Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders

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2008

Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders

Margaret G. Frohlich Dickinson College

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Recommended Citation Frohlich, Margaret G. Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders . Tempe, AZ: AILCFH, 2008.

This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders

II Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica AILCFH

margaret.indd 1 11/20/08 9:25:47 PM El Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica se otorga anualmente en memoria de una de las fundadoras de la Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica. Siguiendo el espíritu de Victoria Urbano el premio se concede a la mejor monografía sobre tema femenino/feminista en el área de literatura y estudios culturales de Iberoamérica o US latino.

margaret.indd 2 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM Margaret G. Frohlich

Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders

Tempe, 2008

margaret.indd 3 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM Serie: Victoria Urbano de Crítica

Editoras: Carmen de Urioste y Cynthia Tompkins Asistente editorial: Inmaculada Pertusa Seva Asistente de redacción: Christopher Kark Comité del Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica: Ksenija Bilbija, Cynthia Tompkins y Carmen de Urioste.

Portada y diseño: Magdalena Soto

El presente libro ha sido publicado por la Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica (AILCFH). Queda prohibida, sin la autorización escrita del titular del «Copyright», bajo las sanciones establecidas en las leyes, la reproducción parcial o total de esta obra por cualquier medio o procedimiento, ya sea eléctrico, químico, mecánico, óptico, de grabación o de fotocopia. Esta prohibición incluye el diseño y la fotografía de cubierta.

Printed in US-Impreso en EEUU

ISBN 978-0-9794480-1-0

margaret.indd 4 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM Contents

Acknowledgements...... vii

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1 Nationality and Sexuality across Borders 1.1 The Nationality of Lesbianism...... 17 1.2 Identity Crises and Border Crossings in Flores raras e banalíssimas...... 18 1.3 Competing Nationalisms: Lesbian and Catalan Identity . . . . . 27 1.4 Latina Lesbians and Transnational Negotiations of Sexuality. . 41

Chapter 2 Bi’s, Bugas, and Borders in Lesbi Narrative 2.1 Borders, Identity, and the “Bisexual Threat” ...... 51 2.2 The Sexual Politics of Chicana Lesbian Identity:Margins . . . . 56 2.3 Off the Chart: Sexual Desire and Sexual Identity in La insensata geometría del amor...... 62 2.4 The Distance between a Lesbian and aBuga: Rosamaría Roffiel’s Amora...... 71

Chapter 3 Se le ve la pluma 3.1 Female Subjectivity and the Production of Meaning...... 81 3.2 Taking Up the Pen ...... 88 3.3 Political Writing, Visuality, and Commodity Fetishism . . . . 100

Chapter 4 Taking Place in Time: Somewhere over the Rainbow 4.1 Sexuality and Temporality in the Bildungsroman...... 111 4.2 Queer Ontology and Identity: Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes...... 121 4.3 Queering Spatiality ...... 131 4.4 Another Stage: Countering American Hegemony in the “Utopia of the Mirror”...... 139

margaret.indd 5 11/20/08 9:25:49 PM Conclusion...... 149

Works Cited...... 155

Index...... 169

margaret.indd 6 11/20/08 9:25:49 PM Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful for the support of many individuals and institutions that gave their assistance to this project. I would like to thank the talented professors of my dissertation committee: my doctoral advisor Lou Charnon-Deutsch at Stony Brook University, to whom I would like to pay special tribute for her expert knowledge of women writers, generous advice, and constant support; my second reader Daniela Flesler, also at Stony Brook University, for her critical insight that helped to maintain the project’s coherence; Brad Epps at Harvard University for his inspirational research and spirited critique that helped me to refine my analyses; Román de la Campa at The University of Pennsylvania, whose exceptional passion for Hispanic literature and culture continues to spur me on; Kathleen Vernon at Stony Brook University, for encouraging me to compare the cultural productions of women across national borders, and Gabriela Polit-Dueñas at Stony Brook University whose conversations and reading recommendations helped me to broaden my treatment of identity. I would also like to thank Benigno Trigo at Vanderbilt University whose course on memory and the maternal body greatly expanded my understanding of female subjectivity and writing. I am truly grateful for the generous grants and awards that made my research possible: Dickinson College’s Research and Development Travel Funds, Stony Brook University’s Research Access Program, the Gloria Kahn Fellowship Award, the Patrick Charnon Scholarship Award, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and the Tinker Field Research Grant. I would like to extend a special thank you to all of my friends and family for their words of encouragement along the way. The unwavering support of my parents, Anna Lee and Mark, is a great act of love. Thanks to C.J. Prince for giving me solace and cheer in her adventures with the pen. Thanks also to my dear friends from

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margaret.indd 7 11/20/08 9:25:50 PM graduate school, especially Sobeira Latorre, Fernando Guerrero, Mariela Wong, Manuel Urrutia Zarzo, Megan Hughes Zarzo, Tania Miguel de Magro, Toni Rivas, Danny Barreto, and Monica Sanning for their comments and suggestions throughout various stages of this project. I am incredibly inspired by the work of Professors Jackie Collins, Inmaculada Pertusa, Melissa Stewart, and Nancy Vosburg, and thank them for their council and support over the years. I would also like to thank bibliophile Damon Stanek for providing me with such pertinent texts. My warmest gratitude goes to Flannon Jackson whose incisive critique, multiple edits of previous versions of this manuscript, patient conversations, and reading recommendations renewed my enthusiasm and widened my intellectual perspective. Finally, I want to thank the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica’s selection committee for the Premio de monografía Victoria Urbano 2007, Cynthia Tompkins, Carmen de Urioste, and Ksenija Bilbija, for their recognition and for extending my research to a wider audience. I also thank Cynthia Tompkins and Carmen de Urioste for their editorial assistance. I am very grateful to Inmaculada Pertusa, editor extraor- dinaire, for her persuasive and careful guidance and for inspiring me with her own research before this project began.

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margaret.indd 8 11/20/08 9:25:50 PM Introduction

Introduction

ow are nationality and sexuality related? What is gained and what is lost when sexuality is framed in terms of identity politics, and what is the role of the nation-stateH in this process? Though nationality is one of many terms that connote aspects of subjectivity, such as gender, race, and class, it distinguishes itself as a metanarrative with a long history of conferring legitimacy on political issues. Critical analyses of nationalisms in the era of late capitalism highlight the disparity between traditional understandings of national boundaries, contemporary patterns of immigration, and globalized economies. Similar contestations of boundaries occur in relation to sexuality, such as we find in Queer Theory, encouraging a careful analysis of how nationalism and sexuality might be understood as co-determinant systems, each influencing the other’s intelligibility. Select lesbian novels are particularly illustrative of the complexity of the relation of nationalism to sexuality, depicting the formation of bonds between women in close relation or in opposition to nationalist discourse. The novels and films investigated in this present study span a variety of nations and languages (Catalan, English, Portuguese, and Spanish) facilitating both national and transnational connections and an analysis of nationalisms and sexualities1 in multiple contexts. An increase in the production of lesbian narratives is occurring in an historical period in which stable forms of social identification, such as nationality and gender roles, are in flux. How these two phenomena intersect is the focus of this book.

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The term Lesbian Nation and the shift implied in the terms Queer Nation and Queer Planet are clear examples of how national discourse has been tied to global perspectives, no longer confined to groups bounded by territory, religion, or ethnicity.2 While cultural and political affiliations beyond the nation-state, such as those posed by Marxism, were in motion long before the term globalization came into popular usage, the connections forged by recent social movements based on gender and sexuality both reify and extend national boundaries. Recent historical changes in nationalism help to explain the nationalist character of the gay movement. In his article “Social Movements as Nationalisms, or On the Very Idea of Queer Nation” Brian Walker traces the defense of nations in order to protect threatened cultures back to the Second World War. He argues that although many gays and lesbians wish to see homosexuality treated as nothing more than one of several characteristics that a person might have, there are also many for whom it is a way of life and thus part of generalized extension of nationalism beyond the confines of territory and religion. Walker notes that some gays and lesbians have their own sense of community, history, literature, and ethos just like many other nations:

For these people sexual preference is just one feature of a much broader way of life based on a radical questioning of everyday institutions, gender roles, and so on. For these people queer- ness is not a transitional way of life for those on their way into the mainstream but a radically different ethos that needs to be preserved. (524)

As Walker indicates, homosexuality is understood in multiple and contradictory ways, and like other nationalisms, queer nationalism is highly contested. For example, not all agree that marriage should be a social institution of a “Queer Nation,” and the activists that form the Grup de Lesbianes Feministes of Barcelona hold the conviction that it ignores individual rights in favor of rights for couples.

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Discord is also evident in the various reactions to Queer Theory, which is sometimes perceived as a threat to groups that have finally been able to assert their identity in a growing number of public arenas, including the literary market, and at other times as a theory that supports these groups’ belief in the freedom to identify as one wishes. As a theory that is, according to Annamarie Jagose, “ceaselessly interrogating both the preconditions of identity and its effects,” it is perhaps only logical that Queer Theory’s identity is likewise under constant revision (Queer Theory 3). Some theorists fear the “de-gaying of gayness within the queer theoretical field” and the blurring of axes central to identity via an erasure of boundaries (Cooper 20). The term queer, however, is not necessarily radically opposed to terms of sexual identity such as lesbian, and both of these terms have the potential to unsettle binaries such as hetero/homo. As the gay/queer debate illustrates, the framing of difference extends beyond marginalized groups in relation to dominant cultures to include these groups’ internal divisions, e.g., factionalism within Marxism, early radical feminists and male-dominated groups on the left, and more recently a divide in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual) community between those who support New York State’s passage in 2002 of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act and those who see it as a betrayal for its failure to include transgender as a protected category. Indeed, there are many differences within the gay movement, and not everyone agrees upon the same political goals. In Virtually Equal, Urvashi Vaid describes two different modes of resistance to prejudice within the gay movement:

Are we a movement aimed at mainstreaming gay and lesbian people (legitimation), or do we seek radical social change out of the process of our integration (liberation)? Gay and lesbian history could be read as the saga of conflict between these two compatible but divergent goals. Legitimation and liberation are interconnected and often congruent; the former makes it possible to imagine the latter. But our pursuit of them takes different roads and leads to very different outcomes. For some gay

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and lesbian people, mainstream integration is the paramount goal of our political movement. For others, the transformation of mainstream culture holds the key to genuine gay and lesbian equality. (37)

In certain lesbian novels selected for this study, we can find examples of both of the two modes of resistance that Vaid indicates, one focused mainly on integration and the other on transformation. The character, Carlota, of Geovanna Galera’s novel El cielo en tus manos (2003) adopts a pedagogical tone in her call for greater toler- ance of lesbianism:

¿Acaso que dos mujeres se amasen era tan extraño? La homosexualidad es tan natural como el sexo entre hombre y mujer, lo que ocurre es que la religión y en ocasiones la política, durante años, han intentado ocultarla, castigando a sus fieles, cuando quizá en su seno había más gays y lesbianas, o al menos relaciones de este tipo, que en cualquier otro círculo social. No hay derecho a que las torturen de esa manera, que las dejen vivir en paz; si no las apoyan que se olviden de ellas, pero que no las castiguen. (142)

Carlota’s plea primarily focuses on ending discrimination and social punishment. This goal is reflected as well in Juan Carlos Claver’s film made for television, Electroshock (2006),3 and in passages of Susana Guzner’s novel, La insensata geometría del amor (2001), both of which address the deadly effects of “curing” lesbianism with electroshock therapy in Spain. The works of Guzner and Claver contest lesbian as a category signifying criminality or illness. However, following Vaid’s distinction between legitimation and liberation, we find that these narratives contrast with the politics of Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998). Though all these works involve a disidentification with terms (the latter contests lesbian, heterosexual, and female as terms that connote essential and homogeneous characteristics), the suggestion in the works of Guzner and Claver that lesbian can be legitimated through proper resignification is not upheld inBeatriz, which questions the limits

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and exclusions of identitarian terms. Judith Butler suggests a way to move through a similar impasse in feminist discourse:

Here the numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehen- sive concept or category. The claim to have achieved such an impartial concept or description shores itself up by foreclosing the very political field that it claims to have exhausted. This violence is at once performed and erased by a description that claims finality and all-inclusiveness. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation. Bodies( that Matter 221-22)

In agreement with Butler, my investigation analyzes multiple asser- tions and contestations of identity. Questions of difference and inclusion are at the heart of nationalisms and sexualities, which are traditionally analyzed within the confines of a heterosexual framework,4 e.g., Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions, which details the relation of nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American romance novels to national discourse. Introducing gay and lesbian literature to the question of nationalism is an endeavor that runs counter to traditional literary inquiry, as Elena M. Martínez observes in Lesbian Voices from Latin America: “[…] the Latin American literary canon has, like literary canons everywhere else, undervalued and dismissed literary and cultural manifestations that are not the prescribed ones and

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traditionally has only accepted heterosexual forms of desire and sexuality” (6). In his article “Estados de deseo: homosexualidad y nacionalidad (Juan Goytisolo y Reinaldo Arenas a vuelapluma),” Brad Epps explores how the literary works of two authors of different national backgrounds depict the strained relation between nations and homosexuals:

Con el sida, la idea del homosexual como una amenaza a la integridad nacional cobra un tono todavía más mórbido y sombrío, inspirando ideas de reclusión obligatoria, clasificación, vigilancia y hasta tatuajes identificatorios. Estas visiones son, en parte, las que se encuentran en muchas obras de Goytisolo y Arenas, visiones que ellos re-presentan y alteran dentro de un panorama de opresión y resistencia. (809)

Investigations such as these by Martínez and Epps, together with a growing number of critical anthologies on Hispanic gay and lesbian texts5 since the early 1990s, expand our knowledge of the relation of nationalisms to sexualities and suggest that literary canons are changing to incorporate cultural productions depicting LGBT experience. In 1991, however, David William Foster noted a disparity in the amount of research on lesbian literature as compared to investigations of works depicting male homosexual experience (3). Within recent years, this tendency to favor male-centered texts has begun to shift. Yet when attention is given to women it often focuses on their oppression, and as Helen Graham notes of the plurality of women’s socioeconomic and cultural experiences under Francoism in Spain, there is also a need to theorize women’s contributions to both nationalisms and changes in gender politics (182).6 In response to such observations, my research focuses on novels and films that portray female characters who have sexual experiences with other females, be they self-identified lesbians, bisexuals, or women who do not outwardly proclaim a particular sexual identity. As we explore the relation of national discourse to sexual discourse in these narratives, we find that lesbian sexuality is not simply excluded from

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the heteronormativity7 of national culture but rather occurs at the constitutive limit of heterosexual discourse and sometimes fashions its own national contours. Avoiding the suggestion that the works I am studying pertain to a silenced history of a lesbian nation that was intact and needed only to be uncovered, I direct my attention to the production of identity in literary and non-literary representations in various national contexts. As part of my focus on the problematic of identity formation, I question the meaning, use and implications of the terms lesbian and bisexual, and avoid the suggestion of an essential link between the various novels and films that I analyze. Marilyn Farwell indicates in Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives that lesbian literature is beset by a number of definitional problems: “For literary criticism, a lesbian narrative is a problematic category because it involves two contested terms: lesbian and narrative” (4). In this study, I explore how such terms are engaged, mapping the epistemological constraints on various figurations of sexuality and subject formation. Instead of embracing a unidirectional approach that posits Hispanic lesbian fiction only as symptomatic of larger social phenomenon, I argue that such novels are formed by and participate in the formation of sexual identities and national discourse. Annamarie Jagose notes in Lesbian Utopics, taking up Michel Foucault’s “repres- sive hypothesis,” that, “ […] the lesbian body is mistakenly drama- tized as only prohibited and not simultaneously produced” (3). For example, I examine how the novel Con pedigree (1997) by Lola Van Guardia (a pseudonym of Isabel Franc) challenges the intelligibility of the lesbian subject by pointing to the multiple processes by which various kinds of lesbians are constituted. Complimenting this approach, the representations of lesbian sexuality that I examine purposely span a wide range of aesthetics, complexities, genres, and styles in order to expand the narrative voices that might inform the intersection of nationalism and sexuality. In choosing a broad range of material for this project, I hope to avoid privileging any one subject position or political motive. This selection of cultural productions engages what Andreas Huyssen

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describes in his essay on the role of literary and cultural studies in the context of globalization, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” as an increasingly horizontal field of comparisons in contrast to the traditional vertical nature of the high/low cultural divide, which positions canonical literary works in opposition to mass culture. Despite the new and more numerous comparisons being made across borders, he indicates that the local and the global are still held too far apart, producing analyses that are often either too amorphous or too parochial: something I hope to avoid by balancing transnational connections with historical specificity. The transatlantic (the Americas and Spain) and transcontinental (United States and Latin America) connections that I will make are facilitated by the pairing of women from different nations in the novels and films that I critique. For example, Spanish and Latin American women are joined in El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) by Esther Tusquets and Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) by Carmen Nestares. In addition to their obvious shared cultural history, Latin America and Spain also share in common a peripheral positioning that eases a comparison of their literature: Latin America as “other” in the American continents dominated by the United States and Spain within a European context where it is depicted as “different.” Novels such as Achy Obejas’Memory Mambo (1996) and Carmen Oliveira’s Flores raras e banalíssimas (1995) depict women from different parts of the Americas that form intimate relationships. Transatlantic and intercontinental comparisons help me to respond to Fefa Vila’s assessment of the differences between Spanish and Latina-Chicana literature: “[…] no podemos decir que la cultura lesbiana y gai en el Estado español tenga la misma incidencia que en otros países. La literatura anglosajona y la latina-chicana es la que nos ofrece las mejores versiones de la disidencia sexual” (12). I am interested in the political and social implications of the creation of models of “dissidence,” rather than difference, as well as the critical attention paid to foreign, instead of domestic, models of sexuality. For instance, Spanish bookstores are more likely to exhibit gay and lesbian literature written by foreign authors instead of Spanish authors. These marketing practices promote the erroneous impres- sion that gay culture is not part of Spanish culture.

