With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

CHAPTER 5. Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions

CHAPTER 5 Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions To link families with four sisters who would be friends longer than their lifetimes, through children who would bond them at baptismal rites. Comadres. We would become intimate friends, sharing coffee, gossip, and heartaches. We would endure the female life-cycle—adolescence, marriage , menopause, death, and even divorce, before or after menopause, before or after death. I had not come for that. I had come for her kiss. —EMMA PÉREZ, GULF DREAMS In my research on Chicana literature, I found a series of stories in which girlhood provides a space, however restrictive, for lesbian desire. In the socially sanctioned system of comadrazgo, young Chicanas are encouraged to form lifelong female friendships, and it is the intimacy of these relationships that often provides the context for lesbian desire . Specifically, I consider the representation of girlhood friendships in four novel-length works: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1991), Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1987), Terri de la Peña’s Margins (1992), and Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams (1996). Of these, only the lesbian-authored texts—those by de la Peña and Pérez—are generally perceived as “lesbian” fiction. By including Mango Street and Menu Girls, I argue that they, too, are Chicana lesbian texts, not because the characters (or their authors) self-consciously claim a lesbian identity, but because the texts, in their literary construction of such intense girlhood friendships, inscribe a desire between girls that I name “lesbian.” 92 With Her Machete in Her Hand In this, I participate in lesbian textual criticism, which has discussed at length the question, What is a lesbian text? Bertha Harris (1976, n.p.) has defined lesbian texts thus: “If in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature.” This definition seems to use “lesbian” as a metaphor for “feminist” or “woman-identified.” Barbara Smith implicitly demonstrates the exceedingly broad scope of Harris’s definition when she applies it to black women’s writing. Indeed, Smith (1982, 164) argues that according to Harris’s definition, the majority of black women’s literature is lesbian, “not because the women are ‘lovers,’ but because they are its central figures, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relations with one another.” While I concur that such a definition likewise encompasses most contemporary Chicana literature, so defining all Chicana literature as lesbian would hardly enhance an understanding of either Chicana literature in general or Chicana lesbian literature in particular. In her well-known reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Smith (1982, 165) gestures toward a more nuanced description of lesbian fiction: “[Sula] works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate friendship between Sula and Nel, but because of [its] consistently critical stance toward the heterosexual institutions of male/female relationships , marriage, and the family. Consciously or not, Morrison’s work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black women’s autonomy and their impact upon each other’s lives.” Seemingly, Smith’s use of the term “lesbian” to describe a critique of heterosexual institutions is both metaphoric and utopic.1 Because she seems to use “lesbian” and “lesbian feminist” interchangeably, both the passionate friendship and the critique of institutionalized heterosexuality are necessary to her definition of lesbian. However, if one applies Smith’s description “both lesbian and feminist” respectively to the “passionate friendship” and the critique of heterosexual institutions, one comes closer to a usage of lesbian that is neither metaphoric nor interchangeable with feminist. Thus the critique of heterosexual institutions makes Sula feminist (in a nonheterocentric sense), while the “passionate friendship” invites a lesbian reading. It is important, I think, to differentiate lesbian from other homosocial relations between women and from female desire in general, lest the latter two erase the former, as has been the case in many applications Memories of Girlhood 93 of Adrienne Rich’s “Lesbian Continuum” (1983). In The Practice of Love (1994), Teresa de Lauretis unravels lesbian from its metaphoric and political applications to define it in quite specific terms: Whatever other affective or social ties may be involved in a lesbian relationship—ties that may also...