Cherrie Moraga's Going Brown: "Reading Like a Queer"

Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.

—Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet

What I never quite understood until this writing is that to be without a sex—to be bodiless—as I sought to be to escape the burgeoning sexuality of my adolescence, my confused early days of active heterosexuality, and later my panicked lesbianism, means also to be without a race. I never attributed my removal from physicality to have anything to do with race, only sex, only desire for women. And yet, as I grew up sexually, it was my race, along with my sex, that was being denied me at every turn.

—Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years

This essay undertakes what might sound like a gratuitous project: a queer reading of a body of work that is organized precisely by nonnormativity.¹ Cherríe Moraga's uncanny aptitude for resignifying language, bodies, epistemologies, politics, and the most obstinate identity categories—which she often puts to use in her otherwise unfeasible project of self-racialization—is so undoubtedly queer that her work might seem an unlikely candidate for an actively queer reading. One of this essay's aims, however, is to challenge the commonplace that queering makes the most sense and is most productive when the object of analysis is in some way normative. Queering normative texts is an enormously useful project, because it conscientiously illuminates the iterations, tautologies, and narrative devices that occlude the constructedness of—as well as the labor entailed in reproducing— normativity (in relation to, for instance, citizenship, sexuality, racialization, or literary conventions). Moreover, queering can appropriate the most intractable foundations of normativity and transgressively infuse them with innovative queer meanings. Nevertheless, these approaches can unwittingly sideline explicitly queer texts, even—or especially—in the process of referencing them as evidence tout court of nonnormativity.

The motivation for this essay is my sense that despite Moraga's prominence as a queer Chicana writer, the instructive complexity of her work is largely untapped. Now spanning some fifteen years, her efforts to textualize the dynamic, messy relationship between racial formation and sexual identity yield a rich, expansive primary terrain for scholars invested in challenging monological approaches to identity. Yet her work has been taken up in queer theory mainly as evidence, which may explain why it is often cited in the "see, for instance" type of footnote.² At the same time, and possibly holding this evidentiary use in check, there is a nagging sense that in relation to the poststructuralist orientation of queer theory, Moraga's occasional objectification of race, reification of binary oppositions, refusal to critique models of authenticity, and modernist-inflected conceptions of power and resistance can seem misguided, if not flat footed. Rather than pinpoint those occasions as authorial failures, however, I propose that we use them to come to a more nuanced understanding of the illogic of race.

This essay also aims, therefore, to offer a fresh approach to Moraga's work. I am particularly interested in examining the diverse and often contradictory rhetorical strategies, together with the acute self-reflexivity about race and sexuality, that are compelled by the unusual self-racialization that organizes Moraga's autobiographical collections: Loving in the War Years (1983), The Last Generation (1993), and Waiting in the Wings (1997).³ Unlike many accounts of difference, these works have the peculiar distinction of embodying the processes through which the subject writes herself into a narrative of racialized difference, emerging as they do from a profound desire to be recognized and engaged as a racialized subject. To that end, Moraga rearranges and reconfigures the epistemological and ontological tropes that one expects to find in accounts of difference, and—to [End Page...