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Border crossings, a prominent aspect of the works in this study, are also present in the transnational and transcontinental movement of the authors of lesbian novels. For example, Cristina Perri Rossi, born in Uruguay, now lives in Spain; Sara Levi Calderón, born in Mexico, now lives in the United States; Dolores Soler-Espiauba, born in Spain, has also lived in Portugal and Brussels; and Kleya Forté-Escamilla, who is from a bi-lingual and bi-cultural background, was born in the border town of Calexico, Mexico and grew up in Baja and Arizona. The novels of many of these writers also cross borders; for example, Dos mujeres (1990) by Sara Levi Calderón has been translated into English and now sells in the United States under the title The Two Mujeres; Amora (1989) by Rosamaría Roffiel was originally published in Mexico and now sells in Madrid’s gay and lesbian bookstore Berkana in the same feminine narrative section that includes lesbian novels published in Spain; and Julia (1970) by Ana María Moix was originally published in Spain and now sells in American bookstores. Although comparing and contrasting novels of the same national origin aids in building a better understanding of the specificities of a nation’s culture, as well as the cultural significance behind social expressions and phenomena, the exclusion of comparisons across national borders would limit the quality and nature of what is being explored here. Hence, my plane of inquiry is national, international, and transnational in scope. The extension of my research within and beyond national confines allows me to understand what is unique to novels of the same national background as well as the cultural commonalities that can be traced in a variety of Hispanic novels when the nation is not the primary organizing principal. In chapter 1, I analyze Hispanic narratives from the 1990s that involve women crossing over together and coming together across the borders that constitute nation and sexuality, including Flores raras e banalíssimas by Carmen Oliveira, a novel based on the real-life relationship between Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soares and American poet laureate Elizabeth Bishop; Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas, in which two Latinas living in the mainland United States,

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one from a Puerto Rican family and one from a Cuban family, cross over the various cultural divides between them; and the film Brincando el charco (1994) directed by Frances Negrón-Muntaner that portrays the relationship between two Latinas, one from the mainland United States and one from Puerto Rico. Examining traversals across differences allows us to understand how the nation is evoked, reifying and loosening sexual boundaries. The interplay between nationalism and sexuality in a context of cultural and spatial border crossings works to destabilize binaries, such as local/ global, hetero/homo, and reveals their interdependencies, thereby facilitating new linkages and perspectives. Chapter 2 compares depictions of the sexual biases surrounding the figure of the bisexual and examines the way disputes over sexual boundaries mirror national border tensions in the novels Margins (1992) by Terri de la Peña, La insensata geometría del amor by Susana Guzner, and Amora by Rosamaría Roffiel. Here I turn to Elizabeth Grosz’ analysis of space-time from her essay, Space, Time, and Perversion, to trace the particular ways in which bisexuality functions as a site from which challenges to the constitutive limits of subjectivity are made. Grosz notes that it is difficult to separate identity from the “overarching context of space-time, within which bodies function and are conceived” (100). In these novels, I also find evidence that supports Judith Halberstam’s claim that “the relations between sexuality and time and space provide immense insight into the flows of power and subversion within postmodernism” (Queer 13). Although my inquiry into the way that bisexuality both maintains and troubles borders and temporalities is perhaps more heavily invested in how it unsettles them, this emphasis does not stem from a belief that fluidity is unproblematic and morally superior to fixedness. I concur with Halberstam in her essay In a Queer Time and Place that further entrenching the fixity-fluidity binarism forecloses opportunities to understand how sexuality functions within and beyond both of these modes. I also share Brad Epps’ concern in his article “The Fetish of Fluidity” that some formulations of Queer Theory engage in a facile over-appreciation of movement. Diaspora and exile are clear examples of movement that

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are not reducible to the pleasantness of freedom from restraint. With this in mind, my interest is not in fluidity in general, but rather the extent to which an historical refusal of the porous nature of national and sexual borders is associated with conditions of oppression and the dialectic of identity and freedom. The narrative tensions that surround the figure of the bisexual revolve in part around language use and which terms are thought to accurately describe which individuals. Theoretical discourses on language and the body, such as Julia Kristeva’s From One Identity to Another and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter, address how language shapes and influences the way that we know and describe embodied human experience and the way that materiality is rendered unstable. Language, writing, and representation of lesbian subjectivity are central aspects of many Hispanic lesbian texts, such as Dos mujeres and En breve cárcel (1981) by Sylvia Molloy, and this question of language and representation is the focus of chapter 3. Even though these two novels do not demonstrate a concern for definitional categories, writing about and representing a lesbian relationship is a central organizing principle of the text. As described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her essay The Epistemology of the Closet, there is an intimate relation between language and sexuality, and systems of power and knowledge that sustain homophobic oppression are bound by language. The problem of feminine expression within patriarchal language structures extends to lesbian expression, and the work of feminist theorists that address this problem, such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, provide the background against which I trace the contours of language and lesbian desire in Julia Alvarez’ novel In the Name of Salomé (2000) and Soledad (2001) by Angie Cruz. For those that seek an origin that subverts the relegation of females to a subordinate role in relation to men, the ancient Greek poetess Sappho holds great appeal. Many lesbian narratives contrib- ute to the development of a Sapphic nation, and as Brian Walker notes, gay nationalism has more in common with other national movements than one might initially assume, including its own literature and histories. The role of literature in the gay movement resembles that of other national movements:

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A self-consciously particularist literature is developed which emphasizes the local culture. Histories are written which project the story of the community back through time (in the case of gay nationalism, back to ancient Greece and Rome), tracing the pre-history of the present moment in which it came to consciousness. (Walker 519)

In chapter 3, I develop the relation of writing, identity, and national discourse in novels that portray the act of writing, such as María- Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1995) and Mireya Robles’ Una mujer y otras cuatro (2004). Also in chapter 3, the question of language and representation is expanded to include the visual presence of lesbian literature in the free market, e.g. the clearly marked gay and lesbian sections of bookstores. Although the visibility of gay and lesbian literature and other commodities within the market of capitalist societies may have positive benefits for gay and lesbian communities by affirming gay and lesbian existence, it is sometimes dangerously confused with the achievement of political equality. The dubious benefits of visibility can be situated within an historical development that started in the nineteenth century: “The transition from sodomitical acts to homosexual persons can be thought of as an epistemological turn or swerve into the visual as a place where the signs of deviancy are now to appear” (Bryson 8). Participation in the market is a complicated matter for the gay and lesbian community, for such participation can be seen as both helpful to the aim of increasing political awareness and detrimental when such participation obfuscates political goals:

To question the reduction of the political to the dimensions of cultural consumption is not to dismiss out of hand the implications of “women’s culture” as a marginal site of production, a countermemory, a place for the consolidation of alternative practices and discourses. But marginality alone is no guarantee of political effectiveness and transgression, and the movement within lesbian communities toward increasingly cultural forms

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of collective identity engagement has the effect of depoliticizing sexual differences and at the same time homogenizing their production. (Wiegman 4)

The activist work of the previously mentioned Grup de Lesbianes Feministes of Barcelona performs a critique of consumerism within the gay community, calling for an invigoration of political action aimed at redressing social inequalities. In chapter 3, I compare this activist work to the political aims expressed in lesbian fiction. At the heart of debates over visibility and representation is the question of how entities become intelligible. The concepts of time and space have long shaped the constitutive limits that mark the contours of knowable entities. Stable identities, such as those pro- posed by nations, are constituted through a linear temporality that keeps them “intact.” I turn to Judith Halberstam’s research on conventional temporalities to understand the constitutive limits of the lesbian subject. Historically, the lesbian subject has been excluded from the “forward-moving narrative of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam What’s That 1). In order to understand alternative temporalities, chapter 4 examines the temporality of youth as it is narrated in three novels about young girls’ lesbian connections: El mismo mar de todos los veranos by Esther Tusquets, Réquiem por una muñeca rota (2000) by Eve Gil, and Nunca soñé contigo (2000) by Carmen Gómez Ojea. “Becoming-lesbian” (to borrow Grosz’ Deleuzian term) portrayed in these novels counters teleological renderings of sexuality and points the way toward a politics of sexuality beyond an identitarian framework (184). Chapter 4 explores how the legitimation of sexuality shifts in utopian or virtual space as characters attempt to find a space conducive to their being at odds with conventional temporality. Here I analyze connections between national and sexual identity in the narration of virtual Internet “spaces” and spaces described in utopian terms. My theoretical approach utilizes Benedict Anderson’s formulation of “imagined communities” and Foucault’s text “Of Other Spaces” to understand the unique space-time of simultaneously utopian and heterotopian spaces such as the social space of a

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bar called “Gay Night” in Con pedigree that is contested in terms of varying national perceptions of sexual identity. In Desde la otra orilla (1999) by Mabel Galán, characters turn to cyberspace in order to make intimate connections in a quasi “disembodied” space in which gender is rendered ambiguous and sexual identity dissembled. Sexual expression in virtual and utopian spaces may provide new ways to conceptualize sexuality by blurring the lines demarcating gender and traversing the spatial limits of nations. In the texts that I will discuss, there is a tendency within lesbian fiction for characters to describe their union as being out of space and time, suggesting that sexuality is a process that exceeds social identification. The narratives that this book analyzes clearly draw our attention to the marginal status of lesbians in society and the way they are subject to various prejudices and social inequalities. While examination of these injustices is a crucial undertaking for furthering democratic principles of equality, limiting our attention to this marginal status risks failing to understand the complex relation of margin to center and how mechanisms of exclusion are perpetuated and produced in both sites. While some narratives address this problematic more overtly than others, they are all affected by it. Therefore, I hold this point of interest close even when it is least apparent.

NOTES 1 In the introduction to the anthology Nationalisms and Sexualities, which explores the way that these two discourses shape identity, Parker, Russo, Sommer, and Yaeger underscore that “nation” and “sexuality” are irreducible to singular models (2-3). 2 The termLesbian Nation originates from Jill Johnston’s book by that name from 1973 and was a rallying cry of politically organized lesbians in the 1970s. Queer Nation is an organization started in the United States in the summer of 1990 by activists who sought to challenge public sexual discourse and discrimination within public, political and cultural spaces (Berlant and Freeman 198-99). In the title of his anthology of critical essays Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993), Michael Warner extends Queer Nation to Queer Planet.

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3 Claver’s film was released one year later in the United States by Picture This! Home Video with the title A Love to Keep. 4 See Puri for an excellent discussion of questions of nationalism and transnationalism in lesbian/gay studies and how nationalism favors heterosexuality. 5 For example, Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960-1990) (Smith 1992), Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (Ed. Juanita Ramos, 1994), ¿Entiendes?: Queer readings, Hispanic Writings (Eds. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith, 1995), Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Eds. Silvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin, 1998), Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Eds. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 1999), Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture (Eds. Susana Chávez-Silverman and Librada Hernández, 2000), and Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression (Eds. Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa, 2003). 6 Licia Fiol-Matta provides a Latin American, and specifically Chilean, example of a lesbian woman’s contribution to nationalist discourse in her analysis of the literary work and public persona of Gabriela Mistral. She concludes that the famous poet and Nobel Laureate’s discourse reinforced the demands of marriage and motherhood at the service of the nation while paradoxically facilitating her avoidance and subversion of these imperatives in her role as a public figure, schoolteacher, and writer. 7 A term coined by Michael Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet that refers to the way that heterosexuality is perpetuated as normative (xxi). It is related to Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality.

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Nationality and Sexuality across Borders

1.1 The Nationality of Lesbianism

hat is the relation between nationality and sexuality in narratives that focus on the sexual relationship between women of different national backgrounds? WhatW roles do border crossings and national discourses play in the narrative construction of these characters’ relationships and vice versa? A traditional reading based on national identity might subordinate the personal relationships between women to the public life of a nation and suggest that the value in examining the personal is in its metaphorical representation of public social issues. I am interested in the political implications of not only inverting this relationship, such that national issues might be read as meta- phors for private relationships, but also of exploring to what extent national and intimate relationships are co-determined and hence of similar social value. In this chapter, I analyze the representation of lesbian relationships between women of different national origins in four narratives of the 1990s: Flores raras e banalíssimas by Carmen Oliveira, Con pedigree by Lola Van Guardia (pseudonym for Isabel Franc), Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas, and the filmBrincando el charco directed by Frances Negrón-Muntaner. Each depicts lesbian relationships in the context of sociopolitical struggles, a coincidence that bears further reflection and which I address throughout the length of the chapter: Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico’s relations with the United States and Catalonia’s relations with the Spanish State.

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In these selected works, differences in national identification are portrayed not only as a source of attraction between characters but also as a source of the problems that they experience in their relationships. Characters conceptualize national identity in varying ways: as something fixed at birth, as an open question, and as something that can be consciously adopted. In each case, a complex relation exists between these women’s intimacy and national identity, one that involves multiple challenges: understanding one’s lover in and beyond her national identity, tension between nationalities when sexuality becomes a type of nationalism, dismantling the dichotomy that separates national and sexual identity, and finding commonalities despite different approaches to national identification. These characters are engaged in a process that includes both the appreciation and reification of national identity and the recognition that it is insufficiently able to capture human subjectivity. These narratives eschew a utopian vision of lesbian love rising above difference and the strictures of identitarian spaces. By signaling the differences that persist amongst lesbians, they echo Black Feminism’s critique of the Feminist Movement of the 1970s that stressed the need to account for differences among women. The dialectic of difference and identity within the realm of nationalism is also present in discourses of gender and sexuality. What is at stake in these narratives is the negotiation of the issue of difference without reinforcing categories of authenticity and purity, exclusions based on absolute difference, and hierarchical subject positions.

1.2 Identity Crises and Border Crossings in Flores raras e banalíssimas

In contemporary debates on sociopolitical inequalities and power relations, sexual inequalities are sometimes dismissed as inconsequential or merely symptomatic of larger social ills and hence better ignored in favor of more pressing matters. Foster speculated in 1991 that this dismissal might explain the “underproduction of lesbian narratives in Latin America” (4). Cristina Ferreira Pinto- Bailey, in her article “O desejo lesbiano no conto de escritoras

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brasileiras contemporâneas,” adds to Foster’s hypothesis that in a Latin American context fear of being labeled a lesbian and having one’s writing deemed pornographic might also act as impediments. In the context of Brazil, the bestselling novels of Cassandra Rios are an exception to the generalized invisibility of lesbian narrative, and Rios herself, adds Foster, is one of few “exceptionally prominent” women writers (119). Her novels depict lesbian desire as something that the economically privileged experience:

[…] Rios’s women are all economically secure and materially free to pursue their personal psychological needs), Rios presents heroines who supplement the real urban situations of her readers by offering an image of personal sexual realization that, because it is the stuff of her novels, is not likely to be actual sociocultural fact. (Foster 120)

It has been many years since the popularity of Rios’s novels in the 1960s and 1970s, and although a detailed analysis of the history of lesbian activism and studies in Brazil is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that there have been significant changes in both areas. For example, in 1996, Brazil instituted the Dia Nacional da Visibilidade Lésbica, and in an interview with Mix Brasil in 2004, Lúcia Facco, critic and writer of lesbian fiction, underscored that interest in gay and lesbian studies in the Arts in Brazil was growing. In contrast to the characters of Rios’s bestselling novels, the women portrayed in the more recently published collection of stories by Facco, Lado B. Histórias de mulheres (2006), are of various ages, social classes, and ethnicities. In spite of these changes in lesbian visibility and representation, Sérgio Ripardo still notes, in his article “Crítica: Lésbicas derrubam clichês em livro de contos,” a continued resistance to books about homosexuality in the Brazilian editorial market. In contrast with Rios’ novels’ appeal to fantasy, Carmen Oliveira bases her book Flores raras e banalíssimas (1995) on oral and written testimony. The novel narrates the relationship during the 1950s and 1960s between two historical figures: Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares and Elizabeth Bishop, a Poet Laureate of the

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United States. This book uniquely explores the hidden, fictionalized, and documented aspects of a lesbian relationship and traces how such modes of truth and storytelling relate to national identity. Translated into English by Neil K. Besner and given the title Rare and Commonplace Flowers, Oliveira’s biography was a finalist of the Lambda Literary Awards of 2002. The translation appears to be a faithful representation of the original. Besner admits that obviously the two books are not the same and cannot be, though he hopes to have brought them close together (65). Like Oliveira’s book, other lesbian narratives from Spain and Latin America portray border crossing and cross borders in translation, among them: Dos mujeres (1990) by Sara Levi Calderón, La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) by Maria-Mercè Marçal, El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) by Esther Tusquets, to name a few. Flores raras e banalíssimas, which narrates the identity crises of its characters, demonstrates its own sort of identity crisis by walking a tight rope between fiction and biography. It includes the distant voice of a narrator common to biographies as well as dialogues between characters that one would expect to find in a novel. The last pages of the book highlight this tension by introducing a list of sources that Oliveira consulted during the writing of her book with a quote by the Roman historian Titus Livius, “Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum. Escreve-se para contar, não para provar” (213). Oliveira’s citation of interviews, personal correspon- dences, and newspapers suggest the veracity of the text despite her claim via the quote by Livius that she writes to narrate, not to prove something. Both the original and the translation of Oliveira’s book feature black and white photographs of Lota and Bishop, their homes, and some of their friends, providing a documentary touch that stands in contrast to their fictionalized dialogues. The tension between fiction and documentation is also present in the contrast between Bishop’s lyrical and emotional poems about Brazil and the documentary style of the travel literature that she writes in her report for Time Magazine. The fictional narrative ofFlores raras e banalíssimas explicitly acknowledges the lesbian relationship between Lota and

