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N HER SHORT PROSE PIECE entitled “The Slow Dance,” Cherríe Moraga comes as close as she has ever come to offering a “coming-out” story. The piece is a carefully crafted tribute to butch/femme desire that centers on Moraga remembering her enthrallment over watching two women slow-dancing together at some public place.1 Because the narrative is quite sparse—in fact, is devoid of even the most basic details about surroundings or music—it is animated only by the image of the two dancers, Elena and Susan. They move together “capably” without seeming to need verbal cues, “Susan’s arm around Elena’s neck. Elena’s body all leaning into the center of her pelvis” (“The Slow Dance,” 31). Their dance is as powerful and consuming for the reader, therefore, as it presumably was for the then-inexperienced Moraga, who, we learn, could only “fumble around” them. She too was only a spectator, and even as she remembers the dance from the temporal distance of Loving in the War Years she still does not write herself into the script in an active way. Every person who comes to a queer selfunderstanding 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 (“Introduction,” in 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) Making Familia from Racialized Sexuality Cherríe Moraga’s Memoirs, Manifestos, and Motherhood 16 READING CHICAN@ LIKE A QUEER The significance of “The Slow Dance” does not end with Moraga’s clumsy initiation into lesbian public culture or with her fascination with butch/ femme desire. Its importance is in the way it stages these dramas of outsiderness and longing squarely within the fraught paradigm of her parents’ interracial relationship. After Elena and Susan take center stage in the first four paragraphs of the piece, Moraga brings us abruptly (but only very momentarily ) to the present to tell us that “I move women around the floor, too— women I think enamored with me” (31). Rather than allowing Moraga to take the floor and describe her own dance as we think she finally might, however, the narrative immediately moves to a reflection on her Mexican American mother’s desire: “My mother’s words rising up from inside me—‘A real man, when he dances with you, you’ll know he’s a real man by how he holds you in the back’” (31). If we read the pieces in Loving in the War Years in the order in which they are presented, then by the time we read “The Slow Dance” we have become as familiar with the sexual(less) dynamic between Moraga’s parents as we have with their complicated interracial dynamic—which is to say that we have come to understand that race and sexuality are intimately intertwined in Moraga ’s world.2 We know that the capable dancer (“the real man”) to whom her mother refers is not Moraga’s father. In fact, this recalls an earlier moment in the book when Moraga’s mother confesses that she knows what it is like to be touched by a real man and that “‘I don’t feel this with your father . . . ¿Entiendes ?’” (11). And, just as Moraga momentarily envisions herself as her mother’s lover in “The Slow Dance,” here too she writes that “it takes every muscle in me, not to leave my chair, not to climb through the silence, not to clamber toward her, not to touch her the way I know she wants to be touched” (11). The unlikely components of “The Slow Dance”—the mother as lover, lesbian initiation as...

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