Cherríe Moraga's going brown: Reading like a queer

GLQ

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 237-263

  Soto, Sandra K ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249122904     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-11-2-237     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. I borrow my sublitle, "Reading Like a Queer," from Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, "Tomboy Tantrums and Queer Infatuations: Reading Lesbianism in Magali Garcia Ramis's Felices Días, Tío Sergio," in Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression, ed. Lourdes Torres and Immaculada Pertusa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 60.
2. See also Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii;
3. and Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, 2nd ed. (Boston: South End, 2000), 116.
4. All references to Loving in the War Years are from this edition unless otherwise noted.
5. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 153n24;
6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 33n32;
7. Steven Seidman, "Identity and Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture," in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, 140n30;
8. and Martha Vicinus, '"They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 448n12.
9. Valuable exceptions include Ann Cvetkovich, "Untouch-ability and Vulnerability: Stone Butchness as Emotional Style," in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, ed. Sally R. Munt (London: Cassell, 1998), 159-69;
10. Judith Halberstam, "Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get the Blues," in Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 111-39;
11. and Teresa de Lauretis, "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: The Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire," in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 203-53.
12. Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End, 1993);
13. Moraga, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1997). Hereafter cited as Generation and Wings.
14. La Fountain - Stokes, "Tomboy Tantrums and Queer Infatuations," 60.
15. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2.
16. Ibid., 1; emphasis added.
17. For instance, this argument provides helpful leverage in the context of a virulent backlash against feminist, sex-positive, and queer scholarship in Chicano studies. See Ignacio M. García, "Juncture in the Road: Chicano Studies since 'El Plan de Santa Bárbara,'" in Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change, ed. David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 108-20.
18. García presents a resounding disapproval of the current state of Chicano studies and nostalgically recalls the Chicano movement's original blueprints for the field. The major challenge to the field, he professes, is the increasing number of Chicana scholars whose "lesbian-feminist" approach to Chicano history and cultural studies may be stylish in academe but is completely removed from the problems facing the Chicano community, and certainly is not the kind of work imagined by those activists who laid the groundwork for Chicano studies. "Unlike the politics of the Chicano Movement," he claims, the gender politics of the more " adversarial" feminists "are not based on what the predominantly working-class community thinks" (190). He positions lesbian-feminist scholars - a group of nameless women whom he dubs "gender nationalists" - as an external threat to the integrity of Chicano studies at a time when the field is particularly vulnerable: they compete with "committed" Chicano scholars for already limited resources; they "find the lurking 'macho' in every Chicano scholarly work" (190); they "have even gone as far as promoting the idea that homosexuality is an integral part of Chicano culture" (190). What is needed is a "recommitment to scholarship that will empower Chicanos and Chicanas in their struggle to liberate their community from poverty, political powerlessness, and a collective identity crisis" (201).
19. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 11.
20. Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), xv.
21. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon, 1993);
22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003);
23. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor Juana's Second Dream: A Novel (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
24. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3.
25. Rather than attempt to reconcile the universalizing and minoritizing views, Sedgwick seeks to illustrate "the performative effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their overlap" (ibid., 9).
26. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," in Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 399.
27. Toni Cade Bambara, "Foreword, 1981," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Third Woman, 2002), xli.
28. Moraga, Loving, vii.
29. Ibid., iv.
30. Lora Romero, '"When Something Goes Queer': Familiarity, Formalism, and Minority Intellectuals in the 1980s," Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (1993): 122.
31. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist, 1981).
32. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 21.
33. Moraga, Loving, 104.
34. Ibid., 87;
35. Romero, '"When Something Goes Queer,'" 122.
36. Moraga, Wings, 39.
37. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 143.