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Bishop (as they are referred to most often in the novel) and draws the reader’s attention to the erasure of that relationship in non- fiction. In one scene Lota leafs through newspaper clippings and documentation about her life’s work and is taken aback by the terms that are used to describe her that ignore not only her public work, in calling her a housewife, but also her committed relationship with Bishop: “brasileira, solteira, de prendas do lar” (205). Oliveira’s novel registers border crossings on an intimate corporal level. The novel opens with Bishop’s voyage to Brazil where a friend introduces her to Lota. Bishop’s awkward straddling of two very different cultures shows up in her transnational cooking as she finds herself improvising pancakes from exotic ingredients: “Contando com um repertório não muito familiar de salsinhas e cebolinhas, Bishop improvisou umas panquecas” (24). Both this hybrid cultural breakfast and the American tourist in Brazil who prepares it are palatable to Lota, as Lota’s friend Mary observes: “Mary estava vendo a hora em que Lota ia salpicar pimenta em Bishop e comer” (24). National foods provide one of many cultural levels upon which national unity is accepted, transmitted, and ingested. If one may speak of a national body, it is a body nurtured by a mythically autochthonous cuisine. Bishop is determined to bring the best of her American self to Lota through her cooking: “Arojadamente, prometeu que no Natal faria um autêntica peru à americana” (25). Before Bishop is able to translate this quintes- sential example of American cooking into Brazil for consumption, however, she eats a Brazilian caju (cashew) fruit given to her by Lota: “Bishop cheirou e gracejou que não se deveria permitir que uma fruta e uma castanha se combinassem de forma tão indecente” (30). The “indecency” of the caju results from the way that the plump and fleshy fruit encloses a hard nut, which appears to penetrate it. This fruit that evokes intercourse promptly produces a severe allergic response in Bishop. Lota notes that the caju embodies a terrible identity crisis, being a peduncle and not a fruit, and that it tends to affect people who are also suffering an identity crisis: “Assim, pela lei da semelhança, a cajuíte tende a atacar pessoas em crise de identidade” (32). This veiled reference could be directed

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at Bishop’s changing identity since she is both far from home and falling deeply in love with another woman. Lota eases Bishop’s convalescence and playfully makes an edible flora out her swol- len ears: “São grandes, carnudos. Desenvolveram-se rapidamente. Sim, só podiam ser aqueles apetitosos cogumelos” (32). While American and Brazilian cultures do not blend seamlessly as these scenes demonstrate, they cannot be held apart. When Bishop is finally well enough to prepare a traditional American turkey, the maid informs her that they will give the bird Brazilian cane liquor all day before they kill it. The narrative omits any description of the actual killing and consumption of the turkey, emphasizing the humorous hybridity that results from the hubris of trying to insert a New England tradition into Brazil unscathed. The troubled nature of Bishop and Lota’s intimate relationship echoes the tensions between their respective countries during the 1950s and 1960s. Flores raras e banalíssimas mentions that in September of 1963, politician Carlos Lacerda was in the United States telling the Los Angeles Times that the American government was going to intervene in João Goulart’s government. Almost a decade after the 1995 publication of the novel, the United State’s National Security Archive posted declassified documents that revealed American willingness to back the military coup, thus officially confirming what many people already knew. The coup resulted in twenty-one years of military rule in which thousands suffered long-term imprisonment, torture, and exile. The historical context of American political and economic dominance in the continent threatening Brazilian national identity and sovereignty might explain, at least in part, the negative reaction of Lota’s friends to Bishop. In the same way that the government of the United States interfered with Brazil’s autonomy, Bishop perceives her American friend Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group, to be meddling in her relationship with Lota. In this metafictional scene, Bishop becomes certain that two of the female characters are based on herself and Lota, especially since McCarthy has spent time with the couple. She is disturbed by the way that other characters in the novel speak of the relationship between the two characters that resemble her and Lota.

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They describe their relationship as anormal and Bishop’s reaction is not pleasant: “A vulgaridade com que, no livro, as outras amigas cogitavam sobre o relacionamento físico entre as duas mulheres a revoltava” (118). The primary narrative ofFlores raras e banalíssimas contrasts with the negative opinion that McCarthy’s characters express, for although it painfully recounts the couple’s difficulties, it emphasizes the endearing tenderness between them and their continued love for one another in spite of Bishop’s alcoholism and Lota’s obsessive work habits. Bishop’s American friend McCarthy is not the only one who holds an inaccurate or negative perception of Lota and Bishop’s union. One Brazilian friend of the couple, Maria Amélia, recognizes that Lota and Bishop share a love between two souls but is in denial about what other friends see as the clearly sexual nature of their relationship. Lota’s other Brazilian friends reject her devotion and attraction to Bishop altogether: “A verdade é que todos tinham ficado abismados quando Lota anunciou que Bishop estava se mudando de mala e cuia para Samambaia. Àquela altura ninguém conseguia atinar com o que será que Lota via naquela americana achacadiça” (49). Lota’s friends’ rejection of Bishop does not likely reflect a concern that Lota is being too generous since they are accustomed to Lota’s care for others and even adoption of wayward children. A more plausible explanation is their combined discomfort with lesbianism and with Bishop’s nationality. If this is so, they sublimate and overcompensate for their aversion to lesbianism via an inflated rejection of Bishop’s writing and her nationality. When Bishop discovers a journalist’s scathing review, “Paternalism and Anti-Americanism,” criticizing an article she had written, she notices that everyone is treating her strangely. In the article, she is accused of portraying a Brazil that was eager for the paternalistic aid of the United States. Bishop herself blames the American publication The New York Times Magazine, whose choice of photos to accompany the article emphasized Brazil’s underdevelopment and whose edi- tors chose a title that was not her own. The growing rejection of Bishop stems from insults about her writing and her American tourist ignorance to blaming her for Lota’s eventual suicide after

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battling depression: “Quando voltou ao Brasil, foi recebida como uma condenada. Arrasados com a morte de Lota, todos agiam como se ela não estivesse arrasada. Como se não tivesse o direito de estar. Resistiram a que pegasse as coisas que havia juntado durante quinze anos, como se fosse um larápio” (211). The book resists providing the reader with a clear delineation between a rejection predicated on Bishop’s nationality and one based upon Bishop’s sexuality. While one might understand why Lota’s friends would be wary of Bishop for being a troublesome alcoholic, the intensity of their rejection, which includes making her a scapegoat for Lota’s suicide, is more difficult to explain. As previously mentioned, even those who acknowledge the strong love shared between Lota and Bishop have difficulty acknowledging the physical nature of that love, and hence it is likely that this overwhelming rejection of Bishop might also be fueled by homophobia. Although Bishop and Lota both share a deep interest in Brazil, the differences in their focus produce tensions between them. Bishop’s poems depict Brazilian nature, and she writes contently from the mountain home that she shares with Lota in Samambaia. Bishop’s love of Lota is intimately tied to this place, and at one point, when her relationship with Lota has taken a turn for the worse (Bishop’s alcoholism and Lota’s addition to work cause tension in their relationship), the narrator explains that Bishop misses the Lota of Samambaia: “Sentia muita saudade de Lota. Da Lota de Samambaia” (159). Lota, on the other hand, is drawn toward the city and dedicates all her energies to what many perceive as a new era in Brazil, at a time when the country has recently moved the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia. Lota begins to design a metropolitan park in the new state of Guanabara, drawing from several international sources of influence as part of Brazil’s aim to show the world its new modernized self. When speaking to the first governor of Guanabara about her plans for the park, Lota draws on the appeal of the cultural icon of Central Park in the United States to make her point: “Dê-me este aterro. Vou fazer ali um Central Park” (79). Bishop, a poet from the United States, is interested in representing what is autochthonous to Brazil and sharing its exotic

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qualities with an American audience while Lota is a Brazilian architect whose interest is to modernize Brazil and show that modern image to the First World. The two women’s work pulls in opposite directions yet both are dedicated to Brazil and want to share it with non-Brazilians. Both national and personal expressions interweave in their creative works; Lota designs writing spaces for Elizabeth that highlight the Brazilian landscape, and Elizabeth’s poetry finds the Brazilian night sky in Lota’s hair:

Para onde acorrem em luzente formação essas estrelas cadentes em teu cabelo negro, tão retilíneas, tão prematuras? —Vem, deixa-me lavá-lo nesta bacia estanhada, cintilante e gasta como a lua. (40)

Lota and Bishop make a home of their own design out of Brazil and out of one another despite the negative views of others and a troubled past. Early on in their lives, both women had experienced a disruption in their sense of home: Lota’s father was a political exile; Bishop’s father died, and her mother was permanently insti- tutionalized. Together, these two women try to make a space where they feel welcome, a sense of home. In this narrative, the lesbian relationship is figured as an alliance, albeit sometimes troubled, between women from different nations striving to create a space where their sexuality is accepted and where the limits of national identity are challenged. Though Bishop attempts to address what is unique about Brazil through her exoticizing poetry, and Lota strives to show what Brazil has in common with the rest of the modernized world, both women contest discourses of authenticity. Bishop’s extreme love of Brazil would seem to suggest that she is more than a typical tourist, and a reporter notes: “Contudo, voltará ao Brasil, pois nenhum país exerce maior sedução sobre seu espírito” (69). Despite the obvious nature of Bishop’s love for Brazil, many of Lota’s friends and writers in Brazilian newspapers question the ability of her poems to capture

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accurately Brazilian life. Lota’s European education, international tastes, and great love of European fineries do not prevent her from being a nationalist, profoundly invested in the future of her country, the current state of its government, and the daily life of its citizens. Lota is insulted by the way that nationalism is brandished before her as a pretense to thwart her ideas: “Lota achava uma burrice, disfarçada sob o estandarte do nacionalismo, que o Estado gastasse uma fortuna por rejeitar soluções internacionais” (97). Lota’s interest in international solutions to the problems she encounters while working on the aterro, such as the tetrapods used at the beaches at Cannes to keep water off the land, are unjustly categorized as anti-nationalist. To judge a Third World nation’s interest in the technologies of the First World as a sign of anti- nationalism is a view that depicts Brazil as a mere colony, something that Lota intuitively understands. According to Oswald Andrade in his essay on Brazilian nationalism, Anthropophagite Manifesto, Brazilian culture, rather than maintaining an absolute distance from what might otherwise be considered foreign, not only favors contact with other cultures but also thrives on ingesting them and then turning them upside down. He asserts that Brazil’s originality derives from its ability to devour all things European. Though Lota’s projects do not exemplify this type of active cannibalism, they do underscore a Brazilian stance that works with, but is not slavish toward, European influence. Lota dares the Brazilian government to fund the most important illumination of a park in the world, insisting that her international team is the best crew in Brazil. Lota constantly struggles against being relegated to an inferior position, arguing with Brazilian officials that her project should be placed on equal footing with other excellent projects. Her work compan- ion, Bianco, exemplifies the many ways that she is belittled in his perception that Lota, as a “South American Indian,” should feel lucky to be the friend of an illustrious “First World” poet: “Lota devia se sentir extremamente gratificada, porque era uma índia sul-americana que encantou furiosamente uma grande poetisa do primeiro mundo” (110). The lesbian connection that Lota and Bishop share resists positioning one woman in obvious ascendancy

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over the other. Bishop’s feelings for Lota cannot be reduced to that of an American exercising an exotic fantasy with a South American. After all, Lota’s close ties with European culture are something that strongly attracts Bishop. Moreover, instead of kowtowing to Bishop, Lota actively pursues and ingests her desire for the great poet whom she nicknames “Cookie.”

1.3 Competing Nationalisms: Lesbian and Catalan Identity

When did we become a people? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others? Edward Said, After the Last Sky

Ricardo Llamas and Fefa Vila describe the inception of the Spanish State as “an imposed union of several peoples, traditions, and cultures, under the shadow of an authoritarian, religiously based monarchy symbolically incarnated by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs” (214). Centuries later, the constitution of the Second Spanish Republic would grant Spain’s regions the right to autonomy. The outcome of the ensuing Civil War, however, resulted in the fierce repression of plurality in Spain during General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and a national rhetoric emerged to purify Spain of any supposed “abnormalities.” In order to suppress competing nationalisms, the regime enacted measures against, among other things, regional dialects and languages. Franco’s regime, as part of the process of reinforcing traditional Spanish values, codified homophobia in several laws, e.g., the 1954 reform of the 1933 Ley de Vagos y Maleantes and the Ley de Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social approved in 1970. After 1954, the State sent many homosexual men, especially those of the lower classes whose families did not influence the court system, to prisons, and the practice of sending lesbians to mental hospitals continued (Arnalte 101, 104). Sam Pryke argues in his article “Nationalism and sexuality, what are the issues?” that both national conflict and

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nation-building are associated with particularly sharp control of deviant sexual practices in order to insure the “well-being” of the nation (539-40). The infamous assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca by Spanish nationalists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the aforementioned laws, and the confinement of many homosexuals to jail or mental institutions during Franco’s dictatorship corroborate Pryke’s assertion. Born in Barcelona in 1955 during Franco’s reign, lesbian novelist Isabel Franc demonstrates in her writing a clear valorization of freedom of expression and thought. In her article “Queer Books Bloom in Spain,” Tatiana de la Tierra quotes Franc as saying:

My generation was robbed of words. During the Franco years, everything was black and white. No colors. Everything was mediated by moral repression and guilt for what you say and think. When your hands are tied, you want freedom from oppression. I wanted to find words, to ask questions, to have a dialogue with the word.

Two years after Franco’s death, Barcelona was host to the first Gay Pride demonstration in Spain and Franc was among the partici- pants. Today there are many Catalan women that represent lesbian desire in novels, poetry, and film.1 Franc is the author of several lesbian novels, including Entre todas las mujeres (1992), a finalist of the 1992Sonrisa Vertical award for erotic narrative, and No me llames cariño (2004), winner of the Shangay award for best book of the year of a gay/lesbian theme in 2005. Con pedigree (1997), written under the pseudonym Lola Van Guardia, is the first novel in a popular trilogy that includesPlumas de doble filo(1999) and La mansión de las tríbadas (2002). The novel originally carried the subtitle “Culebrón lésbico por entregas,” which was later removed. When interviewed by Revista Nois, Franc explained the reason for the removal of the subtitle, listing the chapters as serialized installations, and her use of a pseudonym:

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Tuvo que sacarse [el subtítulo] porque algunas librerías no aceptaban el libro, al igual.[…] Cuando las chicas de editorial Egales me ofrecieron colaborar con ellas surgió Con pedrigree (Culebrón lésbico por entregas) pues pretendíamos que fuesen una especie de fascículos quincenales o mensuales que, como las antiguas novelas por entregas, luego pudiesen encuadernarse y para preservar la identidad de la autora y evitar que la acosasen con preguntas sobre lo que sucedería en próximas entregas se optó por firmarla con seudónimo y éste ha servido durante estos años para que se especulase sobre quién era el autor o la autora de la serie. (23)

According to Franc, both the removal of the subtitle containing the word lesbian and her use of a pseudonym were guided by marketing concerns, the former due to prejudice on the part of some bookstores and the latter to create a sense of intrigue. Though Franc does not declare that her use of what is obviously a pseudonym was for fear of others labeling her a lesbian, the readers of her trilogy may have held this interpretation. Franc’s play with identity continues in her other works; both Isabel Franc (only part of the writer’s full legal name) and her pseudonym, Lola Van Guardia, appear as authors that collaborated in writing No me llames cariño and Cuentos y fábulas de Lola Van Guardia (2008). While the Francoist Spain of Isabel’s childhood pushed for the identification and isolation of sexual dissidents, this free play with identity runs counter to an imperative to identify one’s “true” self. Questions of identity and representation are also present in Con pedigree. The novel hinges upon three characters who meet in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an American resort town well known for its gay and lesbian community. The three women share a dream of opening a nightclub by the shore of the Mediterranean after Spain’s transition to democracy. Gina, a Nuyorican from Manhattan, Karina, the descendent of a family from Montsià in southern Catalonia, and Cecilia, from Valladolid, the capital of Castilla-León, differ in their national and regional backgrounds yet share an interest in Spain’s culture and its future. The bar that

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they eventually open is symbolic of Spain’s transformation into a nation that embraces democratic freedoms after having withstood decades of dictatorship. From the beginning of the novel, lesbian public space in Spain is linked with the United States, given that the characters envision their dream of a Spanish lesbian nightclub from Provincetown, where they met decades earlier. Though the United States starts in the novel as an idealized democratic space to be openly gay and lesbian and from which a dream of bourgeois capitalist expansion is exported, it is later problematized. The international bonds and battles inCon pedigree are multiple and provide a variety of scenarios in which nationalisms and sexualities are connected and juxtaposed. In contrast to other Spanish lesbian novels that involve international ties and border crossings, (e.g., La mancha de la mora (1997) by Dolores Soler-Espiauba, Ámame (2002) by Illy Nes, and Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) by Carmen Nestares) the movement of characters in Con pedigree occurs predominantly within isolated gay and lesbian environments, such as Provincetown, and various lesbian and bisexual locales in Spain. The novel establishes an international element through border crossings between Spain, Provincetown, and what I argue develops as the symbolic border separating a Lesbian quasi-Nation and the Spanish State. Sustaining an international flavor, the novel’s characters represent several countries, such as the American character Gina, one of the three women who open the bar, some German patrons, a Belgium woman who is a member of GLUP (Grupo de Lesbianas Unidas y Pioneras), and the complicated “international” relationship between Spaniards and Catalans. Some particularities of Spanish and Catalan nationalisms arise once the humorously sonorous group of three, Gina, Katrina, and Cecilia, decide to name their new bar Gay Night. Using English in the title of a gay and lesbian bar in Catalonia is in part understand- able given the historical importance of Stonewall, which is often cited as the origin of a global gay rights movement. The characters disagree, however, about the meaning and appropriateness of the word gay in a Spanish context. Any global movement’s ability to represent multiple cultural specificities is difficult if not impos-

