-
4. The Birdy and the Bees: Queer Chicana Girlhood in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
68 4 Marci is a girl who wants to be a boy so she can be in love with a girl. She introduces her plight with the above declaration while nightly imploring to God, Baby Jesus, and the Virgin Mary to grant her wish of bodily conversion. At different points along the narrative road that Carla Trujillo paves in her debut novel, What Night Brings, the book’s eleven-year-old Chicana protagonist Marci Cruz constructs a positionality that enables her to shift from an initial identification as transgendered to a full acceptance of both her female body and her unnamed homoerotic attractions. Despite this layered representation of subjectivity, Marci’s ultimate struggle is to reconcile the relationships between her physical body, her gendered behavior, and her sexual desires. She dreams of acquiring a penis with which she may authorize her physical attraction to other girls. The primary motivation behind this transformation lies in Marci’s wish to express heteronormative desire for female partners. Marci dreams and prays for a male body replete with power, agency, and freedom to act upon her desires. Yet in spite of Marci’s desperate pleas for a penis, she fails to exhibit other key components of a transgendered or transsexual incompatibility with her own female body. Given the primary impetus of sexual desire rather than corporeal incongruity, when does this young protagonist’s vision of transgendered identity shift toward an acceptance of queer or lesbian identity? How does Marci’s ethnic identity intersect with her self-definition as a sexual and gendered subject? How is Marci’s experience as a queer Chicana subject impeded by her lack of knowledge and access to communities of affinity who share her sense The Birdy and the Bees Queer Chicana Girlhood in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings I have to tell you what I need from God. I have to change into a boy. This is what I want and it’s not an easy thing to ask for . . . This wish [is] what I want for myself. —Carla Trujillo, What Night Brings THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 69 of difference from social norms? How does Trujillo’s novel put flesh to historian and novelist Emma Pérez’s theory of un sitio y una lengua? Throughout her career Carla Trujillo has repeatedly repositioned herself on the theorized/theorizing continuum as a novelist, administrator, student, editor, and scholar. Her contribution to the body of theory on queer Chicana subjectivity is both prolific and profound. The editor and scholar behind two of the most groundbreaking publications on Chicana lesbian identity, Trujillo has inspired over a decade of critical engagement with her anthologized collections Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About and Living Chicana Theory. Her collective and individual publications have helped to initiate important critical conversations about the role of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, and homophobia in Chicana and Chicano culture and community. Her first novel, What Night Brings, was released to significant critical acclaim and appreciative reception from popular and academic audiences alike. Growing up in an industrial town in northern California in the s, the novel’s protagonist, Marci Cruz, copes with daily emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father. When she is not protecting herself from her father’s rage and flying fists, Marci wages a heart-wrenching battle against her own physical body, struggling to understand her gendered and sexual self. Her family includes a violent but emotionally vulnerable father, a passive and enabling mother, and their two young daughters: the determined, witty, resourceful, and wise-for-herage Marci and her younger sister, Corin, a shell of a girl who has become numb and emotionally distant due to abuse and neglect. As the novel’s central character , Marci narrates the sisters’ struggles for immediate survival and ultimate freedom from their father’s rage and mother’s blind love for her husband. In addition to the physical and emotional abuse inflicted by her parents, the novel details Marci’s attempts to understand the complexities of her own developing gender and sexual identities. As an adolescent, Marci begins to experience feelings of romantic desire, yet the objects of her attraction are girls and women, leading her to grapple with the limits of her understanding of female desire and sexuality alongside her actively engaged sense of spirituality. What Night Brings traces a young queer girl’s path to possibility as she fights to challenge the violence, silences, and...