Post-Borderlandia

T. Jackie Cuevas

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813594545
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicanx butch lesbians and Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people as not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.   Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands, ” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition. 

1

Chicana Masculinities

‘Lesbian’ doesn’t name anything in my homeland.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana”

It is our experience that all language for talking about butches and fems is inadequate.

—Liz Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold

I am going back to all those streets to work the pain. The pain is never going to work me.

—Chonch Fonseca, the butch protagonist in The Barber of East L.A.

Three young butch Latinas in black suits stand on the steps of a spiral staircase. Two of them stare directly at the camera, intent on holding the viewer’s gaze. One looks off into the distance, as if noticing someone or something more important beyond the horizon. The butch who stands front and center appears to be the group’s jefe, with the other two manly women flanking her, homebois at her back. The staircase curves upward out of the frame. A message, emblazoned in red and bold uppercase, is superimposed over the black-and-white photograph: “Smart butches exist. They have opinions. They have feelings. They have politics, too.” The message ends with contact information and a call to book the group for public performances, making it clear that this is a promotional flyer. The women are the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, a performance troupe composed of Mari García, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Claudia Rodríguez. The physical posturing combined with the defensive rhetoric seems designed to simultaneously inspire radical queer identification and incite confusion from the conservatively straight and straitlaced. Apparently the Butchlalis did not get the mainstream memo about the assimilationist gay agenda that encourages queers to make nice and act normal. Or, more accurately, they did get the memo, and this is their creative retort. So, why are these butches ready to throw down? Who are they talking to? And where did they get those fabulous suits?

In their provocative performances, the Butchlalis enact what queer activists Marcia Ochoa and Nancy Mirabal call “tetatúd, assembled from the phrase actitud con tetas (attitude with tits),” perhaps bound or purposefully hidden in this case, an in-your-face stance toward Latina sexuality (J. Rodríguez 67). The promotional flyer uses the term “tetatúd” to challenge a matched set of cultural assumptions: butches don’t think, don’t care, don’t feel, don’t act. These cultural assumptions associate the lack of thinking, caring, feeling, or acting with traditionally restrictive and limiting masculinity. The Butchlalis’ message raises critical questions about the cultural work of butchness. What does it mean to think, opine, and feel butch or butchly? What are butch politics? More broadly, what are the contemporary challenges posed to and by the circuits of butch-femme desire and lesbian gender? Cultural productions and interventions such as those by the Butchlalis offer radical possibilities for reworking understandings of butch as racialized sexuality. This chapter looks to such Chicana butch literary and cultural productions to grapple with these questions in illuminating the psychological and cultural geographies of Chicana lesbian borderlands experience.

In Chicana lesbian literature and performance, the figure of the butch is not hard to find. In this chapter, I examine the tendency in Chicana literature to use butchness or masculinity to signify lesbianness, such as in the butch works of Cherríe Moraga and Rocky Gámez. These authors utilize the figures of the strong butch, the failed butch, the baby butch, and the protoqueer tomboy to expose and embrace the sexual and emotional vulnerability of Chicana borderlands butchness. I will focus on the underexamined short fiction of Rocky Gámez, whose work has been anthologized but not often discussed in critical texts. After demonstrating how Gámez’s and Moraga’s texts helped lay the groundwork for establishing the butch as a prominent Chicana queer figure, I examine how a new generation of Chicana writers and performance artists stage Chicana butchness. I turn to butch performance because, as critic Alicia Arrizón points out in Latina Performance, performance “becomes a vehicle through which the body is ‘exposed’ and multiply delineated” (73), thereby exposing the intersections of queerness through the performance and performativity of gender and sexuality. Through readings of Adelina Anthony’s “Mastering Sex and Tortillas” and the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan’s Barber of East L.A., I consider how this new order of Chicana butches both draws on and critiques traditional Chicana butchness. Throughout my reading of these texts, I remain attentive to questions of what butch means in a Chicana context. Specifically, I am interested in the Chicana butch struggle to find a place within the Chicanx community, how and why the butch Chicana gets displaced, and the effects of Chicana butch (dis)placements on the constructions of Chicanidad and queerness.