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sible: “Within the context of transnational cultural, economic, and political exchanges, monolithic constructions and prescriptions are doomed to failure. What do we mean when we say ‘gay’ in a world where hybridity and syncretism provide the grist for cultural production, distribution and consumption?” (Manalasan 420).2 Some patrons of Gay Night are quick to express their dislike of the choice of the word in the name of the new bar. According to co-owner Cecilia, the club is open to everyone, including men, and so she fails to understand her patron Amelia’s complaint that only using gay is sexist and discriminates against lesbians: “debería llamarse Gay-Lesbi Night, o mejor todavía, solamente Lesbi Night” (11). Co-owner Katrina explains that in the United States gay is used to refer to both men and women, to which Amelia (leader of GLUP) replies, underscoring the uniqueness of Barcelona, if not Spain, “Pues aquí funcionamos diferente, mona, entérate y vete haciendo a la idea” (11). Van Guardia’s trilogy emphasizes women instead of men in its representation of Barcelona, and this emphasis extends beyond Amelia’s semantic argument: “Van Guardia’s tongue-in- cheek lesbian culebrones adhere to a lesbian-utopian aesthetic of only admitting female characters, from the fontanera to the juezas to the diputadas and ministras, which serves to underscore the current invisibility or even absence of women, particularly lesbians, in numerous fields” (Vosburg 26). For Amelia, the United States does not possess an authority greater than that of Spain or Catalonia to determine the legitimate use of language, whether it refers to gender or sexuality. Though her argument is specifically directed to sexual identity politics, it reinforces a broader stance of local and national autonomy in relation to American cultural hegemony. Language, representation, and identity are debated in Con pedigree along Catalan national lines as well. Katrina’s own sense of local patriotism, while absent during the discussion about the meaning of gay, surfaces when an unnamed patron notes that Night in Gay Night should be Nit since they are in Catalonia: “Ves, en eso encuentro que tiene razón. Habría que hacer patria” (12). Using Catalan instead of English in the title of the bar would be a gesture that would simultaneously counter the vestiges of Franco’s

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regime and its repression of Catalan culture and language and place Catalonia, instead of the United States, in a symbolic position of embracing new democratic freedoms in Spain.3 Cecilia challenges Karina’s insistence on fet diferencial, or a differencing factor that underscores Catalan cultural specificity, by upholding her region’s approach to language and identity politics: “¡Ah, hija! Pues en Valladolid no ponen tantas pegas” (12). In Spain, regional patriotism has often trumped national patriotism. Pitting Castilla-León (Valladolid being its capital) against Catalonia mirrors historical tensions between these two regions. During the Civil War Franco’s nationalist government had its seat in the region of Castilla-León and the Republicans maintained a strong grip on Catalonia. Cecilia and Karina’s argument is one of several satirical moments in the novel in which characters reenact, through their debates about sexual identity and language, the very types of prejudices and divisions revolving around national identity typical of the Franco regime. Con pedigree also prefigures recent debates over the topics of nationality and sovereignty surrounding the new Estatut d’autonomia de Catalunya. While some characters of Con pedigree formulate difference as absolute and advocate for political separatism, others make political and sexual connections across differences. Since the book takes places during the transition to democracy, the way that the characters deal with differences between themselves and others stands in contrast to Franco’s violent exclusion of certain cultural groups or runs the risk of mimicking it. The novel clearly uses humor to criticize the projects of some of the militant political groups’ desires to make Gay Night a more exclusive locale. In her characteristi- cally humorous style, Franc gives the sonorous name Rita Padilla to the founder of LA (Lesbianas Autosuficientes) and her partner, the equally singsong, Neus Deus. Both LA and GLUP oppose the title Gay Night, but have different priorities, and instead of working for what they have in common, fight amongst themselves and resort to petty and ridiculous insults: “Rita acabó llamándola enana y miope, acusándola de chupacámara y reprochándole su afán de protagonismo” (28). Con pedigree also parodies the phenomenon

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of political factionalism within the gay and lesbian movement in Catalonia through the novel’s list of political factions: LA, GLUP, ALI (Alegría Lesbiana Independiente), RadiGays, and one “histórica del feminismo,” Lola Portalón (12). It should be mentioned that this list is short in comparison to actual groups in Catalonia: Associació de Gais i Lesbianes de Badalona (AGIL), Asociación de Transexuales e Intersexuales de Catalunya (ATC-LIBERTAD), DONA MÉS DONA, Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC), Grup d’Amics Gais (GAG), and Joves per a l’Alliberament Lèsbic i Gai (JALG), just to name a few. The divisions and factionalism in this fictional representation of the gay and lesbian community are also present in the real world. The Gay Pride parade in Barcelona has been the occasion for heated debates over whether or not nightclubs and other locales should be allowed to have floats in the parade, as some fear the promotion of commercialism and lighthearted play at the expense of political protest. For example, in 2004 the political group Lesbianes Feministes posted a flyer in protest of the normalization and lack of political commitment of gays and lesbians living in the wealthy gay zone known as “Gaixample.” 4 Con pedigree’s use of humor encourages self-critique within the gay and lesbian movement but avoids the promotion of totalizing gestures of exclusion that are typical of nationalism. Just as language is a central point of adhesion for nations, so the novel’s character Amelia is concerned with language’s ability to reflect how she understands lesbian sexuality. In addition to the aforementioned concern about the use and meaning of the term gay, she argues against favoring masculinity as the general case in linguistic terms:

—Y a cuestiones lingüísticas—recalcó Amelia—. Son muchos siglos de aguantar el genérico en masculino. —Pero tenemos que estar unidos...—inició Cecilia. —Y unidas—puntualizó la líder. (12)

The narrator is complicit with this feminization of the general case in language and explicitly addresses the audience of Con pedigree as

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“las lectoras” (159). This preference for using the assumed gender of the majority of the readers rather than the traditional use of the masculine, even if only one man is present in a sea of women, reflects Franc’s own linguistic preferences as expressed in her creative essay “Por un centímetro de testículo.” The novel’s use of language draws the reader’s attention to gender inequalities and raises the issue of how to cease the ostracism of women without invoking a new set of hierarchical exclusions. Con pedigree depicts two distinct approaches to the negotiation of difference and identity. While some characters work to dissolve or transverse the differences between themselves and other women, other characters enact new exclusionary measures between women. In her role as the leader of GLUP, Amelia argues for lesbian separatism and distance from heterosexual males and anyone who might be bisexual. The politics of GLUP are evocative of Jill Johnston’s work Lesbian Nation, in which she supports a separatist politics based on the idea that a woman can never be equal in relationship with a man. The narrative encourages readers to question Amelia’s promotion of unification, showing that her political agenda eventually alienates women from each other more than it unifies them. National rhetoric sometimes turns to the idea of a national essence, and so too does the rhetoric of the characters when they debate the essence of lesbian. What makes a lesbian territory truly “lesbian” is for some characters a matter of whether or not true lesbian bodies, and only true lesbian bodies, are present there. Con pedigree’s satirical element revolves around the way that characters try to overcome the perpetuation of the underpinnings of Franco’s nationalist movement by actually mimicking a similar enforcement of unity. Con pedigree formulates the lesbian body as an extension of national territory, and a battle ensues over whether or not, and how, national bodies might be marked and identified. A Belgian, Madelaine Letournedo (also a member of GLUP), proposes the initiation of a campaign to purify lesbians through the creation of an identity card, evoking Spanish national identity cards. Madelaine makes reference to the so-called “gay gene,” Xq28, discovered in the United States and enthusiastically endorses the idea of doing

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genetic testing as a way of validating who should have a card and who should be denied one: “Si la información biográfica no fuera fiable, cabía la posibilidad de realizar una prueba genética que, aseguró, estaba muy desarrollada en su país, su realización era sencilla, limpia y en absoluto dolorosa” (194). National and sexual purity are woven together, and as GLUP expresses its concern for sexual pedigree the narrator indicates that Amelia rules as if ruling a nation: “Amelia apoyó la propuesta con aire presidencial” (194). The group’s project to standardize and systematize lesbian sexuality in order to insure its purity ironically mirrors the regularization of sexuality and proliferation of sexual discourse associated with heteronormativity. By depicting lesbians as the initiators of a campaign for sexual purity, Con pedigree signals that the important question is not who has power but rather how that power is employed and at what expense. The novel portrays a dialectical process in which a marginal group enacts the same principles of exclusion that led to its own marginal status. Both the silencing and criminalization of homosexuality under the Franco regime, which the owners of Gay Night had escaped when they met in Provincetown, and the alienation and social exclusion of some self-identified lesbians by other self- identified lesbians inCon pedigree, involve power relations in which one group is categorically delegitimized by another’s essentialist discourse. In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick signals the injustice of this kind of power relation: “To alienate conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seizure” (26). Con pedigree’s comic reversal of oppressed and oppressor indicates the potentially damaging effects of discourses of essentialism and purity on either side of the center/margin binary, whether tied to nationalism or to sexuality. Novelist and essayist Emma Pérez, however, stresses the utility of essentialism in spite of its logical inconsistencies or potential harm. Speaking of the importance of essentialism to her Chicana lesbian identity, she insists that marginalized groups sometimes benefit from strategic essentialism or “practiced resistance against dominant

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ideologies that silence and/or model marginalized groups” (105). On the one hand, Con pedigree would appear to support Amelia’s politics of lesbian essentialism as her challenge to the bar’s title Gay Night can be read as resisting years of male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality.5 On the other hand, the novel resists a positive portrayal of Amelia’s politics when she and GLUP propose the use of the carné. Amelia and GLUP treat heterosexuals as radical others that reify the limit and boundaries of lesbian identity, and they define heterosexuals spatially as invaders of some purified homosexual zones. Cecilia, speaking to Amelia says,

—Este es un local gay, está abierto a todos y a todas. —Ya vale que lo sea— replicó Amelia—y que entren tíos (que habría mucho que discutir, por esa parte), pero que encima nos invadan los heteros me parece una vergüenza. (182)

Gina also suggests the radical otherness of heterosexuals in her reaction to Nati’s assertion that seducing some heteros would be fun. She ironically uses the language of the Catholic Church to insist that this idea of Nati’s is blasphemy: “Eso es un blasfemia” (182). An unnamed lesbian militant ironically imitates Franco’s homophobic rhetoric with its emphasis on sickness and criminality when she says that heterosexuals dirty the atmosphere: “Sabemos de buena tinta que en este establecimiento acosan las hordas heterosexuales y ensu- cian con su presencia la salud del ambiente” (182). It is clear that the purpose of the carné is not to solidify ties between women that love other women. The scene of Candi’s confession when she admits that she has slept with a man once in her life illustrates this: “Todas las miradas se centraron en la atribulada Candi que observaba en derredor como acosada por un tribunal de la Inquisición” (244). The tensions in the novel over identity politics suggest that essentialist constructs of identity—a positivist essential lesbian identity in this case—are equally hurtful whether instituted by marginalized or dominant groups. Epps notes that essentialism is particularly problematic in the context of homosexuality: “[…] la esencialización y

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la naturalización de la identidad y la experiencia es especialmente compleja en el caso de la homosexualidad, ya que las experiencias e identidades en cuestión muchas veces han sido naturalizadas como no naturales e incluso anti-naturales” (“Estados de deseo” 805). The type of exclusion based on biological essentialism that we find in Con pedigree is reminiscent of race based exclusionary practices within nationalisms of the Iberian Península.6 In contrast to the members of GLUP, Nati, a member of ALI (Alegría Lesbiana Independiente), sees the presence of heteros in the bar in a positive light and welcomes the opportunity to show off her powers of seduction: “¡Tope guay, tías—se alegró Nati—con el prestigio que da un hetero en el currículum!” (182). When Remei goes to deliver flyers advertising her catsitting business at local lesbian shops and stores, she does not contest the legitimacy of spaces where bisexuals might be found and goes to “la mensajería Voyvo Lando (donde el 99 por ciento de las trabajadoras entendía y la otra era bisexual)” (92). Adelaida, a writer of lesbian fiction, is also not concerned about the presence of women who identify one way or another. Speaking of the term lesbian she says, “Identifica sólo a quien quiere identificarse con ese término, pero no a todas las mujeres que en algún momento de su vida sienten o han sentido deseo hacia otra mujer” (169). Adelaida further ponders the limitations of terms that connote sexual identity: “¿Quién es lesbiana y quién no lo es? ¿Cuándo podemos decir de una mujer que lo es o no lo es? ¿Podríamos decirlo de alguien que sólo ha tenido relación con otra mujer una vez en su vida? Entonces podríamos decirlo también de alguien que no la hubiera tenido nunca pero podría tenerla, y en ese saco entrarían todas ¿o no?” (169). Her concerns are marked by a postmodernist breakdown in metanarratives and singular truths that reinforce the essential identity of subjects. Elizabeth Grosz’ argument in Space, Time, and Perversion in favor of different ways of seeing lesbian relations reflects Adelaida’s concerns:

Becoming-lesbian, if I can put it that way, is thus no longer or not simply a question of being-lesbian, of identifying with that being known as a lesbian, of residing in a position or identity;

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the question is not am I—or are you—a lesbian, but rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of sexuality we invest ourselves in, with what other kinds of bodies, and to what effects? (184)

Eventually Karina, the woman with whom Adelaida is in love and who calls herself a heterosexual, falls in love with Adelaida and identifies herself as a lesbian. The novel further underscores that it is problematic to speak of sexuality in static and fixed terms when Dorotea, who constantly reminds her lesbian friends that she is “hetero y muy hetero,” ends up taking a lesbian lover (208). If GLUP establishes a type of lesbian nation via harsh exclusions, these other examples show women of different “nations” (hetero/homo) coming together via shared pleasures and sexual desire. Pleasure also traverses national boundaries when, during the national celebration of the New Year, Gabi and Candi take two German women back to Gabi’s home: “Pero Gabi quiso dejar el pabellón nacional muy alto y hacerle a su contrincante una demostración de las especialidades meridionales. Le habían dicho que las nórdicas eran rígidas y que se volvían locas con el nervio y salero de las íberas” (129). Although reinforcing stereotypes of the cold German and hot Spaniard, this description of female sexuality stands in sharp contrast to the relegation of female sexuality to procreation and the home under Franco’s strongly pro-Catholic regime and opens itself up to transnational connections. Lesbian desire crosses national boundaries and promotes connections across differences through Adelaida, described as “la gran diva de las letras lésbicas” (7). Her writing forms part of a transnational genre of lesbian writing with other authors that she mentions such as Patricia Highsmith, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras. Mention of these writers signals women’s transnational participation in literary traditions and their struggle to access the symbolic realm that determines the cultural imagination of a nation. Con pedigree’s mention of lesbian literature is of course self-referential and in choosing to write the novel in entregas like many nineteenth-century novels, Franc inserts lesbian literature and female authorship, via

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this anachronistic gesture, into the Spanish literary tradition. In Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction, what Josep-Anton Fernández’ claims about the Catalan writer Terenci Moix can also be said of Franc: “The representation of homosexual desire in his texts destabilizes national identity, in the sense that it reveals that Catalonia, a subordinate minority, also contains a marginalized minority within its boundaries, thus compelling us to read differences within these boundaries” (102). Franc’s novel encourages us to read differences not only within Spain’s boundaries but within Catalonia and the lesbian community as well. Adelaida’s writing, viewed as part of a contemporary set of female writers, is also put into a genealogical relationship with the Greek poetess Sappho, often remembered as a lover of women, when Adelaida hears of the realization of her dream of having “sus textos impresos en la lengua de Safo” (23). Adelaida’s novels offer a positive counterbalance to the most common representation of lesbians:

Adelaida Duarte había transgredido todos los tópicos del género lésbico al presentar personajes de lesbianas que no eran ni psicópatas ni pobres desgraciadas ni heridas ni amar- gadas—aunque ella misma no era precisamente la modelo en la que se inspiraba—ni tampoco marimachos o camioneras. Eran mujeres normales y corrientes que, como reza el eslogan, amaban a otras mujeres. (21)

In presenting her characters in this manner, Adelaida represents lesbians outside of the realm of pathology, countering homophobic rhetoric. Con pedigree also challenges two key institutions of the nation- state: family and matrimony. The novel puts an ironic twist on a common scenario in many lesbian novels in which a lesbian or bisexual daughter in an otherwise heterosexual family comes out and is rejected or hides her desire for another woman in order not to be disowned by her family (e.g., El cielo en tus manos (2003), Venus en Buenos Aires, Dos mujeres). In Con pedigree, a daughter of

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a Spanish lesbian mother living in the United States, Karina, acts as if she is a lesbian so as not to upset her mother until one day when her mother catches her in bed with a man and disinherits her and says of her daughter, “preferiría monja que heterosexual” (271). Adelaida offers to help Karina “regenerarse” and begins to kiss her (272). The ending, in which Karina’s mother is happy to see her daughter “convertida,” is humorous but also biting in its satire (276). The mother’s cruel treatment of her daughter when she finds out that she has been with a man is not unlike the cruelty of heterosexual parents in many novels (and reality) who reject their daughters for being with women. Karina’s untraditional upbring- ing conserves the traditional role of the family in the legitimation of sexual identity and indicates the perpetuation of the center in the margin. In 1995, Anny Brooksbank Jones observed an increase in gays and lesbians seeking family status:

Despite gradual politico-juridical recognition of a European trend towards non-traditional households it can be difficult to communicate with the Spanish state except as a member of a family. As a result, many such unions, including growing num- bers of lesbian and gay couples, are demanding family status in the public as well as the private sphere—that is, for legal and economic motives (including pension and inheritance rights) as well as reasons of affectivity and intimacy. (390)

The demand on the part of non-traditional households for family status has been overshadowed by a demand that the traditional institution of marriage legitimate non-traditional unions, conflat- ing family status and martial status. Con pedigree, which addresses same-sex marriage prior to its legalization in Spain, depicts two of its characters, Nati and Estela, as they hold their own marriage ceremony in their “territory,” Gay Night.7 The inclusion of a black and white photo of Antoni Guadí’s Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Expiatory Temple of the Sacred Family) on the page opposite Nati and Estela’s decision to hold their own marriage

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ceremony offers up a new reading of the “sacred Spanish family” and how it is represented by this national symbol.8 Holding the marriage ceremony in Gay Night further establishes the bar as a space of sovereignty. As with most else in Con pedigree, the marriage ceremony also falls under scrutiny and Adelaida finds it “un poco empalagoso” (274). The novel urges readers not to take the ceremony too seriously since the nuptial song is a song by the Spice Girls. On the other hand, the marriage ceremony provides a contrast to the carné for it resists the limitations of state institutions without explicitly alienating other women. Con pedigree reinforces skepticism of social practices that favor institutions and identities over human connections.

