This essay critically assesses the shift from Latina/o to Latinx to articulate new formations of language, history, and cultural politics. Taking cue from Suzanne Oboler’s foundational 1995 book Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States, it further asks what’s at stake in adopting new labels and discarding those preceding them, particularly for attending to the lives and histories of individuals incessantly impacted by matters related to gender and sexuality. While recognizing the important representational work the X does, the essay also troubles an easy embrace of it by asking what the X crosses out or eliminates from consideration within contemporary identity politics.

When imagined in relation to other regions in the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the "norm," the uncontested site of middle-class white American heteronormativity. This characterization of the Midwest has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class cultures suggests the need to understand the Midwest other wise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that essentializes and naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for dispelling and unraveling the idea of the heartland. This special issue represents an engagement with and a creative departure from the notion of the American Midwest both as a geographic entity and as a discursive formation. The middle creates less a magisterial panoramic perspective than a queer vantage-a troubled, unstable perch buttressed by the dominance of the coasts and the "South." We believe that such instabilities are productive of alternative ways to approach space and time and to reimagine routes and paths, contours and shapes, directions and teloses of queer lives, practices, and institutions.

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