The Ultimate Rebellion: Chicana Narratives of Sexuality and Community

KATHERINE SUGG The Ultimate Rebellion Chicana Narratives ofSexuality and Community For the lesbian ofcolor, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through hersexual behavior —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands, ig In highlighting die paradoxical intertwining ofsexual practices, political resistance, and cultural ideologies, die above epigraph by Gloria Anzaldúa flags die complex relations among women ofcolor, their communities, and their sexualities. Such analyses ofthe gendered and racialized nature ofcommunity identity—ofbelonging and betrayal —emerge as central tropes in the writings ofmany Chicanas, particularly those who identify as lesbian or as otherwise sexually transgressive. Writers such as Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Cherrfe Moraga, Terri de la Peña, and Emma Pérez have persisted in demonstrating the deep relationship between racial-ethnic identities and disciplinary ideologies ofsexuality and gender. This essay is an effort to trace such critical links between personal histories, cultural and ethnic communities , and political identities, and in particular to understand die ways diat sexuality erupts on the center stage ofotherwise political scenarios. Recent fictional and autobiographical writing by queer Chicanas signals the intersections ofsexual practices and desires with other kinds ofdesire, such as investments in political and social transformation and emancipation. One significant upshot ofthe specific histories ofChicana [Meridians:jèminism, race, transnationalism 2003, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 139-70]©2003 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 139 feminism and Chicano cultural nationalism has been a sustained critical attention to the uses offemale sexuality in community formations, particularly cultural nationalism. For example, many Chicana writers have analyzed explicitly or in fictional form the Chicano Movement's discourse of"La Malinche" as both a sexist tool and a powerful "structure offeeling ." A cultural icon ofMexican identity that refers to the historical figure ofHernán Cortez's indigenous mistress and translator, La Malinche (also known as "Doña Marina") emerges in surreptitious ways—as what Daniel CooperAlarcón would call a "palimpsest"—in contemporary writing by Chicanas and has been discussed, critiqued, and celebrated by turns.1 Malinche figures a Chicano and Mexicano ideology oftreacherous womanhood, ofdie female traitor whose sexual actions have dire political repercussions, ifnot intentions. For queer Chicanas, this icon of female sexuality holds specific lessons and dangers, and diis essay looks into her continued inscription in narratives ofcultural belonging and betrayal that turn on questions ofsexual (mis)alliance. It seems at times that a new Malinche is threatening "the culture" with a sexual turn to another woman, particularly a white woman, and it is this sexual and political affiliation that must be deflected, deflated, or defended. To understand more fully the pressures that bear on such negotiations ofrace and sexuality and community, I consider die mutually constitutive relation between politics and the stories thatwe tell about each other and ourselves. Such stories are especially apt barometers of the tensions between communal belonging and selfhood. In autobiographical writings and realist novels, the emotional and political desires for affiliation and belonging emerge through the various negotiations that Chicana feminists, and especially Chicana lesbian feminists, have made widi their cultural and racial identities and tiieir feminism. One tendency among Chicana queers, for example, has been to narrate their personal and cultural histories in a way that situates their seemingly "transgressive" sexuality as an effect, or function, ofspecific ethnic histories and ofparticular families and communities. As a consequence ofthis intersection ofethnic pride and sexual identity, these narratives occasionally resort to a retrenchment ofexclusionary discourses of race and edinicity, couched in terms ofan intra-ethnic sexual pluralism and tolerance. 140 KATHERINE SUGG My discussion in diis essay can be seen as a series oflinked questions diat include: what is involved in Chicana narrativizations ofselfand community? How do desire and sexuality bodi articulate and disrupt narratives ofidentity? And must the choice always be between an "authoritarian " narrative ofidentity versus a postmodern sense ofcomplexity and fluidity; that is to say, an incessandy destabilizing rhetoric in which the "referential...subject can frighteningly disappear" (Prosser 1998, 14)? Controversies over identity narratives involve tensions between existing political discourses that are complicit in masculinist ideologies ofcommunity coherence and the understanding that narrative itselfis a cultural and political enterprise that can transform society. In this essay, I suggest that some...