1.4 Latina Lesbians and Transnational Negotiations of Sexuality

“there are no more Puerto Ricans in Boriquen” Miguel Algarín

In her essay, “Chicana Lesbians: Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community,” Carla Trujillo underscores the fundamental necessity for Latina lesbians to confront their sexuality before they can confront their lesbianism. She explains that, for Latinas who are raised to be passive in relation to men in a culture of machismo, coming out as a lesbian requires a confrontation of taboos, ignorance, and self-hatred surrounding the female body (a task for many non-Latinas as well). Latina lesbians are a minority within a minority that is also beset by complex issues of identity, as Román de la Campa explains:

The implicit opacity of the Latino category may well constitute one of its most salient features, but, then again, one must begin by recognizing that a bit of equivocation is already present in its morphological relation with the term ‘Latin America,’ given that the latter carries within it a history of multiple referents, imaginaries, and imprecisions. (377)

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Latina lesbians in the United States began to organize politically around their doubly vexed identity as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s, forming organizations such as the Lesbianas Latinas Americanas, founded in Los Angeles in 1978, and Las Buenas Amigas, founded in New York in 1986. Today there is a significant amount of literature by and about Latina lesbians, many of whom are Chicanas. Some notable anthologies that include works by women living in the United States are Compañeras: Latina Lesbians, edited by Juanita Ramos, and Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories edited by Rosamund Elwin. Transnationalism is implicit in the identity category “Latina” when it is used to refer to someone of Latin American descent living in the United States. The meaning of the term extends beyond the specific national boundaries of any one nation in Latin America and can be used to refer to people who have crossed national borders through immigration. For Latina lesbians who were not born in the United States but later moved there, social identification often involves the traversing of multiple cultural boundaries: Latin America/United States; heterosexual/homosexual. One such traversal is the task of Juani Casas, the protagonist of Achy Obejas’ novel Memory Mambo (1996). Juani is a 24-year-old lesbian who left Cuba with her family in 1978 to live in exile in the United States, eventually settling in Chicago. She falls in love with Gina, a Puerto Rican also living in Chicago. Although they are both Latinas living in the United States, Gina and Juani differ in how they relate to their countries of origin, adding a third traversal to the mix: Latin America/United States, heterosexual/homosexual, Puerto Rico/Cuba. Gina constantly fixes her sight on Puerto Rico and its identity in relationship to the mainland United States. Juani, however, does not wrestle with her identity as a Cuban in the United States, and her lack of a strong political commitment to the Cuban Revolution deeply offends Gina. As Memory Mambo progresses, the problematics of sexual identity are explicitly linked with those of national identity. Juani notes that for Gina, “being a public lesbian somehow detracted from her puertorriqueñismo” (78). Gina explains her stance to Juani saying,

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“ ‘That’s so white, this whole business ofsexual identity,’ she’d say, while undoing my pants. ‘But you Cubans, you think you’re white’ ” (78). Here, by “you Cubans,” she means Cuban Americans like Juani and her family that fled revolutionary Cuba, and lesbian becomes something white, something of the United States and the colonizer. Gina’s argument that fighting for gay liberation is done at the expense of fighting for national liberation reflects the moral stance taken up by the Cuban revolutionary regime at its outset:

Above all, there was a desire to recuperate the national dig- nity, which was felt to have been lost under Batista as Havana became ever more a playground for American gangsters and “decadent” tourists […] . In fact, one of the first programs of the revolutionary government was to train female prostitutes as seamstresses. Its main publicly stated objective was to offer the women alternative employment, but there was also a moralistic desire to make them “decent” women. Many Cubans felt the same way about homosexuals, particularly ostentatious maricones and locas—that is, that they should be socially redeemed and turned into “real” men. (Lumsden 57-58)

Gina appears unable to imagine a model for gay liberation that would not by extension promote American cultural imperialism, leaving Juani little room to discuss the extent to which her sexuality, although perhaps not the cause of her alienation, is a part of it. Gina’s insistence that gay identity functions as an extension of American imperialism is a political stance that is also evident in Elías Miguel Muñoz’ novel, The Greatest Performance (1991).9 Both Memory Mambo and The Greatest Performanceposit lesbian identity outside of Cuba’s national borders:

The lovely Rosita, ex-Cuban refugee recently-made US citizen, is cooking dinner for her lover. She was too much of a grown- up when she came to the Promised Land, too old to become a true Gringa, too young to embody the Guantanamera myth. The lovely Rosita confessed to herself, one glorious and liber-

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ating day, that she was a lesbian. She broke out of her Cuban closet and invaded the Night of American Pleasures. Finally free. (116-17)

The narrative aligns Rosita’s lesbian identity with American consumerism: she claims her new identity during her relationship with a woman named Joan who makes commercials targeting the “gold mine” of Hispanic consumers while trying to rid Rosita of her Cuban accent and habit of eating fatty Cuban foods (115). The novel’s preoccupation with performance, as evidenced in its title, prevents the reader from accepting Rosita’s proclamation of hap- piness at her newfound membership in the “advanced universe” as anything but a sort of fiction that she is invested in living out (118). Her pride in having left behind her ties to Cuba and her “trashy memories of underdevelopment” is coupled with an irresistible urge to listen on the sly to the music of Raphael or Manzanero that remind her of her life on the island (116). The narrative portrays an uncomfortable scenario in which Rosita seems unable to enjoy her sexuality without having to hide and negate another central aspect of her subjectivity, her cubanidad. The antagonistic relationship between national identity and lesbian identity that is narrated in Memory Mambo and The Greatest Performance is also established and eventually challenged in the film Brincando el charco (1994), written and directed by Frances Negrón-Muntaner. The title refers to the rite of passage of many Puerto Ricans who come to live in the United States. The film mixes fiction and documentary as it depicts a lesbian relationship between two women living in Philadelphia: Ana, born in the mainland United States and of Puerto Rican descent, and Claudia, born in Puerto Rico. While Claudia is interested in the question of Puerto Rican nationality, Ana is involved in the creation of a Latino dis- trict, and Claudia’s lack of interest in her endeavors creates tension in their relationship. The director of the film, Negrón-Muntaner, plays the role of Claudia, the protagonist, who leaves her Puerto Rican home to live in the mainland when her father physically and verbally assaults her for being in love with a woman named

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Maritza. Claudia’s lesbianism and her father’s puertorriqueñismo are incompatible, and her father specifically frames the “offense” of her lesbianism in nationalist terms, as an offense against the precious work of raising a female Puerto Rican: “Con el trabajo y el sacrificio que da crear una muchacha en este país,‘¡y tú me pagas con esto!’”. Claudia moves to the mainland United States only to find that as a Spanish-speaking Latina coming to terms with hundreds of years of colonialism she is, in her words, “a partial stranger everywhere and anywhere.” Although the unity implied by the myth of national identity conflicts with her experience of being an outsider, she still finds it appealing, saying, “Yet on certain occasions I am seduced into seeing us, failing to see anything else. That is when I must point my lens elsewhere. To look for what escapes the ‘us’ in nosotros.” For Claudia, being seduced by “us” implies risking the critical distance that is necessary for understanding the nature of her marginalization. Through her work as a photographer and documentary film- maker, Claudia creatively confronts the conditions of her alienation as a lesbian Puerto Rican woman. Pouring pinto and black beans into a blender, she remarks that she has no pure blood and cannot afford purity. Her work with images exposes the mythic nature of democracy and equality in the mainland United States and Puerto Rico through an examination of race. As part of her current video project, Claudia films a Puerto Rican woman voicing her frustration at the fact that in the mainland United States some African Americans cease to think of her as a “sister” when they hear her speaking Spanish. Claudia notes a similar negation of shared experience among Puerto Ricans living on the island who, despite adopting a rhetoric of equality, betray their prejudice in their language, recalling phrases such as “Marry lighter para mejorar la raza” and “Es negro, pero es buena gente.”10 In addition to questioning the purported unity and equality of Puerto Rican society, Brincando also comments on the divisions of racial identities in the mainland United States. Claudia films a man explaining the limited nature of bureaucratic forms that attempt to document racial diversity by providing respondents with certain categories: Hispanic, Latin

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American, Portuguese, etc. He does not identify with any of these options and pushes the limits of such forms to include himself: “Yo escribo ‘other.’ Que se imaginen.” For this man, resistance and disidentification best reflect his identity. Claudia also addresses the multiple axes of exclusion that solidify “pure” identities when she takes up the topic of female sexuality. She films a woman who argues that the invisibility of lesbian sexuality is an extension of the invisibility of female sexuality. Brincando el charco playfully counters the Freudian configuration of the female body as lack (of a phallus) by showing the words “What a lack” across a black screen followed by a new frame with the words “of imagination.” The viewer then sees two females, one of them Claudia, sexually engaged in a sequence of images filmed in black and white. The scene reifies Claudia’s description of herself as a “body with multiple points of contact.” Black screens interrupt the images of the two women three times, each featuring a different phrase: “¿Qué miras?”/“Don’t look”/“Do it.” These breaks hold the viewer’s gaze at bay, countering traditional cinematic images of female bodies passively viewed. Although easily passing for white, Claudia, as a lesbian, a woman, and a bilingual in the United States, expresses her understanding of the difficult experience of social inequality that unites diverse groups of racial, linguistic, gender, and sexual minorities. While the importance of identity politics for marginalized groups—her claim to a lesbian identity being part of this recognition—Claudia’s work expounds on the negative aspects of identity when it is bound to discourses of homogeneity and purity. Martin Duberman makes a similar argument about the double-edged sword of identity politics:

Yet we hold on to group identity, despite its insufficiencies, because for most non-mainstream people it’s the closest we have ever gotten to having a political home—and voice. Yes, identity politics reduces and simplifies. Yes, it is a kind of prison. But it is also, paradoxically, a haven. It is at once confining and empowering. And in the absence of alternative havens, group

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identity will for many of us continue to be the appropriate site of resistance and the main source of comfort. (5)

The reduction of subjectivity to identitarian terms is problematic for both those in the mainstream and margins. Hence, Claudia’s creative project of hearing voices without havens extends beyond the concerns of minority groups alone. Throughout Brincando el charco, Ana and Claudia’s relationship provides the occasion for understanding discrimination on a larger social scale. Claudia films her girlfriend Ana while the latter explains that because other people never accept her as an insider, as pure, she varies her national identification according to different social contexts: she says that she is from Puerto Rico when she is with gringos and that she is from New York when she is with Puerto Ricans. By doing this, Ana demonstrates that she is both inside and outside of these two identities that are part of a malleable process of social relations. The manipulation of identity and the constructed nature of its (re)presentation are also reflected in the film’s explicit reference to cinematography: Claudia behind the camera, Claudia being photographed by a friend, freeze frames, the incorporation of documentary footage (some of which Claudia filmed herself), the imposition of text during the erotic sequence, etc. Judith Mayne describes what is at stake in such cinematic representations of lesbianism:

Lesbianism raises some crucial questions concerning identification and desire in the cinema, questions with particular relevance to female cinematic authorship. Cinema offers simultaneous affirmation and dissolution of the binary oppositions upon which our most fundamental notions of self and other are based. In feminist film theory, one of the most basic working assumptions has been that in the classical cinema, at least, there is an unproblematic fit between the hierarchies of masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and activity and passivity on the other. If disrupting and disturbing that fit is a major task for filmmakers and theorists, then lesbianism would seem to have

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a strategically important function. For one of the “problems” that lesbianism poses, insofar as representation is concerned, is precisely the fit between paradigms of sex and agency, the alignment of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity. (174)

In its portrayal of lesbianism, Brincando represents women exerting power as agents in relation to sexual desire. Their agency counters what Butler calls in Bodies that Matter the “regulatory norms” of “heterosexual hegemony” (15). I would agree with Butler (Foucault) that such agency does not constitute an external opposition to power. Instead, it represents a disruption but not a clean escape. Claudia also registers concern for the ways in which acts of resistance may reproduce the conditions they seek to subvert; hence, her aversion to purity on either side of racial, sexual, or national divides. Although Claudia’s masculinity disrupts traditional norms of gender and sex that assign masculinity to males alone, her coupling with a more feminine woman seems to replicate the standard heterosexual model (one partner is “feminine,” the other “masculine”). The film reverses this pattern, however, when Claudia goes back to Puerto Rico in heeled pumps and Ana wears Claudia’s bulky leather jacket. Although this more feminine attire seems to suggest that Claudia cannot risk appearing too masculine in Puerto Rico, such a conclusion is complicated by the fact that Claudia also appears “softer” and more typically feminine at a public poetry recital earlier in the film. Just as she is never entirely at home in the mainland United States or in Puerto Rico, Claudia is neither entirely masculine nor feminine; she is able to negotiate codes of gender just as she negotiates national identity. Brincando el charco does not conclude with any definitive resolution to the problematics of identity politics, but it does document the diversity of human subjectivity and the pluralities within a single group. The closing scene that shows Claudia’s plane taking her back to Puerto Rico after her father has died visually depicts this diversity. Filmed in color, the scene contrasts with the black and white footage of Claudia’s father ordering her out of the family

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home. Claudia represents the “true colors” of Puerto Rico, and her return signals an acknowledgement of the diversity of its people. We never see Claudia’s plane arrive in Puerto Rico, and as the title of the film suggests, traveling may be more closely associated with a sense of home than finding a haven. In summary, the lesbian works discussed in this chapter narrate the close relation between nationality, sexuality, and women’s involvement in processes that contest and perform both systems. However, these narratives neither glorify lesbianism nor render lesbian characters free of the exclusions and inequalities that they seek to overturn as they negotiate difference. Whether signaling societal prejudices or promoting self-critique through irony and explicit address, these narratives question the universality and unity of categories of identity. They point toward the problematic relation of nationalism to lesbianism when lesbianism and homosexuality have been treated as anti-nationalist. Finding support and inspiration in lesbian relationships, their characters participate in political debates and actions that promote solidarity at the same time that they question discourses of purity and authenticity, complicating the limits of national and sexual identity.

NOTES 1 For example, Marta Balletbò-Coll, Gloria Bosch, Olga Guirao, Maria Mercè-Marçal, Ana María Moix, Illy Nes, Carme Riera, Montserrat Roig, and Jennifer Quiles. Among Catalan women writers of lesbian desire is Esther Tusquets, born in Barcelona, whose trilogy is commonly regarded as the first substantial account of lesbianism in Spanish narrative. 2 Although a global gay culture may exist, global models can fail to capture national histories and cultural differences. Dennis Altman’s article “On Global Queering” provides further elaboration of this point. 3 Basque nationalism also suffered tremendously under Franco. For a helpful essay on Basque nationalism, its complexities and treatment during that time period, see Heiberg. 4 The Tinker Research Foundation and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities funded the field research that produced this observation.

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5 Coined by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in which she notes that heterosexuality is a violent institution and that its practice is not concerned with the freedom of choice. The term describes the institutionalization of heterosexuality in society and how it is treated as innate, natural, and universal. 6 Spanish nationalism has supported the myth that Visigoth culture continued in the peninsula without interruption and that true Spanish culture stands outside of any Arab influence. For critique of this view see Castro and Alfonso de la Serna. Biological difference has also been stressed within the nationalism of the Basque Nationalist Party. 7 A defiant celebration of lesbian desire in the absence of state sanction also occurs in the film A mi madre le gustan las mujeres (2001) directed by Daniela Fejerman and Inés París. The film depicts a Czech woman who marries a Spanish man so that she can stay in Spain with her female lover, but immediately after the ceremony she turns to kiss her lover in view of all those present. Both this film and Con pedigree mock the sanctity of heterosexual marriage while arguing in favor of lesbians’ right to matrimony. The Spanish government has since legalized same- sex marriage, but not without criticism, such as that of the activists of Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona who argue that the measure works against the interests of citizens who have intimate relationships but are not married. 8 A similar scene occurs in the Spanish film Costa Brava (1995) by director Marta Balletbò-Coll about a lesbian couples’ relationship in which one of the characters speaks of lesbian desire with Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in the background. 9 Although an interest in the work of women writers clearly guides my analyses, I am primarily concerned with the narrative construction of lesbian subjects and have included this work by a male author based on its resonance with the other works described in this section. 10 Cuban American performance artist Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano) also explores the relation between purity, lesbian identity, and racial identity in the short film Your Kunst is Your Waffen (1994).