38. Moraga, Generation, 9, 2.
39. Yarbro-Bejarano, Wounded Heart, 140, 141.
40. Romero, '"When Something Goes Queer,'" 122.
41. Ibid., 122.
42. Moraga, Generation, 126.
43. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 59-60.
44. Ibid., 59.
45. See also Halberstam, Female Masculinity, for a fascinating account of the uncomfortable yet fully productive crisis of meaning created when butch women enter public bathrooms reserved for "women."
46. See Tomás Rivera, Y no se lo tragó la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Part (Berkeley, GA: Quinto Sol, 1971);
47. Norma Elia Cantú, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995);
48. Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990);
49. and Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 1982). In these works, emblems of childhood shame range from the recurrent inspection for (and finding of) lice in the child's hair by an Anglo-American school nurse or teacher to the visible discomfort of Anglo-Americans on seeing a Chicano child's body in a public swimming pool.
50. Moraga, Generation, 118-19.
51. Moraga, Loving, 87.
52. Ibid., 87.
53. For contrasting accounts of surface versus depth see Michele M. Serros, Chicana Falsa, and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (New York: Riverhead, 1998);
54. and Serros, How to Be a Chicana Role Model (New York: Riverhead, 2000).
55. Moraga, Loving, 116.
56. Moraga, Wings, 91.
57. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 94.
58. Foucault adds that "if in fact [power relations] are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that 'explains' them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. . . . the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose 'inventors' or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy" (94-95).
59. Quoted in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 76.
60. Moraga, Loving, 87.
61. Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 60.
62. This reading depends, of course, on taking Moraga at her word when she claims that she so easily passes as white.
63. Moraga, Wings, 91.
64. Deena J. González, "Chicana Identity Matters," Aztlán 22 (1997): 134.
65. Ibid., 134.
66. González, "Chicana Identity Matters," 133-34.
67. The works that González cites are, in order, Moraga, Last Generation;
68. Anzaldúa, Borderlands;
69. Emma Perez, "Sexuality and Discourse," in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman, 1991), 96-108;
70. Alicia Caspar de Alba, Three Times a Woman (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1989);
71. and Gaspar de Alba, The Mystery of Survival, and Other Stories (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1993).
72. Moraga, Loving, 52, 53.
73. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 8.
74. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8.
75. Sedgwick defines "explicit performatives" as first-person indicative active statements in which one could insert the adverb hereby without changing its meaning (Touching Feeling, 67-92).
76. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 11.
77. José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 181.
78. Limón argues that the incredible success and popular fan base of the late tejana singer-performer Selena were less a matter of her musical talent than of her noted "public and specifically Mexican erotic display [which] permits a much needed site of discharge and expression for a still extremely repressed sexuality, for women as well as for men" within the sexually charged context of "the historical and unequal engagement of Anglos and Mexicans in the United States" (182, 178). That Selena's performance of sexuality - through her famous bustiers and skintight pants, her erotic dance moves, and her flirtation with her live audiences - was rendered in this context of sexual repression and racial conflict interpellates her in a historical symbolic system in which "the sexuality of Mexican women in general became deeply involved in the iconography of the colonial relationship between Anglos and Mexicans in psychologically and politically complicated ways" (180-81).
79. Moraga, Loving, 185.
80. For an extended critique of Moraga's representation of African Americans see Christina Sharpe's provocative essay "Learning to Live without Black Familia: Cherríe Moraga's Nationalist Articulations," in Torres and Pertusa, Tortilleras, 240-57.
81. For Sharpe, Moraga's project of making familia from scratch is riddled with the policing of racial borders, namely, that between Chicanas/Chicanos and African Americans.
82. Moraga's translation: "that which never passed through her lips."
83. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 6-7.
84. Yarbro-Bejarano, Wounded Heart, 128.
85. Abdul R. JanMohamed argues that Foucault's definition of power, together with his Eurocentric focus, disallows an investigation of racialized sexuality and renders his analytics of sexuality limited for African Americans ("Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality,'" in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992], 94-116).
86. Moraga, Loving, 82. Chocha replaces the first edition's cunt in the first sentence.
87. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 88-89.
88. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 37.
89. Sedgwick quotes Francis J. Broucek, "Shame and Its Relationship to Early Narcissistic Developments," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 63 (1982): 369-78.
90. Ibid., 61.