Decolonizing time: Chicana femme decolonial aesthetics and ancient serpent temporalities

The serpent has become a symbol systematically corrupted by colonial chronobiopolitics, but it reemerges in Chicana femme art as a symbol of decolonial time. This article examines how select artworks of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Diane Gamboa, and Anel Flores mobilize serpentine aesthetics as embodied rhetorical practices that dismantle linear temporality. Through a sensory-centered critical rhetoric informed by decolonial feminist-of-color theories, I theorize their artwork as enacting a Chicana femme logic, which I define as an aesthetic and epistemic system that intertwines queer sensuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and cyclical, generative time. This analysis offers serpentine temporality as a critical framework for resisting the sensorial violence of colonial modernity and imagining futures otherwise foreclosed upon by accelerationist, apocalyptic rhetorics.