Critical Response #2. 04/14/2015

The non-essence of me.

How much of what I am is defined by others and by myself as the essence of me? How many times have I truly believed that I am a clear, coherent and delineated character? How many times my face, my looks, my last name, my non-Colombianidad there and my Colombianidad here have pressured and produced the uneasiness of not belonging…anywhere.  How many times I have felt fear, proud for my one, two or three lives here and there, for my straightness, my gayness, and my none of them? 

Moraga’s book reminded me very much of the love-hate story between me and the culture I was raised in, the constant battle of embracing and repelling the roots, the hope to find a place, a home and a community that fully represented me. I especially resonate with her anti essentialist perspective, her view of the selfhood as fluid, ambiguous, out of categories, the hybridity made of the experience of living two cultures, two spaces that continually exclude her and how she creates a third space in which she navigates the Mexicanidad and the Americanidad. That in-between space is the site of resistance to the categorization of identity, selfhood and nationality that ultimately serves to justify discrimination. The multiple identities, the multiple oppressions experienced as a lesbian Chicana woman, and the “inability to identify with any background full-heartedly” (p.xii) are what I believe powerful forms of resistance that Moraga represent in her writings.  

Moraga’s stories embody queerness in many ways when troubles the lines between race categories, inventing new spaces in between that resist the colonizing efforts of white supremacy and the oppressive female roles and heterosexism embedded in the Mexican traditions. Identifying as a lesbian, opposing the heterosexual norms established by the dominant discourses in both cultures place her in an intersecting point of oppressions regarding race, class, gender and sexual orientation. “In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base” (p. 52)

 The above resonates with Somerville’s piece when she states that queer theory “assumes that sexuality cannot be separated from other categories of identities and social status” (p.190). In this sense, Moraga’s epitomize the denaturalization of categories concerning race, class, sexual orientation and nationality, in other words she is constantly queering her reality.

Furthermore, Duncan’s piece share with Moraga’s book a resistance within their writing style when both of them tell their own stories with discontinuities, multiple voices coming from themselves, (daughter/lover/student/mother/woman/Korean/Chicana/American/lesbian) and unpredictable shifts that construct new narratives and language in the margins of the normative writing and the dominant ways to tell stories.

“Aquí,  donde estoy,  las raíces que me sujetan al suelo no son más que los pies. Porque soy de tantos suelos posibles, pero de ninguno…” (Silvia Heilbut, 2015)