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Bi’s, Bugas, and Borders in Lesbi Narrative

2.1 Borders, Identity, and the “Bisexual Threat”

oth nationality and sexuality share the myth of fixed and unmovable borders. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson notes the perpetuation of the myth of fixed nationalB borders in the maps of national weather broadcasts that drop off neatly at the border, as if the weather just one mile north were not the same weather. The borders demarcating sexual identities are similarly misleading. Recent debate over the institution of marriage in the United States reaffirms and contests the myth of the absolute and naturally occurring border running along the hetero/homo divide. As an extension of this divide, a tense and sometimes porous border separates “legitimate” gay and lesbian identity from bisexuality. In Hispanic lesbi 1 novels, bisexuality calls into question the borders that limit national and sexual identities. This chapter explores depictions of bisexuality in three Hispanic novels: Margins (1992) by Chicana author Terri de la Peña, La insensata geometría del amor (2001) by the Argentine/Spanish author Susana Guzner, and Amora (1989) by Mexican author Rosamaría Roffiel. Such a comparison across national borders may inadvertently suggest a universal meaning of bisexuality. While this chapter does establish bisexuality as a motif, it does not aim to assign it a universal definition. Bisexuality carries unique implications for the otherwise assumed impervious borders of sexual and national identity and the limit conditions of

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subjectivity that they posit. By examining the specificity of how bisexuality complicates borders in different national contexts, we will be better able to understand the purported function and quality of national and sexual borders, what they demarcate, and the degree to which borders and identity are necessary for nationalisms and sexualities to be intelligible as such. The narration of a character’s first sexual relationship with another woman is common in lesbi novels,2 and perhaps we can expect a developing genre to immerse itself in narratives about beginnings. Characters often express shock or discomfort at what appears to be their own bisexuality as they try to reconcile their attraction to women with a previously assumed heterosexual identity. Hispanic lesbi narratives employ a myriad of techniques to explore the issue of bisexuality: some use humor to reveal the arbi- trary and sometimes senseless rigidity of sexual boundaries, some question the value of these boundaries by depicting their harmful consequences, and others reify sexual boundaries by reaffirming singular definitions and the fixed nature of sexual identity. Terri de la Peña’s Margins depicts characters’ drive toward the affirmation of their “true” sexuality, while other narratives, such as Marta Balletbò-Coll’s filmCosta Brava (1995) and Isabel Franc’s novel Con pedigree (1997), allow for a sense of humor that calls into question the importance of arriving at such a “truth.” In Costa Brava, one of the principal characters, Montserrat, progresses through a series of declarations about her sexual identity throughout the film. At first, she declares that she is not a lesbian. She later affirms that she likes sleeping with her lover Anna although it does not mean that she is a lesbian. As her relationship with Anna continues, Montserrat claims that she is a lesbian but that she can still sleep with men. Finally, she says that she is a lesbian but that it is of no significance. In Con pedigree, the character Dorotea Santos repeatedly declares that she is “hetero y muy hetero” and continues to say this even after falling in love with another woman (208). In these examples in which bisexuality if not explicitly named, the characters’ apparent attraction to both sexes is related to a disruption or lessening of the significance of hetero or homo identification. Despite their varied

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approaches, narratives that explore the border tensions surrounding sexual identity are sometimes preoccupied with bisexuality’s potential to disrupt both sides of the hetero/homo divide. In queer activist culture and the mass media, bisexuals are often portrayed as “deviants (queer among queers?), fickle lovers, psychotic spreaders of disease, closet homosexuals, and betrayers of the queer cause who at any moment can ‘switch sides’ and reap the benefits of a heterosexist culture” (Newitz and Sandell 2). Ann Kaloski Naylor, looking at lesbian fiction written in English, finds that heterosexual feminist literary theory often demonstrates an aversion to bisexuality by ignoring bisexual content, treating bisexuals as “purely symbolic,” and formulating bisexuality as a deconstructive sexuality that is homophobic (61). A recent Spanish novel that vividly depicts the “threat” of bisexuality is Gabriela Bustelo’s Planeta hembra (2001). In this science fiction novel, two homosexual parties divide the planet earth: one of men, el Partido XY, and one of women, el Partido XX. When the otherwise lesbian leader of the XX party has passionate sex with a man, the result is nothing less than global nuclear war and the destruction of the planet. As a theoretical construct, and not as a practice represented in fictional works such asPlaneta hembra, bisexuality is framed as dubious, if not altogether dismissible, an ephemeral mode of desire that has a supposedly fleeting and untenable relationship to space/ time, and therefore, identity. If bisexuality is something more than potential, occupying a space/time and identity that is present and immediate, it can pose a threat to sexualities that predicate themselves on the singular possibility of being either on one side or on the other of the hetero/homo divide. Michael du Plessis argues that framing bisexuality as a universal fantasy is one way of dismissing the political implications of bisexual subjectivity:

If everyone is bisexual, “bisexuality” can no longer be a specific or pertinent feature. At this point a deeply biphobic logic, which may appear as utopianism or nostalgia, emerges, according to which no one would really be bisexual. Or everyone was once bisexual, or will be bisexual in the future, yet no one is

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bisexual here and now. Thus, no one has to take responsibility for bisexual identities, issues, or politics. (30)

In Space, Time, and Perversion Elizabeth Grosz analyzes space/time and subjectivity as historical constructs: “[As] representations of subjectivity changed, so too did representations of space and time. If space is the exteriority of the subject and time its interiority then the ways this exteriority and interiority are theorized will affect notions of space and time” (99). Depictions of bisexuality help us to understand what kinds of subjects theories of space/time posit and what the space/time of different sexualized subjects is in relationship to the mythic space/time of the “nation.” Understanding the space/time of bisexuality depends in part on what type of construction, positive or negative, of bisexuality with which we are working. To start, let us consider the space/time of “fence-sitting” as a negative construct: its space is pointed and uncomfortable and its time is agonizing because eventually the fence-sitter will have to fall to one side. A positive counterpart to this negative formulation of bisexuality, the state of being rooted is a characteristic of someone who embraces commitment, has a strong sense of self, and whose values and beliefs are firm. Being glued to the fence as a bisexual, however, is not a “good” way to be stuck; for a bisexual’s values are purportedly teetering at best, and it seems unlikely that roots would grow down from one’s perch on the fence. If roots lead back to family, then the supposedly constant movement of the bisexual is antithetical to her/his planted nature. In the United States, the old adage, “Get off the fence!,” is quite telling, and everyone wants to know to which “team” one belongs. The bisexual as free agent raises this fear because of her/his potential to be an enemy spy, a traitor to the nation and family. The bisexual, who can “pass” and enjoy the benefits of the heterosexual family home, is not at home with lesbians and gays who form a family (a la gay anthem, “We are family”) based on being exterior to the heterosexual family home. A more positive rendering of bisexuality would permit an appreciation of plurality and multiplicities, a decreased interest in essentialist identity politics, and the possibility for alternative affili-

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ations across various intersections of space/time. In an attempt to realign the position of bisexuals as lesbians’ other, Kaloski Naylor argues that bisexuals occupy some of the same “territory” of lesbians because both take up a position of self in relationship to women (61). This inclusive rendering of lesbian territory implies the possibility of movement within space/time such that lesbian desire is not always in the same place as lesbian identity, and indeed may touch bisexuality. In a similar vein, Grosz’ analytically Deleuzian experiment with lesbian desire mentioned in chapter 1 is more concerned with lesbian connections than with lesbian identity. A bisexual “becoming-lesbian” could then point toward the separation between lesbian identity and lesbian connections (Grosz 184). Rather than position bisexuality in a no-man’s land somewhere between heterosexuality and homosexuality where the only visible gesture is one of “passing,” bisexuality can be theorized as a kind of am(bi)dexterity, with a stress on versatility rather than duplicity. Part of what is a stake in analyzing bisexuality is the assumed split between discourse and the “reality” of identity categories. In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler maintains that identity categories are both politically necessary and risky, owing to their exclusionary force and the implied control that they falsely assert over discourse:

The expectations of self-determination that self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name itself: by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy; by the future efforts to deploy the term against the grain of the current ones, and that will exceed the control of those who seek to set the course of the terms in the present. (Bodies that Matter 228)

Identity categories do not escape discourse and are open to critique regardless of whether or not they are used in support of human rights and freedoms. In a speech titled “Ethical Violence” deliv- ered at Stony Brook University shortly after 9/11, Butler argued

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that to critique one’s nation is not to betray it. I second Butler’s insistence on wrestling critique from a forced position of negativity, treachery, and betrayal. Gender and sexuality theory are not whimsical or narcissistic meanderings into theoretical problems that have nothing to do with the “real world” that identity categories represent. Human sexuality both supersedes and is the product of the discourses that theory engages. The novels analyzed in this chapter respond creatively to the challenge of bisexuality, indicating the profound social and ethnical implications of the identity politics of our age. From them we are able to overcome some of the epistemological constraints on our understanding of sexuality and human bonding.

2.2 The Sexual Politics of Chicana Lesbian Identity: Margins

The tensions surrounding sexual identity are unique for the figure of the bisexual who, unlike heterosexuals and homosexuals, has no clear other, occupying a space that is both “between” and never wholly on one side or the other of binary absolutes. Focusing on the treatment of bisexuality in Terri de la Peña’s Margins provides a way to outline the specific nature and dynamic of the exclusions that the novel depicts. Salvador C. Fernández’s discussion of cultural and sexual discrimination in Margins, which emphasizes the divisions within the Chicano community and the Anglo community’s exclusion of Chicanos, can be furthered by an understanding of the characters’ “biphobia.” Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, for her part, notes that Margins represents bisexuals and closeted lesbians as poor partners. She explains that some of this negative representation is due to the novel’s depiction of lesbianism as innate and therefore as something that ought to be claimed explicitly. Further analysis is needed to understand the novel’s negative representation of women who do not self-identify as lesbians and how bisexuality figures into this negativity. Margins is Terri de la Peña’s first novel and the “first coming- out novel in Chicana literature” (S. Fernández 72).3 In addition to

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belonging to the tradition of Chicana lesbian writing, the novel’s principal character, Veronica Melendez, is a Chicana lesbian writer who references real-life authors of the genre. Speaking of her profes- sor she says, “If Zamora wants Chicana stories from me, that’s what she is getting. Anyhow, beside Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, who else writes about Chicana lesbians nowadays?” (271). Margins tells the story of Veronica (Roni), a graduate student of English at UCLA, who is recovering from the loss of her lover of many years, Joanna, in a car wreck and the realization that she, the driver, sur- vived. Before falling in love with her new soul mate, René, Roni has a brief affair with Siena, a white Italian-American. The plot is driven by the tension produced in love triangles and moves from triangle (the ghost-like presence of Joanna, Roni, Siena) to triangle (Siena, Roni, René), and finally to the healing of the past and a strong relationship between just two women, René and Roni. In the narrative’s trajectory toward a relationship between only two women, race emerges as a factor that separates “real” from “false” unity. Roni is obsessed with brown skin, which she associates with her dead Chicana lover and later with her new lover. The narrative privileges both racial and sexual homogeneity by emphasizing the unique connection that is possible between two lesbian Chicanas and impossible between Roni and an Italian-American bisexual. In establishing a positive valence of brown skin, the narrative also serves as a vindication of a physical characteristic associated with the unjust prejudices toward a racial minority in the United States. Margins persistently addresses the problem of stereotypes and the generalizations that identity categories connote. Stressing that stereotypes based on race are harmful, the novel depicts the police’s assumption that Roni’s nephew is a delinquent because he is a young Chicano male and is out late at night. Roni challenges the idea that all members of a certain gender category are alike and protests that Siena is being sexist when she says that all men are the same. Roni also shows her dismay at the grafting of putative gender divisions onto sexual identities; people often assume that, because she is a lesbian and is not sexually attracted to men, she hates men or that she wants to be a man. She is faced with another

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dichotomy—that of the city and the country—evoked by René who asks whether Roni is too “civilized and citified” to be attracted to a country woman like herself, a “wild woman from El Paso” (166). In response, Roni simply says, “Not much” (166). Although her parents have reservations about Roni’s brother Frank marrying a white woman, Roni argues in favor of their relationship and does not get bogged down in racial differences. Even class differences are surmountable for Roni, who ends up volunteering with René to help low-income women despite the discomfort she experiences in René’s poor neighborhood. Despite all of these examples of trascending supposed boundaries and advocating for making connections in spite of differences, Roni’s attraction to Siena, whose ethnicity and sexuality are different from her own, troubles her. Margins imbues ethnicity, language, and sexuality with national rhetoric. Differences in ethnic and sexual identity are presented as a double bind that keep Roni from attaining a meaningful connection with her own Chicana lesbian identity, an identity that the narrative frames in nationalized terms (as I will show later on). Siena’s attraction to men and now to Roni would seem to suggest that she is bisexual, yet bisexual does not appear as a term in Margins. I read its presence via its constant erasure, since the novel depicts bisexuality as a threat to the implied homogeneity and impermeability of nationalized identities. Unlike Roni, who has never been sexually with a man and is convinced, after some short-term dating of men, that she is only attracted to women, Siena has never been with a woman before Roni and is very attracted to men. During their first sexual encounter, Roni says to Siena that she knows of her “preference for men” (52). Siena quickly counters by saying, “I’ve only been with men” (52). This statement suggests that Siena will prefer (or equally enjoy) being with women, but that she does not know yet owing to her limited experience. Despite Siena’s recurrent, intense, and mutually pleasing sexual encounters with Roni, she is unable to escape being labeled straight by others. While talking with her friend Mich, Roni starts to compare Siena to her deceased lover Joanna, to which Mich replies, “You can’t even compare them. Siena’s white

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and straight—I’m not sure which is the bigger hangup” (86). Roni continues to be surprised by her own attraction to Siena, and not only because it demonstrates that she is finally able to love again after Joanna’s death: “I never expected to be attracted to someone like Siena—I mean, she isn’t a woman of color, doesn’t even call herself a feminist, much less a lesbian” (89). When Roni opposes René’s advances one night in a bar, René remarks, “Are you only into fucking straight white women these days?” (121). In this passage, bisexuality, although not named directly, is treated as being shameful and when Siena hears of René’s behavior toward Roni, she remarks that René is a manipulator, to which Mitch replies, “At least she doesn’t beat around the bush” (139). This derisive remark aimed at Siena’s uncertainty about claiming a lesbian identity is hypocritical, given that Mich has not always been certain about her own sexuality, recently shifting from the idea that she was asexual to professing a lesbian identity. When Frank, Roni’s brother, finds out about Roni’s relationship with Siena and that Siena has only been with men before Roni he asks, “She’s basically straight?”, to which Roni replies, “She was supposed to be married in December” (157). Frank’s conclusion about Siena’s sexuality and Roni’s conclusion that marriage is a final stamp of sexual identity both privilege heterosexuality and ignore bisexuality. Even Roni makes it very difficult for Siena to lay claim to her desire for another woman without coming out of the closet and professing a lesbian identity. Fearing that Roni has told a friend that she is a lesbian, Siena talks with Roni and says: “‘She assumes I’m—’ Siena looked askance. ‘I told her you’re straight. Though how you can justify that by being with me is another story.’” (83). It is clear that Siena’s attraction to men is not the only thing impeding a long-term and deep connection with Roni. Coming out as a lesbian and starting a relationship with another Chicana go hand-in-hand for Roni. The association between race and sexuality comes into focus in a scene where Roni talks with René about her heritage and the latter responds by expressing her surprise that Roni is a third, and not a sixth, generation Chicana. They continue to speak of the difficulties associated with identity, and Roni says:

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—I’m a little sensitive about that—some Chicanas on campus have criticized me for behaving “too white.” —They’ve probably suspected you’re a dyke, so they’ve put you down for being a “coconut”—brown on the outside, white on the inside. (163)

René then sexualizes Roni’s pejoratively “white dyke” insides and turns them red in her mother tongue: “I bet your insides are rojo y sabroso” (163). René can assuage Roni’s insecurity about her bicultural heritage, emphasizing Roni’s Chicana identity, in a way that Siena, being white and Italian, cannot. Roni reports feeling a deeper connection with René due to their shared Chicana identity and her fluency in Spanish increases while she is with René, symbolizing a return to her heritage and distance from the Anglo-American world. Stronger and stronger boundaries emerge as Roni assumes her lesbian Chicana identity. Roni and Siena decide not to see each other any longer as Roni continues to demarcate the limits of her identity. Roni explains that she needs to be in her own lesbian world: “I’m ready to explore the world I belong in—that means meeting and being with other lesbians. It doesn’t mean you and I can’t be friends. I just can’t be with you exclusively anymore—and not at all—sexually” (224). This greater investment in identity categories and coming out runs parallel with the reification of the boundaries of the lesbian world and Chicana nationalism. For Roni, if Siena dates men, it calls into question Siena’s attraction to women: “I haven’t made any commitments—mainly because it’s too soon. Not only that, but Siena doesn’t identify as a lesbian. For all I know, she could start dating men tomorrow” (157). It is assumed that Siena can only claim a lesbian identity or “go back to the straight life” as René predicts that she will (164). I agree with Catrióna Rueda Esquibel’s assertion that the novel “privileges identity over desire” (671). The narrative posits self-identifying as a lesbian as the only way in which female-to-female desire can be legitimated and maintained, and the border-troubling concept of bisexuality is left at the margins.