Within a queer Chicanx context, a butch might be described by a variety of culturally specific terms. While the terms “tortillera,” “jota,” and “lesbiana” might be used to describe a Chicana lesbian, they refer generally to the category of sexuality, to women who sexually desire other women. They do not necessarily specify the gender expression, gender identity, or gender orientation of a Chicana lesbian. A tortillera, jota, or lesbiana might be feminine or masculine, genderqueer, or transgender or might exhibit a widely divergent range of other genders. While the term “lesbiana” has gained increased usage in the past decade, it seems to circulate primarily within academic realms. In “To(o) Queer the Writer,” cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa rejected the term “lesbian” and the translated “lesbiana” as not resonating with her experience as a queer Tejana, or Mexican Texan: “For me the term lesbian es problemón. As a working-class Chicana, mestiza—a composite being, amalgama de culturas y de lenguas—a woman who loves women, ‘lesbian’ is a cerebral word, white and middle-class, representing an English-only dominant culture, derived from the Greek word lesbos” (263). For Anzaldúa, being a mestiza/mixed-race person and being an amalgam of cultures and languages required a mixture of terms. Being a Chicana woman who loves women required at the very least a culturally specific term, and Anzaldúa identified “most closely with the Nahuatl term ‘patlache,’“ which describes a woman who forms an intimate connection with another woman. Patlache, however, is not a gendered or queerly gendered term for “lesbian.”

When referring to a masculine Chicana lesbian in particular, some might use the term “chingona,” which refers to a badass, one who expresses attitude or cockiness. Chingona distinguishes one from la chingada, or “the fucked one,” a vulgar colloquialism for La Malinche, or Malintzín, purportedly the mistress of Hernán Cortés and often cast by Mexican legend as both the mother and the betrayer of the Mexican mestizo people. As a chingona, a Chicana butch is not only one who prefers to fuck rather than be fucked in terms of lesbian sex but is also one who fucks gender, fucks with gender, fucks things up, questions the boundaries and limits of traditional authority. In a queer or lesbian Chicana context, particularly in the S/M subculture, a chingona might also refer to a top, or one who tops, dominates, or controls the sexual scene. Cherríe Moraga asserts that being chingona signifies a desirable position of power: “Nobody wants to be made to feel the turtle with its underside all exposed, just pink and folded flesh. In the effort to avoid embodying la chingada, I became the chingón” (Loving in the War Years 125). Whatever the particulars of a Chicana dyke’s sexual practices may be, the stance of the chingona offers radical opposition to the mestiza chingada.

Moraga also articulates her chingonaness in Loving in the War Years as a desire to move a woman emotionally and physically—literally move a woman, in bed and on the dance floor:

And I move women around the floor, too—women I think enamored with me. My mother’s words rising up from inside me—‘A real man, when he dances with you, you’ll know he’s a real man by how he holds you in the back.’ I think yes, someone who can guide you around a dance floor and so, I do.

Moving these women kindly, surely, even superior. I can handle these women. They want this. And I do too. (31–32)

As Moraga works to untangle her understanding of her own butch orientation in her mixed-genre memoir, she complicates Chicana butchness beyond this initial description of a simple desire to control other women’s bodies physically.

Chicana literary critic Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s astute and in-depth readings of Moraga’s writings offer insight into Moraga’s conception of the relationship between her sexual self and her gendered self. In The Wounded Heart, Yarbro-Bejarano says of Moraga’s writing that “[i]n the writing of butch and chingón identifications as both sexual and gender constructions, Moraga’s texts undertake a reading of cultural indoctrination and attempt to come to terms with it by representing lesbian sex, specifically butch-femme identifications, as one imaginable engagement with the stigmatization of dominating-dominated polarities” (106). Moraga’s exemplification of Chicana butch opens up the dominating-dominated binary even beyond Yarbro-Bejarano’s estimation. Chingona as a racialized gendered sexuality is not just about dominating in the style of the colonizer. For the Chicana butch, it can be about embodying the capacity to move others sensuously, sexually, and emotionally, which requires a facility with emotional expressiveness and empathy for the other.

Noting the often misrecognized butch capacity for feeling, queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich discusses Moraga’s butch expression and expressiveness as an emotional style. In the essay titled “Untouchability and Vulnerability: Stone Butchness as Emotional Style” published in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, Cvetkovich asserts that butch is more than a visual or sexual style. Cvetkovich discusses “butchness as an emotional style, that is, as a set of conventions for expressing feeling” (159). Cvetkovich explains that in Moraga’s butch writing, “[e]specially charged are the connections between penetration, public humiliation, and feminization” (162). According to Cvetkovich, Moraga is able to construct “butch identity in ways that do not demand a rejection of female vulnerability or womanliness, especially a femininity defined in terms of the capacity to feel” (163). It is noteworthy that Moraga negotiates these connections within a specifically Chicanx context. Cvetkovich elaborates by noting how “Moraga’s understanding of butch sexuality as a response to colonialism’s structures of feeling offers testimony to the difficulty of representing feeling in terms other than stigmatized notions of vulnerability. The value of butch discourse is its power to articulate experiences of feeling that are not castigated as feminine or expected to take forms associated with mental and emotional health, such as openness or expressiveness” (164). Cvetkovich’s explanation of butch as emotional style helps us read Moraga’s butch emotional style as a chingona. As Moraga’s butch persona adopts an outward or visible masculinity, she can also be read as embodying an empowering form of gendered, feminine vulnerability.

