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144 7 Transitioning away from the model of sameness elucidated in the previous chapters, the narrative works of Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas violently push past the familiarity of similitude and into a dynamics of difference wherein desire is used to destabilize binaries and call into question rigid divisions of gender, sex, and sexuality. These destabilizations of seemingly fixed categories of being and seeing define the third representational mode of homemaking that I label “complicating home.” In this category I identify home spaces of similar fluidity as the previous two modes, coming home and being home; however, an erotics of similitude is only invoked as a mythic entity, a truth to be disproved by the complication of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and political heterogeneity as well as social inequities between and among these categories. This mode shatters the utopian notion of commonality with important interrogations of the marginalizing forces directed at queer Latinas, not only from dominant spheres but also from within their own queer and Latina/o communities. Achy Obejas’s and Emma Pérez’s first published novels both portray the intensity of an intimate relationship between two Latinas, one who is openly lesbian and another who refuses to publicly—and at times even privately— acknowledge her desire for women. The politics of similitude enter into discussions of queer Latina desire, as does the correlation between sex and nation, since both can be seen to reconfigure the queer Latina body as an individual and community construct. Sensuality and the act of desiring manifest as a cultivation of racial, cultural, and ethnic home. Yet in both novels, the significance of these acts of love, lust, and attraction as liberatory and empowering practices is complicated by the silence, frustration, and shame that swirls around expressions Dancing with Devils Gendered Violence in Novels by Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas To recognize truth is not easy when one is so close to home. To speak truth is even harder. —Emma Pérez, Gulf Dreams DANCING WITH DEVILS 145 of these desires. Such complications of the idyllic notion of home and homecoming produce a space marked by instability and a network of layered meanings and individual specificity. The unnamed protagonist in Chicana Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams uses her narrative voice to quickly establish a link between herself and her romantic interest. This connection is defined by its primal and organic nature as though the two Chicana subjects are born through their union: “We both knew this, that we came from the same place, that we were joined in a place so uncommon that this world, which bound and confined us, could not understand the bond that flesh frustrated” (). This narrator characterizes herself and the young woman as two equal parts of a greater whole and later cites this intimate connection for prompting her to return home to confront a difficult and painful past: “Dreams of her continue. They remind me of her back, her mouth, her touch. They brought me back home, but not to find her, to recover something I had witnessed that summer” (). In this declaration, the narrator not only recognizes the power of her love for the young woman, but also the opportunities made possible by her return home, to matters that extend beyond the sexual relationship between the two women. Queer Chicana desire serves as the catalyst for yet another discursive homecoming. Obejas’s narrative similarly characterizes an intimate bond between Latinas as a site of origin and home. As Memory Mambo’s Cuban American protagonist declares of her Puerto Rican ex-lover, “To me, she was the like the purest, blackest earth—that rich, sweet soil in which sugarcane grows. I always imagined her as hills in which I would roll around, happy and dirty, as if I were back in Cuba, or perhaps in Puerto Rico” (). Here the Latina object of the narrator ’s desire is not merely suggestive of a home space, but through the narrative she actually becomes the earth itself, the most primal element of which her home is constituted, much like Cristina Serna’s trope of woman as earth. Within these passages one can see how the authors transform the representation of the act of loving another woman, specifically as a queer Latina, into a transcendental experience with ramifications far beyond the limits of the individuals immediately involved or the intimacy shared. For these narrative voices, the love of a...

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