1The title of Megan Sibbett’s work, Shock and Yawn, encapsulates the book’s reflection on violence and terror alongside the mundane character of the daily life within which they occur. Sibbett sets out to introduce its readers to the concept of intimate violence as defined by Anzaldúa through her personal history, poetry, and fiction. The work employs an Anzaldúan framework to analyze how intimate violence and terrorism remain hidden beneath the guise of benevolence of the state. Queer fiction is, then, utilized to show how intimate violence manifests in the quotidian. For such an approach, queer fiction also constitutes a site in which possible oppositional discourse can emerge. By understanding queer as a qualifier which describes experiences that the state deems non-normative, the book expands the scope of oppression against which it is able to argue. In this context, mundane violence against non-normative individuals becomes naturalized, as “the queer other becomes the everywhere threat under which state violence emerges as benevolent protection” (Sibbett 4) for the normative members of the nation.

2The introduction to Sibbett’s book evokes nationwide public service announcements that are part of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign in order to expose the state-orchestrated normalization of mutual citizen surveillance in post 9/11 America. Juxtaposing the PSAs protagonists with Anzaldúa’s oeuvre, Sibbett offers a vantage point that contradicts “the tidy narrative of trusting the state or its authorities as the protectors” (2). In this way, Sibbett situates Anzaldúa’s writing as a theoretical framework in which personal experiences expose the normalization of intimate violence. As a Chicana lesbian feminist, Anzaldúa’s experience constitutes a particular site for oppositional discourse. It simultaneously denies the implicit assumption that the terrorist threat subsumes the everyday existence of queer, non-normative individuals and exposes the intimate violence that those individuals are subjected to.

3Chapter one contextualizes mundane violence through an analysis of instances of “failure to protect” statutes as a means of criminalizing women. In this way, it examines the ways in which protection of children is utilized by the state to sideline its perpetration of violence through carceral power. Sibbett also considers how punitive measures of the benevolent state center narratives of security and family while “naturalizing imprisonment as a success” (23). In such a context, the state presents failure to protect as a failure of heteronormativity, thus focusing the resocialization of women inmates on reinstating identities deemed to be appropriate for them—good mothers and wives. With the use of the Anzaldúan framework, Sibbett continues to understand queer as a quantifier ascribed to any deviation from the established norms, asserting that the state protects those “within the normative order” (44). People who deviate from the norm are, then, not only outside that protection, exposed to the everyday violence, but also subject to carceral correction that is presented as a benevolent gesture aimed at offering them a second chance at life within the borders of normativity.

4Chapter two problematizes the issue of children and child protection in the politics of the state introduced in Chapter One. As the representation of the child in need of protection remains deeply normative, the image of the queer child constitutes an unthinkable threat to heteronormativity within the benevolent state. In this context, Sibbett expands her analysis of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera, focusing on the representation of childhood as a site of everyday violence. Sibbet further presents how Anzaldúa’s turn toward childhood constitutes an attempt at understanding queer futurity by identifying Anzaldúa’s search for the queer child as characteristic of other queer theorists. In this way, she, ultimately, situates Anzaldúa’s work within queer theory, thus presenting creative writing as a substantial avenue for theoretical reflections on non-normative experiences.

5Moving to the analysis of novels with young adult protagonists, Chapter three focuses on Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory. It begins with an examination of American exceptionalism as asserted through three Disney movies: Hidalgo, Miracle, and a remake of The Alamo. In this way, the chapter contextualizes Disney’s portrayal of the past as an ideological cultural force that shapes the citizens’ image of the national legacy beginning already in childhood. Having traced the post 9/11 modes of storytelling that center normative characters and falsify the past by removing the violent settler history, Sibbett begins her analysis of Pérez’s work, devoting particular attention to its decolonial implications. She argues that the novel’s main character, Micaela, embodies “a decolonial history and imaginary that challenges patriotic memory of the past while challenging the colonized present” (Sibbett 95). Importantly, as in the case of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera, it is “a queer, diasporic body” that confronts the readers with “the trajectories of violence in capitalism and commodities” (Sibbett 100).

6Chapter four builds on the Anzaldúan framework and Pérez’s decolonial imagination, as it engages with Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them. Sibbett presents Viramontes’s work as another exhibition of mundane violence experienced by individuals situated outside the scope of normativity, instances of intimate violence that have been “often ignored, censored, or absent from historical memory and the literary canon” (103). Through a reflection on the everyday experiences of people of color, the chapter reflects on how state-sanctioned violence and terrorism are an inherent part of the mundane for queer(ed) individuals. The joint analysis illuminated by perspectives from Anzaldúa, Pérez, and Viramontes allows Sibbett to trace the varying ways in which each of the authors identifies “the observable violence buried under the protective, benevolent state” (118). Sibbett ends her book with a reflection on the importance of queer storytelling in a political era saturated with legislative attempts at silencing queer voices and delegalizing accounts of queer experiences.

7Attempting to stress “the need for stories that bring violence and everyday resistance to our attention” and the ways in which “such stories can help us understand the power and true threat of queer storytelling, that of calling out the banal and benevolent violence of the state” (Sibbett 4), Sibbett’s work offers a fresh perspective on queer theory. It explores the possibility of utilizing personal accounts as theoretical frameworks that allow for the examination of state-sanctioned violence faced by those regarded as queer and non-normative, violence that disguises itself as benevolence beneficial to the normative majority. In this way, Sibbett situates an Anzaldúan approach, currently rather unorthodox, as a viable and informative approach in the discussion of violence, terrorism, or the quotidian. While the number of scholars who illuminate Sibbett’s relatively comprehensive work may appear, at first, intimidating, the multitude of references and names mentioned not only ensures a multi-faceted perspective on the topic but also provides the reader with multiple positions onto which their reading can be expanded. Despite the fact that Sibbett’s work already reflects on the political tendencies of contemporary America under Trump, the time of publication could not be more on point. The issue of imagined children as “hubs of security” (Sibbett 48) on which Sibbett focuses is a visible, worldwide political tendency currently being utilized to limit and/or infringe on personal freedoms of the citizens. Taking Europe’s recent push for chat control as an example, one can notice how an attempt at depriving the citizens of the right to privacy in online correspondence is presented by the state as a benevolent act aimed at protecting children. Finally, the way in which Sibbett’s analysis of Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them exposes the state’s propagation of terror on racial minorities provides a valuable and insightful perspective that can help one understand the terror and injustice that immigrants currently face in the Unites States as a result of ICE agents’ abuse of state-facilitated power.