Deep Dreaming

Abstract

The Salvadoran postwar, animated by both Cold War detritus and a nascent neoliberalism, engendered a fragmented queer experientiality for emerging lesbian politics. This essay frames the work of early Salvadoran lesbian organizers as deep dreaming, denoting the profound reflection and imagination which broadened feminist horizons in neoliberal democracy. However, this essay also points to the uneven terrain in the global political economy of stillness associated with concerted reflection, as lesbians reconfigured social and political imaginaries in post-conflict Central America. In attending to contingency, this essay hints at the necessary work of political erotics and the imagination in renegotiating otherwise fraught social movement histories and epistemologies. Considering this moment, like any queer isthmian temporality, rife with dogged hope in the unknown, also presents a challenge to approach queer life oriented from positions of precarity with greater seriousness, opening space for generative seepages between modes of past and present isthmian sapphic living.