Cisneros's "Terrible" Women: Recuperating the Erotic as a Feminist Source in "Never Marry a Mexican" and "Eyes of Zapata"

Abstract

In the preface to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherrie Moraga discusses the and psychic struggle the collection represents for the writers who participated in it. For these women of color, the process of moving from the personal terror of racism, classism, and (hetero)sexism to a creative agency capable of denouncing and fighting against such systems is necessarily a personal visceral act. As the collection's title suggests, gaining subjectivity for women of color is often tied to the ability to transform their bodies into bridges of communication.' Because their bodies have historically served as sites of multiple oppressions, women of color find it almost impossible to exclude their physical selves from their struggles for consciousness, opposition, and change. Perceived through distorted images and representations of race and sexuality, many women are in effect socially dispossessed of their own bodies; to overcome these numerous levels of domination, women of color thus must first seek out a material and personal form of resistance. As Chicana historian and lesbian feminist Emma Perez asserts, We have been spoken about, written about, spoken at but never spoken with or listened to. Language comes from above to inflict us with western-white-colonizer ideology. To emerge as a survivor, Perez contends, a woman of color must (re)claim her own sitio y lengua; she must find a space in which she can create her own discourse.2 Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros has struggled to give voice to the female body within her feminist writing. The sole daughter of a Mexican father and