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Cherríe Moraga’s essay “Queer Aztlán; the Reformation of Chicano Tribe” moves a step beyond the lesbian Chicana space claimed in La Peña’s Margins. Moraga imagines a Chicano nationalism with new connections between nationality and sexuality, more open to diversity, including those related to sexual desire, and less concerned with borders and “othering”: “Chicana lesbians and gay men do not merely seek inclusion in the Chicano nation; we seek a nation strong enough to embrace a full range of racial diversities, human sexualities, and expressions of gender[…] . In a ‘queer’ Aztlán, there would be no freaks, no ‘others’ to point one’s finger at” (164). Moraga defines Chicanos as “a nation of people, internally colonized within the borders of the U.S. nation-state” (169). Doubting that territory will ever be taken back from Anglo- America, Moraga proposes instead a concern for earth. Instead of earth being parceled into territories underfoot to be claimed, she refigures earth as a transcendental unifier: “Simply, we must give back to the earth what we take from it. We must submit to a higher ‘natural’ authority, as we invent new ways of making culture, making tribe, to survive and flourish as members of the world community in the next millennium” (174). Gesturing beyond Chicano nationalism to “world community,” Moraga’s essay stands in contrast to the boundary reification inMargins and in Roni’s “lesbian world.” Moraga’s suspension of the “natural” in “higher ‘natural’ authority” does not, however, manage to erase frontiers altogether, and its assertion excludes those who may not wish to submit to such an order. The anachronistic pairing of words in the title of Moraga’s essay is full of utopian gestures, and the re-inscription of natural order indicates the obstacles that a process aimed at establishing new modes of affiliation and the reconfiguration of power relations faces. In their texts, both Moraga and La Peña demonstrate the dialectical process by which one exclusion (bicultural and biracial subjects excluded from the dominant Anglo community, gays and lesbians from the Chicano community) is replaced by another (bisexuals excluded from the lesbian community, those that do not wish to submit to a higher natural authority excluded from Utopia). Although neither of these examples of Chicana writing provides an

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exit from this dialectic, both demonstrate the difficulty of altering power relations and redressing social inequalities without enacting new forms of exclusion and inequality.

2.3 Off the Chart: Sexual Desire and Sexual Identity in La insensata geometría del amor

According to popular belief, sexual identity is a direct reflection of a person’s sex and the singular (male or female) sex that constitutes the object of one’s desire. Bisexuality disrupts this privileging of singularity, this insistence on one biological sex, but it is a disruption that theories of sexuality traditionally dismiss as unsustain- able.4 Contradicting these theories by implying that bisexuality is a characteristic of a definable group and constitutes a sustainable identity is the growing use of the acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual), which started roughly in the mid-1990s in the United States.5 Though the scope of this chapter does not allow for a detailed account of the ways in which Western Culture privileges singularity (e.g., monotheism), it does address the tension between singularity and duplicity in national and sexual identities, with a particular emphasis on bisexuality. Singularity is a key component of identity, and identity categories require that a singular characteristic be shared collectively, thus indicating a separate and singular group. The dictionary definition of identity clearly emphasizes singularity: “b: sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing: ONENESS” (Merriam- Webster).6 In some cases, such as that of being a twin, the “oneness” of a thing is its doubleness, and this duplicity would seem to imply an identity crisis. Duplicity, however, can be defined in neutral terms: “2: the quality or state of being double or twofold.” What is singular about duplicity is that it can also imply the presence of one true identity and one false identity (e.g., a wolf in sheep’s clothing), and in this case it is rendered in negative terms: “1: contradictory doubleness of thought, speech, or action; especially: the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or action.” As in the case of duplicity, bisexuality is associated with both neutral and nega-

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tive connotations. It can be described neutrally as twofold, in the sense that both males and females are possible objects of desire, or negatively, in the sense that a bisexual is a traitor, a poser, two-faced, and unpredictable. Literary depictions of women who express sexual interest in both men and women tend to be negative. Characters attempt to resolve the supposedly true (read, homosexual or heterosexual) desire beneath the ambiguous façade of the dubious bisexual, supporting the idea that “unresolved” persons are undesirable or dangerous, something that occurs in Margins. Bisexually is also depicted negatively when it is negated as an option, eclipsed by the weight of the hetero/homo divide. In Illy Nes’ El lago rosa (2004), the main character Susana, upon discovering her sexual attraction to another woman, thinks to herself, “¿Desde cuándo me gustaban las mujeres? Aquella era una idea descabellada. ¡Yo no era lesbiana!” (52). Other novels depict women who have been sexually involved with both men and women but whose lackluster and unfulfilling relationships with men, usually a husband, are more the result of social approval and convenience than sexual desire. Examples of female characters in such novels are the narrator of Esther Tusquets’ El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) and the protagonist of Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline (1982), Arden, who gave “heterosexuality a spirited try” (3). Recently, however, Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998) adds a positive depiction of bisexuality to the lesbi genre, in which the protagonist is no less dangerous than any other character, and her attraction and sexual involvement with men as well as women is potent. Susana Guzner’s novel La insensata geometría del amor distinguishes itself from these other novels because it involves a character’s intended falsification of her sexual identity. The author uses the well- established assumption that bisexuals are inherently duplicitous to upset readers’ expectations and to add suspense to her love thriller. The novel’s depiction of falsified identities and shattered expectations loosens the bind holding sexuality and sexual identity together, and the principal relationship that it narrates proceeds—not because of shared sexual identity, but in spite of it. By following the thread

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of those aspects of subjectivity, sexual or otherwise, that exist even as identity begins to unravel upon itself, La insensata geometría del amor implies new possibilities for concepts such as sexuality and nationality that are frequently treated as intelligible only when framed in terms of identity categories. Such possibilities are particularly relevant for bisexuality, whose relationship to identity has been troubled and tenuous. Both Guzner’s literary work and personal history reflect the complexities of identity involved with crossing spatial, linguistic, and national borders. Born in La Plata, Argentina in 1944, she describes the painful reasons behind her exile in Spain in the following way, “En 1976, a consecuencia del asesinato de mi única hermana, Ana, a manos de la execrable Alianza Anticomunista Argentina—el escuadrón de la muerte creado y fomentado por la entonces presidenta Isabel Perón—, y ante las viles y anónimas amenazas a mi propia vida, me vi forzada a exiliarme en España” (“Presentación”). After many years of living in the Canary Islands of Spain, Guzner returned to Argentina in 2007. Translated into various languages, La insensata geometría del amor is, according to the biographical introduction to the author in its opening pages, the first novel that she decided to publish (4). Guzner’s works span various genres: a collection of short stories, Punto y aparte (2004); a collection of games for children, 72 juegos para jugar con el espacio y el tiempo (2005); a work designed to be read as a novel or represented in the form of a play, Detectives BAM (2005); and her most recent novel, Aquí pasa algo raro (2007). La insensata geometría del amor tells the story of two Spaniards, María Corradi and Eva Zamorano, who meet and are profoundly attracted to each other in an airport in Rome. Part of the novel’s plot is very similar to Margins, and in both novels, the protagonists start new relationships with women who have previously had sexual relationships only with men. Both protagonists also have in common the death of their previous lesbian lover. La insensata geometría del amor diverges from Margins when, near the end of the novel, it is revealed that the protagonist’s new girlfriend, Eva, has lied about her past sexual relations with men altogether. If in Margins bisexuality is present but never labeled as such or suggested as a

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viable identity, in La insensata geometría del amor bisexuality is only present in deception, that is, it is only “present” when Eva lies about her past: she lies during her sexual relationship with María, saying that she is sexually attracted to men. The narrative leads readers to believe, along with the narrator María, in the authenticity of Eva’s sexual attraction to men and apparent bisexuality until the end of the novel. By challenging readers’ expectations, the novel raises questions about the veracity of identity and how it is constructed and maintained. It seems odd at first that a novel with an abundance of dialog about identity should include the following claim on its jacket cover, presumably made by the editorial house, about the principal relationship that it narrates: “Este encuentro fortuito será el inicio de una apasionada historia de amor, cuyo núcleo argumental no se centra en la identidad sexual de las protagonistas sino en la intrigante relación que se establece entre ambas.” The accuracy of this claim becomes clearer upon further examination of what is at stake in Eva and María’s negotiation of identity, space, and time and the novel’s own title. If geometry is “the study of properties of given elements that remain invariant under specified transformations,” then the geometry of love might be understood as those properties of the loved one that remain unaltered regardless of changes in time or space. To describe a mathematical science as insensata, or foolish, senseless, is oxymoronic and reflects the stable contradictions at the heart of the novel. Identity categories do not traditionally permit such contradictions, and therefore Eva as a supposedly heterosexual woman who enjoys a prolonged and passionate sexual relationship with another woman, varies from the usual understanding of the term heterosexual. Identity also resonates with geometry insofar as it purportedly highlights those elements of a person that remain invariant regardless of other transformations. The novel demonstrates, however, that sometimes what remains constant is not one’s socially recognized identity but rather aspects of subjectivity that identity does not easily encapsulate, namely desire and love. Although the title indicates that what is paramount in the novel is the geometry of love, the geometry of terrain, or the earth

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is also implied. The etymology of geometry is “fromgeōmetrein , to measure the earth.” If it can be said that nations are elements by which the earth is “measured,” then the love of the novel is one that is bounded by terrain and identity: nationality. In the same way that the novel distuingishes sexuality from sexual identity, it also complicates national identity. It thwarts any sense that nationality is singular, stable, and homogeneous, that it fixes a person in space. When María meets Eva in the airport, she is quickly enamored with her and relieved to hear her accent from Madrid, which most likely signals their shared nationality and increases the possibility that they may see each other again. However, her relief is short-lived as she begins to question the assumption that they live in the same city: “‘Tonterías, María—pensé—, ya me dirás si siendo española no puede vivir en cualquier parte del mundo…’” (44). Although Eva eventually reveals that she does in fact live in Madrid, this process of questioning what nationality indicates about a person continues. Neither character has a simple and singular national identity, a singular terrain that captures her whole identity. Through the names of the principal characters, the themes of identity and space are brought into sharper focus. Though names function as identifiers for singular individuals, they are often collective in the sense that they pertain to a family name or historical lineage. Eve, according to Christian tradition, is the first woman and is associated with exile from the utopian paradise of the Garden of Eden. As the prototype of women, Eve is all women, and her name extends beyond individual identity. Eve is associated with body consciousness (nakedness) via the fruit of knowledge and with man, for she is made from Adam’s rib. Eva is a name that surfaces in other Spanish lesbian novels, such as Esther Tusquets’ Varada tras el último naufragio (1980) and Ana María Moix’ Julia (1970), and could be read as a gesture at rewriting Eve’s tie to Adam. Mary, in contrast to Eve, is associated with the spirit, with transcendence and the Immaculate Conception. She is not tied to males as is Eve since she lacks knowledge (in the biblical sense) of man. And she belongs to no one place from which she can be exiled, given that the Virgin Mary may take several forms (La Virgen de Guadalupe,

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La Virgen de Carmen, etc). In the novel, sexual identity is associated with these mythic names: María’s exclusive lesbian identity distances her from men while Eva speaks of her many love affairs with the opposite sex. The two names are also positioned differently in relationship to desire, essence, and origin. The Eve of the Bible embraces her desire for the knowledge of good and evil, is not a virgin, and is always displaced from a position of origin (for although she is the first woman she is the product of Adam). The Virgin Mary abstains from desire of the flesh and occupies the place of origin and idealized female essence as the Mother of God. In Guzner’s novel, María cannot imagine sex without a spiritual or emotional bond and maintains that her sexual identity as a lesbian is fixed and unchanging. She is surprised at Eva’s apparent comfort with purely physical bonding and worried by Eva’s “heterosexuality” and apparent shifts in desire. In La insensata geometría del amor we discover that Eva’s identity is coded by duplicity from the beginning. Her parents are Spanish Jews and had originally thought about calling her Lilith, the first woman according to Hebrew tradition, but she is instead named Eva by her mother who sees it as a perfect revenge on orthodox Jews, a revenge she desires owing to the many difficult years that she spent in Israel when they moved there from Spain. Prefiguring the novel’s end, Eva says of her name, “O sea que nací para vengar agravios,” and we learn toward the end of the novel that Eva, in addition to her mother, has grievances to avenge (35). Eva was born in Haifa but her family moved within a few months of her birth back to Spain. The kibbutz where Eva was born is representative of Israeli nationality and evokes her contested cultural identity. Her Christian name covers up her Jewish past and sets the stage for her continued duplicity. Eva’s feigned bisexuality grafts smoothly onto the dualities of her past, and in some respects bisexuality’s relation to identity mirrors the relation of Jewish nationalism to a state/territory: a sexuality without firm ground in identity and a nation without a stable territory. The nationalized spatial tension represented in her family’s movement between Spain and Israel, lying at the root of Eva’s name, is also reflected in the formidable

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task of getting to know Eva and even in locating her physically. María has great difficulties contacting and localizing Eva and is frequently unable to contact Eva on her cellular phone. When Eva invites María for a visit to her parents’ home, she seems closer to finding out more about Eva’s identity and gaining a better sense of her familial origins. An ever-evasive Eva asks María to close her eyes on the way to her parents’ home, thwarting the possibility that María will ever be able to find her own way back to the home, or Eva’s identity, in the future. María’s identity also has the quality of being double. She too has a double nationality and considers Rome to be her second city: her father is from Rome and moved to Madrid when he was a teenager. Though she calls Rome her second city, it still has emotional primacy in her life:

Roma es una ciudad que me inunda de una felicidad a la vez tranquila y eufórica en cuanto llego, algo que no siento ni siquiera en Madrid, el lugar que he elegido para vivir […]. Roma es mi hogar desde pequeña, ese cobijo que nos pertenece en exclusiva como una extensión simbólica de nuestro esquema corporal y en el cual me siento a salvo de todo peligro. (49)

Although the ideological underpinnings of the duality in Eva’s name (Eva/Lilith) are different from María’s Spanish/Italian identity, both women’s identities are in some sense dual in nature. María is also divided by her feelings for two women. Upon realizing that she has fallen in love with Eva, María feels like a traitor to her dead ex-girlfriend, and is split between the life that she led and the one that she lives without her. Complicating this division is another identity that María describes as being formed out of the bond between a loving couple:

Lo que sentía era amor, y punto. ¿Por qué llamarle de otra manera? Reconocía, vaya, si reconocía, esa sensación imperiosa, anhelante y anárquica capaz de enajenarme y mezclarme con otra identidad, ese deseo convulso de crear un ‘nosotras’ más allá del tú y el yo. (8)

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María also, not unlike what many people do sometimes, speaks with herself as if speaking to another person, once again reinforcing the dual nature of her character: “Usaba el mayestático, como cada vez que hablo con mi otro yo” (28). María is fractured yet again, taking up a third position to herself and her “otro yo” as she observes herself speaking to herself and narrates it. María, thus blurred and redoubled, has difficulties understanding boundaries: “Suelo desconcertarme ante los variopintos símbolos femeninos y masculinos que se inventan para distinguir los servicios” (19). When women in a public bathroom assume that María is crying over a man instead of a woman, another dual aspect of her identity is indicated: her publicly assumed heterosexual identity and her more privately asserted lesbian identity. María is so obviously duplicitous that she seems a better candidate for lying about her identity to others than does Eva, the dubious “heterosexual” that is in love with her. Moments when borders are erected in La insensata geometría del amor stand in sharp contrast to their constant dissolution, since even when traveling together and apparently within one nation and not another, María and Eva pass through places that call borders into question (e.g., the Plaza de España in Rome). María’s friends react to Eva’s suggested bisexuality, buttressed by her saying that she is involved with a man named Carlos—with a call for the edification of boundaries. They suggest killing all men and forming a type of lesbian nation defended by the “Ejército Lesbiano de Liberación” (166). The ability to cross and blur borders is not welcomed, and María’s friend Silvia chides Eva for her bisexuality. Upon seeing Eva Silvia says, “¡Pero si es la recién llegada, la amante ambidex- tra!—susurró con la peor de las intenciones” (265). María, though not opposed to Eva, is still surprised by her transgressions across boundaries, and she says of being kissed by her in public:

Quedé sorprendida, a sabiendas que no es nada fácil para una heterosexual asumir ciertos hábitos del complejo código lésbico. Incluso para muchas parejas lesbianas es materia de discusión el comportamiento gestual más allá de lo privado. (96)

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The more difficult it is for María to find out about Eva and her past, the more inclined she becomes toward asserting the sharp differences between lesbians and heterosexuals as a way of explaining her confusion: “No tengo experiencia amorosa con heteros, pero estaba descubriendo que se comunican de manera distinta a las lesbianas y quería aprender las claves” (187). Even upon admitting that she has lied about her male lovers at the end of the novel, Eva still refuses to claim a lesbian identity. The reason for Eva’s resistance is revealed: Eva’s previous relationship was with a married woman named Claudia, and Eva is deeply hurt when she founds out that she is merely one of many of Claudia’s female lovers. Unable to exact revenge on Claudia, Eva’s repressed anger is unleashed on María, and she invents stories about her male lovers in order to make María jealous. By using bisexuality as a screen for a duplicitous person, instead of a characteristic that constitutes a character’s duplicity, La insensata geometría del amor demonstrates the pairing bisexual/traitor to be constructed rather than natural. The ending thus undermines all explanations for Eva’s behavior that had been attributed to her “heterosexuality.” The novel also depicts the constructed nature of national identity when Eva and María travel together to Toledo. The myth that “true” Spain is Christian, and not also Arab and Jewish, is belied by Toledo’s history and Eva explains her special attraction to it, “Ha de ser porque reverdece mis raíces judías—explicaba—. Imagínate, tres culturas en su apogeo conviviendo sin problemas” (219). Similarly, Eva and María share a deep bond despite the religious and cultural differences of their families. Very little of what is perceptible of the characters on the surface describes who they are: though Eva’s name is Christian, she has Jewish roots; María has chosen to live in Spain but identifies most deeply with Italy; and Eva is not “mostly” heterosexual as she claims. Traditional boundaries are vacated of their usual significance, and it is La insensata geometría del amor that provides the most meaningful map linking these two women. As Eva writes to María, “Sin ti, Venecia desaparece de todos los mapas” (124).

