Abstract
Abstract: Questions of gender and sexuality have oftentimes been portrayed as taboo in traditionalist conservative societies. Gloria Anzaldúa claims in Borderlands/La Frontera (1999) that “she [the lesbian of color] goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. The Chicana lesbian, as a matter of survival and motivated by sexual impulses, struggles to surpass the passive role repression assigns to her and refuses to accept the heteronormative rule. In the present paper, I investigate how the narrative strategies and cultural references bring to surface the emotions and experiences that form subjectivity and sexual desire in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams (1996) and Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings (2003). Such transgressive narrators are of different ages and thus undergoing different maturity processes, but they begin both novels as young Chicana women attempting to explore their sexuality and uncover their own prohibited desires while becoming aware of the patriarchal and machista system in which they are inscribed. Here female sexuality and lesbian desire intertwine. The chosen novels enable a debate on women’s sexual development and exploration and society’s influence, judgement and punishment on female sexuality. Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Carla Trujillo, Emma Pérez and other feminist Chicana critics aid this analysis.
Highlights
Scholar Cármen CÁLIZ-MONTORO (2001) describes the borderlands as a representative space of the multiple and dynamic Chicano experiences with very different worlds such as Euroamerican, Mexican, barrio, indigenous, amongst others (MONTORO, 2000, p. 4)
For the constitution of the imagery of Chicano, and especially Chicana, politics in the United States today, one must know that the Chicano Movement, known as El Movimiento, grew across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly throughout the Southwest of the U.S Because of the Mexican-American War of 1848, Mexico has become increasingly dependent on the U.S Successive waves of immigration to the United States happened during the twentieth century
The very society in which she is born and raised teaches her that a woman should be submissive to the men in her life, as Gloria ANZALDÚA (1999) describes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The culture expects women to show greater acceptance of, and commitment to, the value system than men
Summary
Scholar Cármen CÁLIZ-MONTORO (2001) describes the borderlands as a representative space of the multiple and dynamic Chicano experiences with very different worlds such as Euroamerican, Mexican, barrio, indigenous, amongst others (MONTORO, 2000, p. 4). The very society in which she is born and raised teaches her that a woman should be submissive to the men in her life, as Gloria ANZALDÚA (1999) describes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The culture expects women to show greater acceptance of, and commitment to, the value system than men. Some attitudes in society may need to change in order to come to a place in which women, especially lesbians, are respected.
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