Ethics of care in Chicana lesbian writers

Abstract

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls our Mothers Warned Us About (1991) by Carla Trujillo challenged conventional positions and ideology about gender and sexual roles when it was published. The controversial issue of the ethics of care, discussed and understood in ecofeminist theories as the imperative of heteropatriarchal societies towards women to become caretakers, finds in these texts reflections from the queer identities of their authors, transforming their actions into positive interactions. In this volume, relationships of sorority, expressing love and care for one another abound as the writers in the compilation explore new alternatives of building families aside from heteropatriarchal role models. Among these explorations, the different poems and essays included in the volume established a communication through eroticism and sexuality, and discussed their implications openly, in order to overcome the problematics of an imposed heterosexuality and, even, an imposed motherhood. This collection expresses how, thanks to all this previous work by writers and critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Cherrie Moraga, Emma Pérez or Carla Trujillo herself, whose stories are included in the volume, Chicana lesbian writers today can escape essentialist visions that place women and queers as closer to nature in order to undervalue both and find the justification to oppress them. On the contrary, Trujillo’s volume opens an avenue towards a more post anthropocentric attitude, exercising empathy towards the human and the more-than-human world in relation to making these writers aware of the influence of their origins, and the embracement of their roots through the expression of love and caring for other women.