and the extraordinary crónicas of Pedro Lemebel. I ended up taking six classes with Jean at Columbia. These ranged from her undergraduate seminar on the films of Luis Buñuel (Jean was, after all, an expert in Mexican studies and was able to seamlessly jump from Buñuel's surrealist origins in Madrid and Paris to his Mexican period and later French experience), to her class on poetry and the nation, where we read Mary Louise Pratt's brilliant 1994 essay on "Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood," which was published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts—for that class, I wrote a paper on the Puerto Rican poet Luis Llorens Torres. I also took Jean's class on women, gender, and Latin American culture, where we read Manuel Ramos Otero's extraordinarily dense short story "Inventario mitológico del cuento" (a queer Puerto Rican reenvisioning of Julio Cort...

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