Chingona as a Chicana butch gender orientation finds some synergy with Carol Queen’s descriptions of working-class butch. In Real Live Nude Girl, Queen offers a definition of butch that registers the tension between masculine and feminine and between visual and emotional styles by describing one of her lovers. She says that butch means “so deeply Not Feminine.” In the chapter titled “Why I Love Butch Women,” Queen says that butch is walking down the street with attitude, wearing jeans and white T-shirts, and exhibiting “the kind of womanness that isn’t taught in school,” marking butch as nonconformist, nonacademic, and circulating in a working-class street culture. Queen goes on to say that “[b]utch is a giant Fuck YOU! to compulsory femininity, just as lesbianism says the same to compulsory heterosexuality” (153). Emphasizing how butch, like femme, crosses traditional gender boundaries, Queen declares that “I love butch women because, in their big black boots, they step squarely across a line” (160). This juxtaposition of the not-feminine physical style and attitude with what Cvetkovich describes as a feminine emotional style makes it difficult to ascertain the gender of butch. In Butch Is a Noun, S. Bear Bergman professes to “know what butch is” and offers a humorous definition that contradicts itself every step of the way.1 For Chicana and other racialized butches, butch may be a matter of mixing sexual style with visual style as well as emotional style. The concept of butch itself is inherently contradictory—and in the cultural work this chapter explores, Chicana butch mixes genders to construct a borderlands gender that resonates with the notion of mestizaje.2 This borderlands gender is a way of feeling butch along the lines of Muñoz’s “Feeling Brown,” an “affective overload” born of exceeding normative categories of Latinidad.

Butch as a category of lesbian gender continues to be subject(ed) to definitional debates, suggesting its resistance to fixedness. Debates around butchness also signal ongoing attempts to regulate gender as well as unseat it from its regulatory throne. The visible butch often gets read by the dominant gaze as a mode of cultural loss, wherein expressions of masculinity may be perceived merely as failed femininity. This misreading sets up the butch figure as inherently antifeminine, conceptually trapping the definition of butch as against woman—and as a lesbian she is often assumed to be antiman. So, if the butch is only allowed to be considered man-hating and woman-hating, what is she presumed to be and to be for? Can butch identity be fully explained in terms of what Muñoz terms “disidentification,” the disavowal of the normative or dominative, and if so to what effect?

According to Judith Butler, butch and femme are “historical identities of sexual style” (Gender Trouble 41). For Butler, butch identity involves the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine, particularly through the resignification of the masculine:

Within lesbian contexts, the “identification” with masculinity that appears as butch identity is not a simple assimilation of lesbianism back into the terms of heterosexuality. As one lesbian femme explained, she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that “being a girl” contextualizes and resignifies “masculinity” in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible “female body.” (156)

In Butler’s formulation, butch requires the presence of a readable “female body” onto which traditionally masculine codes can be reconstituted as a lesbian gender expression. The butch’s subversive appropriation of masculinity for expression and use in what Butler refers to as “lesbian contexts” troubles the gender binary not just by mixing genders but also by intersecting gender expression with transgressive sexual orientation.

Representations of Chicana butchness explore a range of aspects of queer, masculine, working-class Chicana experience. In doing so, Chicana butch texts shift dominant discourses about butchness. One dominant misconception is the trite idea that butch is a retrograde or misogynist form of gender identity or expression. The second is the idea that butch fell out of favor and then reemerged onto the lesbian public scene. Addressing the first idea, Jack Halberstam’s work in theorizing “female masculinity” attempts to recuperate butch and other masculine lesbian genders by recognizing them as existing along complex continua of queer genders and sexualities. But the texts I will examine in this chapter also stretch the boundaries of gender expression to account for valences of race/ethnicity and class, and they engage masculinity, and butch masculinity in particular, as much more than a consciously adopted performance or matter of style.

The Chicana lesbian and queer cultural productions I examine in this chapter resist both of these dominant, limiting tropes of butchness. They also construct a particular idea of butch by interrogating how butch is racialized and gendered specifically in a Chicanx context. Within a Chicanx context, the butch figures in the texts I discuss here connect their sense of being butch with obtaining class mobility and cultural capital among other Chicanxs.

Many other writers and scholars have taken up discussions of butch lesbian gender, with many focusing on its matter of visual style and its tenuous and shifting relationship to feminisms, including lesbian feminisms (Nestle; Kennedy and Davis; Faderman; Burana and Due; Halberstam; Munt). These valuable contributions to queer thought have helped document and legitimize butch and butch-femme as lesbian identity formations. Yet, few considerations of butch-femme in mainstream queer academic discourse adequately consider the relation between race or ethnicity to sexuality and gender. For my purposes, I am interested in how Chicana authors represent butch within Chicano and Chicanx contexts, complicating the interconnectedness of ident...