Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 305 Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression Temple University Press, 2003 Edited by Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa Over the past fifteen years, there has been a proliferation of scholarship that explores representations of non-normative sexuality in contexts of diaspora, racialization, and transnarionalism. These works, many of them anthologies, provide critical resources to a number of fields including queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, literary studies, ethnic studies, and area studies —all of which have been slow to examine the mutually constitutive constructions of sexuality and racialization. The recently published andiology Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression (2003), co-edited by Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa, is an important and innovative addition to this corpus and is the first anthology to bring together queer readings of Spanish, Latin American, and Latina lesbian desire . In her introduction to the book, Torres provides a useful survey of the extant anthologies that have helped create the field of study that Silvia Molloy dubs "Homosexual Hispanisms." According to Torres, these works have largely marginalized lesbian desire both because of the disproportionate attention they devote to gay male desire, and because this unbalance leads to the conflation of lesbians with gay men. For Torres, subsuming the study of lesbians under a general homosexual umbrella often erases the gender hierarchy and gender ideologies inherent in most societies and thus renders lesbians less visible. (3) Given her careful attention to erasures of difference in relation to gender, it is somewhat surprising that Torres does not go far enough to situate the expansive transnational reach of Tortilleras— from Uruguay to Los Angeles to Spain—in ways that will explain why bringing together such a diverse group of national and historical contexts is a useful projea, or why joining criticism on Cherrie Moraga and Ana Maria Moix is more compelling and less problematic that joining that on Moraga and say, John Rechy. Nonetheless, the well-though-out assignment of the sixteen essays to four apt themes (Coming Out/Covering Up, [Re]presenting Lesbian Desire, Sites of Resistance, and Racialized Lesbianisms ) helps the reader to note the convergences and divergences of these diverse essays. While comprised mainly of essays examining literary works by Spanish and Chicana writers, the anthology also includes essays on the Argentine filmmaker Maria Luis Bemberg, the Uruguayan author Christina Peri Rossi, and the Cuban American performance artist Carmelita Tropicana. One of the interesting upshots of the transnational scope is that the differing geopolitical contexts from which the primary authors create representations solicit an eclectic array of methodological and theoretical applications from the theorists. For instance, in the context of Puerto Rican literary studies, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes insists that scholars look not only at the recendy published texts that explicidy represent lesbian desire, bur at those texts "that require a more active or sympathetic reading: the reading of a queer, like a queer, or in search of queer meaning" (60). Indeed, La Fountain-Stokes's essay on the Puerto Rican novel Felices dÃ-as, tÃ-o Sergio, provides a brilliant queer reading of the novel's protagonist, Lydia, by tracking her unruly (masculine) behavior (with the help of Judith Halberstam's work on female masculinity), her identification with her gay uncle, and her fantasies about Sophia Loren. La Fountain-Stokes's intervention has relevance beyond the queer reading of Felices dÃ-as and the recuperation of this lesbian protagonist for Puerto Rican queer studies, though both of those are crucial in and of rhemselves. Moreover, his essay helps us push at Eve Sedgwick's male-centered paradigm of triangulated desire by elaborating a range of homoerotic triangular configurations for Lydia, thereby creating a space for female desire. If many of the essays in the volume point to such textual moments of veiled homoeroticism, the essays on Chicana lesbianism take a much different approach, as most of them draw on material by authors for whom racialized lesbian 306 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies desire is a central organizing principle. Thus, Christina Sharpe's provocative essay "Learning to Live without Black Familia: CherrÃ-e Moragas Nationalist Articulations," provides not an unveiling of lesbian desire, but an...