What are “fictions of vulnerability” and how can they be read? In this talk I’ll discuss my current project and next book, Open Wounds: Reading Fictions of Vulnerability Across American Borders, which models a method for reading North American cross-border “fictions of vulnerability”, those literary and cultural texts in which conditions and crises of vulnerability govern, and where “vulnerable groups” are central. With its title taking as its inspiration queer feminist border theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous description of the U.S.-Mexico boundary as “an open wound” (1987: 25), the book maps and examines literary, film, and new media responses to conditions of vulnerability that cross North American borders.

As it brings together cross-border work by U.S., Canadian, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous authors Open Wounds models and puts into action a critical reading practice I call vulnerable reading. The broader project examines work by Anzaldúa, Rebecca Cammisa, Stella Pope Duarte, Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Danis Goulet (Cree/Métis), Valeria Luiselli, Manuel Muñoz, Gregory Nava, Katherena Vermette (Red River Métis), Richard Wagamese (Wabaseemoong First Nation), Connie Walker (Cree), Colson Whitehead, Javier Zamora, and others. Such work, I argue, emerges from the cross-border, hemispheric conditions that produce (just three of many) intersecting, transcontinental crises of vulnerability: unaccompanied and separated children travelling through Mexico to the United States; femicide across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada; and the legacies and ongoing intergenerational effects of carceral residential and reform schools across the U.S. and Canada.

The book’s method of “vulnerable reading” attends to conditions of vulnerability while simultaneously reframing vulnerability as compatible with and fundamental to agency, resistance, strength, wellness, and joy. This critical reading practice reframes vulnerability as not inevitable or terminal, but a state of being (sometimes transitory, sometimes longer term), what philosopher Florencia Luna might call “a layer, not a label” (2009). Vulnerable reading therefore creates a space for generative vulnerable encounters, and is iterative, concerned with the careful examination of layers of vulnerability in and across texts, as well as the calls to readerly action they elicit.