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2.4 The Distance between a Lesbian and a Buga: Rosamaría Roffiel’sAmora

From its first line, “¡Los hombres son una subcategoría!”, Rosamaría Roffiel’s Amora demonstrates a preoccupation with identity categories and the negotiation of differences in Mexican society (13). Amora, a novel with autobiographical underpinnings, is “the first lesbian novel published in Mexico, a country that has been producing for over twenty-five years a rich vein of male gay writing” (Foster 115). Lupe (also nicknamed Amora) is the protagonist and a self-proclaimed lesbian who falls in love with Claudia, a buga (heterosexual or a woman who identifies as heterosexual despite her sexual relations with other women): “Mujer que, en apariencia, se relaciona sexualmente sólo con hombres” (17). The novel’s portrayal of the tension produced between two women of different sexual identities, lesbian and heterosexual/buga, parallels its treatment of Mexican postcolonial national identity and First World identity. Amora’s treatment of sexuality and nationality clearly associates these two systems and suggests, despite their apparent separateness, that they are codetermined. In addition, the novel’s discourse of sexuality and its relationship to sexual identity indicates a rupture with traditional assumptions of the essential nature of identity and counters the homogenizing and prejudicial thoughts and behaviors that have long been associated with identity categories. The novel’s treatment of bisexuality plays a pivotal role in understanding this reconfiguration of the relationship between sexuality and sexual identity. Amora establishes clear ties between national and sexual identity. For example, it depicts gay as a nationalized term connoting sexual identity, but only in specific countries. When Claudia asks Lupe why gay is not used to name homosexuality in Mexico as it is in other parts of the world, Lupe responds, “Aquí existe todavía un poco de resistencia porque viene de gringolandia. Es cuestión de costumbre. Te apuesto que dentro de algunos años todos lo usarán” (97). Lupe’s prediction that everyone will use the word gay suggests that with growing popular usage the term will be assimi-

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lated in Mexican culture as a Mexican term or that resistance to gringo culture will diminish. This passage illustrates the cultural specificity associated with terms that connote sexual identity but are often viewed as free of national ties (e.g., the presumption of an unproblematic global gay movement and culture).7 This resistance to the term gay mirrors Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s observation about cultural imperialism in her article “Under Western Eyes”: Third World women’s resistance to Western feminism, a resistance to the assumed superiority of the United States and its ethos of identity politics that posits a universal model for all to follow. The meaning of terms connoting sexual identity and behaviors can vary greatly within different national and gendered contexts, as this participant of Annick Prieur’s sociological study of homosexual men in Mexico City illustrates:

A mayate is a man who does it with jotos. A tortilla is a man who likes to fuck a joto, and also likes to have the joto fuck him. Bugas are those who say they don’t do it with jotos—only with women. Then there are theheterosexuals , who like to fuck men—which means jotas who like to fuck men. And bisexuals are those who fuck men, and the men who fuck jotos. They are bisexuals mayates. They are tortillas. My experience is that most men that I have been with are mayates. And some rare times bisexuales. And bugas—the truth is that I don’t think they exist anymore. Because now any man will be with a joto or with a woman. (24-25)

More than just an English word of the gringos, gay is associated with the First World and not the Third World Mexico of the 1980s when the plot takes place. John D’Emilio links sexual identity to economic systems and suggests that homosexual sexual identity is associated with the development of capitalism:

In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction

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to their own sex. It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on a sexual identity. (172)

In Amora, the outwardly lesbian Lupe lives economically free of her parents and in her own apartment away from the family home, something she notes is still scandalous for an unmarried woman to do in Mexican society. Lupe suggests that Claudia’s buga sexuality pertains to an older socioeconomic system and Lupe underscores for Claudia the difficulties of being a buga in love with a lesbian: “Tu problema es que quieres estar bien con Dios y con el diablo. Por un lado, seguir siendo la hijita de papá que algún día se casará de blanco y con orquesta, y por el otro jugar a la mujer fatal, tan primermundista que hasta se permite una relación gay” (147). Even when she is reflecting positively on Mexico, Lupe relegates not just the word gay but homosexual freedoms to the First World:

Puede decirse que el feminismo avanza en México, igual que el Movimiento de Liberación Homosexual. Quién lo dijera: las organizaciones gay reúnen a un número mucho mayor de militantes que las feministas. Coordinan mesas redondas, talleres, marchas, programas, obras de teatro. ¡Y van miles! Qué envidia (de la buena) … ¡Coño!, si hasta parece que estamos en el primer mundo. (184-85)

Lupe suggests that as long as Claudia claims to be heterosexual despite her feelings for her, she will be stuck between identifying with the traditional Mexican culture of her father and buga sexuality or being gay and of the First World. Often, the specifically Mexican experiences of gender and sexuality that Lupe mentions are not positive. When she and Claudia go into a bar they are harassed, not just by men but by “machos nacionales”: “Enseguida empieza el consabido acoso sexual por parte de los machos nacionales” (96). Lupe, who works for a rape crisis center, also references gendered violence in Mexico: “¿Te imaginas todas las muertas anónimas de este país, asesinadas por

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contradecir a nuestros charros nacionales?” (92). For Lupe, living as a woman in the country’s capital is a difficult challenge: “Cada caminata por el DF me confirma mi teoría de que la Tierra es un planeta de castigo, y que nacer mujer y vivir en esta ciudad es una de las últimas pruebas que debe pasar un ser humano para llegar a elevadísimos planos del espíritu” (96). The feminization ofamor in the novel’s title reflects a love between women that distinguishes itself from the culture of misogyny that Lupe describes. Though her outlook on gendered sexual relationships in Mexico is generally negative, Lupe tries to promote more positive social interactions, and this involves, at least in part, a way to be “First World gay” in Third World Mexico. Lupe finds a positive Mexican example of sexuality in the famous icon Frida Kahlo. Frida is associated with duality both in terms of her well-known bisexuality and in the bi-cultural duality represented in her self-portrait “Las dos Fridas.”8 Lupe is also associated with duality, both in terms of her sexuality and her name: Lupe is short for Guadalupe, which in Mexico refers to La Virgen de Guadalupe and the combination of the Mexican goddess Tonantzin with Catholic Virgin Mary. Lupe’s first discussion about lesbianism with Claudia takes place at an exhibition of the works of Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo. Claudia, discussing the exhibition with Lupe, asks,

—¿Es cierto que eran lesbianas?—pregunta Claudia a boca de jarro. —¿Perdón…? —Tina y Frida… que si eran lesbianas. —Más bien eran seres sexuales, como todos, ¿qué no? —¿Cómo es eso? —Seres sexuales, con capacidad para relacionarse amorosa- mente con cualquier sexo, para enamorarse de las esencias y fijarse después en las envolturas. Lo demás son etiquetas. (76)

Lupe’s comment suggests that despite common perception, labels such as lesbian or bisexual do not fully comprise the essence of

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person. Lupe emphasizes that for her the term ser sexual is very positive and referring to it says, “Ése es sólo para personas avanzadas” (98). When asked why then she uses the term lesbian to identify her sexuality she explains that this type of progress, or advancement, is unintelligible to the traditional Mexican like her mother: “No le puedes enseñar a leer a alguien por la H si todavía no conoce la A. ¿Te imaginas soltándole ese rollo a las amigas de mi mamá? Pues no entienden nada. Todo a su tiempo, mi querida poeta” (98). Likewise, Frida is an icon famously “ahead of her time” and yet enamored with Mexican tradition and folklore, as is apparent in her self-portraits. Mexican culture at large also reflects this bi- directional pull between tradition and modernity, full of tradition and machos nacionales and the spirit of revolution. As Carlos Fuentes notes in A New Time for Mexico, the Mexican revolution is also dual in nature insofar as it was both conservative (restoring village rights to lands) and modernizing (creation of a modern national state). Lupe comments on the continuing presence of both of these tendencies in romantic relationships:

[. . .] La poesía permanece intacta en nosotras pese a la prisa, el periférico y los machos mexicanos, pasamos los treinta creyendo todavía que en México ‘sí puede haber una revolución’, cada vez que iniciamos una relación lo hacemos convencidas religiosamente de que ‘ahora sí con ésta/éste sí la hago porque no es como las/los demás’ . . . (178)

In addition to the parallels it draws between national and sexual identity, Amora also is unique for its treatment of bisexuality. Its explicit addressing of bisexuality distinguishes it from the second Mexican lesbian novel, Sara Levi Calderón’s Dos mujeres (1990) and Margins. In Dos mujeres the term sui generis is used to describe the sexuality of two women in love instead of lesbian or bisexual, and in Margins the term bisexual does not appear. ThoughAmora , Margins, and La insensata geometría del amor share characters who are quick to label as dubious and hurtful women who are sexually attracted to both men and women, Amora complicates this

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dynamic by assigning “bisexuality” a positive valence, while buga is used pejoratively. Claudia presents another example of a positive treatment of bisexuality when she says, speaking to Lupe/Amora, “Tienes razón Amora, la humanidad avanza hacia la bisexualidad” and Lupe says, despite her lesbian identity, “[S]eguiré abierta a una relación heterosexual hasta el último de mis días” (146, 88). Bugas, however, are referred to in several negative ways as women who identify as heterosexual but who kiss other women and then act the next day as if they do not remember, who assume that lesbians are not selective and will sleep with any other woman, who get angry if lesbians do not proposition them and then when they do act surprised and claim they did not give off any signals of invitation, and who wish they could find a man who would give them all that their lesbian lover already does. Unlike the term buga with its negative association with compulsory heterosexuality, Amora’s discourse of bisexuality, as espoused by Lupe, suggests an alternative way of negotiating interiority and exteriority, less prone to discrimination and stereotyping than the Mexican patriarchal society she describes. Implied in this rendering of bisexuality as progress are new modes of sexual and national affiliation, and thus the function of bisexuality in the novel can be extended beyond Foster’s assertion that the narrator feels “obliged to praise bisexuality” owing to a “feminist ethic of nonexclusionary discourse” (117). By distinguishing between her socially asserted lesbian identity and her bisexuality, Lupe demonstrates that sexual identity is not wholly representative of a person’s sexuality. As a feminist activist, she attempts to counter the prejudicial ways of thinking that confrontations with otherness tend to involve, a goal that she claims for other feminists like herself and is proud of:

Millones y millones de mujeres nacientes a una nueva identidad, buscando dentro y fuera de nosotras mismas, dispuestas a probar una forma distinta de ser, ansiosas de una relación más digna y equitativa con el hombre o con otra mujer, conocién- donos por primera vez en nuestra vida. (42)

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It appears at first that Lupe will not be able to relate to Claudia beyond the limits of the category of buga, and she is afraid of falling in love again, only to be heartbroken by a woman who identifies as heterosexual. A devout feminist, Lupe is also discouraged by the antifeminist jokes that people tell at Claudia’s birthday party in the superburguesa house of Claudia’s parents: “[Q]ué chingados tengo yo en común con Claudia y su mundo, que qué chingados voy a hacer si me enamoro de otra buga, que qué chingados me pasa que no aprendo las lecciones” (27). In an explosive moment of frustration, Lupe and her friends commiserate about their bad experiences with bugas: “Oigan, hablando de bugas, ¿qué tal ésas que a las dos copas te echan ojitos, te agarran la mano y hasta te llevan a una esquina oscurita para darte besitos y al otro día no se acuerdan de nada?” (130). It is not just lesbian feminists like Lupe and her friends who sometimes draw rigid boundaries around different sexualities, but also Claudia. Even well into her sexual relationship with Lupe, Claudia wonders about her ability to love another woman and speaks of her “exceso de núcleos heterosexuales” (130). Bugas and lesbians are stereotyped and insulted, and Veronica, a friend of Lupe’s niece, says in front of Lupe without knowing that she is a lesbian: “¡Las lesbianas son unas degeneradas que violan mujeres y que guácatelas!” (119). In Amora, differences are also reified along nationalist lines and betray Mexico’s struggle for its own identity apart from Spain and the United States. When describing herself and her friends, Lupe says that Mariana is European looking, Citlali is more Mexican in appearance, and says of herself:

[…] ¡güera de ojos azules! Siquiera me pusieron Lupe y no Jacqueline o Jessica. ¡Horror! No cabe duda que la conquista dejó sus huellas y la penetración ideológica nos acosa. ¡Y nosotras que nos sentimos tan mexicanas! Ya estamos haciendo planes para poner nuestro altar de muertos el primero de noviembre. Invitaremos a nuestros sobrinos, adoradores del pinche hallo- ween. (32)

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Lupe, who identifies as a lesbian despite her own bisexuality, demonstrates that identity categories do not always function as commonly perceived, and this characteristic is again reflected in her attempts to broaden the narrowing effects that categories sometimes have. When Claudia asks Lupe why she identifies as a lesbian if she also has loving relationships with men, Lupe replies,

Es una forma de militar. La gente tiene una imagen muy este- reotipada de la lesbiana: marimacha, de pantalones, chamarra de cuero y pelo rasurado. Cuando te les presentas, femenina, dulcecita, cariñosa y amable, pues les rompes los esquemas y, a veces, hasta llegan a agarrar cierta conciencia. (98)

Lupe rebels against stereotyping people who share a category of subjectivity, such as class. When Claudia says in response to being cat called, “¡Pinches nacos de mierda!”, Lupe argues with her friend’s remarks, saying that she is against mediocre people who do not think for themselves: “¡Y ésos, Claudia, se dan en todas las clases sociales!” (99). Lupe also counters gender stereotyping, and when her friend Norma begins to stereotype men in a negative manner she says, “Pero es que asumir tu posición es caer en el sexismo al revés. Es repetir lo que hacen ellos con nosotras” (52). These examples stand in contrast to the moments in which Lupe stereotypes bugas but are consistent with her attempts to constantly overcome this prejudice and embrace a relationship with Claudia. Amora underscores the pluralities and potentials that exceed sexual and national identities without vacating these terms of their cultural specificity and significance. Lupe clearly frames the crossroads of bisexuality in utopian terms at the same time that she values lesbian identity. Lupe acknowledges that gay is a gringo term that is also potentially Mexican. Amora reflects Ien Ang’s observation that when addressing terms such as a nation and identity we need to speak of the “ways in which we both do and do not share these (and many other) concepts” (28). This challenge also applies to analyses of terms such as amora, bisexuality, and queer and the need to consider the ways that they do and do not perform the exclusions they seek to transcend.

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NOTES 1 Lesbi is a Spanish abbreviation for the word lesbiana that due to its truncation maintains a bisexual inflection. 2 For example, the novels Dos mujeres (1990) by Levi Calderón, Con pedrigree (1997) by Isabel Franc, Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998) by Lucía Etxebarria, Desde la otra orilla (1999) by Mabel Galán, Nunca soñé contigo (2000) Carmen Gómez Ojea, Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) by Carmen Nestares, Una mujer y otras cuatro (2004) by Mireya Robles, and others focus on first encounters. 3 La Peña is also author of Latin Satins (Seattle: The Seal Press, 1994) and Faults (Boston: Alyson Press, 1999). Catrióna Rueda Esquibel notes that Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline (1982) is the first Chicana lesbian novel, though this observation does not contradict Salvador Fernández’s assertion that Margins is the first Chicana coming-out novel. 4 In “Blatantly Bisexual,” Michael du Plessis analyzes the way in which Freud posits bisexuality as an innate disposition of all human beings that cannot be fully sustained in the present. 5 The acronym also appears as GLBT and in a longer form as LGBTTQ2S: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, and two spirited (from North American indigenous communites). 6 All definitions in this section are from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 7 See Hutcheson regarding similar concerns about Anglo-Saxon imperialism in the Spaniards’ reception of the term queer, and Pertusa Seva (11-16) for a discussion of the debate surrounding gay Hispanic criticism and the adaptation of Anglo-Saxon theorists and terms. Montero wonders if invertido/a might serve as a provisional term instead of gay or queer, both of which he notes are “circumscribed to the imperial metropolis” (162). 8 Frida was married to Diego Rivera and had affairs with women. Her portrait, “Las dos Fridas,” features two versions of herself, one representing her German heritage and the other her Mexican nationality.

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Se le ve la pluma1

3.1 Female Subjectivity and the Production of Meaning

he desire to express oneself in one’s own language, in a specifically feminine language and writing, is a topic of both lesbian and feminist theories of representation, bothT of which address the issue of representing the feminine in a phallocentric signifying system. They indicate the masculinist nature of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of childhood development, which, pivoting around the Oedipus complex, con- figures the maternal body as lacking the paternal phallus2 and as a negative variation of the masculine model that assuages the boy child’s fear of castration. The female filial subject, instead of fearing castration, experiences desire for the penis (penis envy). Tied to the paternal function and inscribed in the child by the Oedipus complex, the acquisition of language also establishes maternal passivity. The disintegration of the mother-child duality via the law of the father aids the child in separation, in subject formation, and in gaining access to the symbolic and language. The maternal body is alienated from the production of meaning. Various feminist theorists have pushed beyond the maternal phallus to address the female, not always maternal, sex and to articulate lesbianism beyond its tie to male fantasy.3 For Luce Irigaray, relations between females, such as mother-daughter or lesbian relations, attract the hope of elaborating a feminine symbolic and liberating the woman as the “nature-body for which man

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will be the words” (Why Different 34). She explains that a lack of valorization of feminine experience has resulted in a scarcity of words and images that speak it, and that a shared female body has traditionally occupied the site at which communication between women takes place:

These blind passions and complicities are often linked to the fact that daughters and mothers have the same body: they talk about the corporal events that mark their life: puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, mothering, children… They talk about it as women, in collusion in regard to the men’s world, but often they’re still lacking a personal path for exchange. (Why Different32)

Irigaray argues that paying attention to the mother-daughter relationship, and the dialogue that takes place within it, can positively affect current modes of speaking and change women’s relationship to words and with the men in their lives. She argues that the mother- daughter relationship has this potential, but since women’s stories are “defined by a universe in the masculine” they require a feminine symbolic (Why Different32): “In order for daughter and mother to communicate, they need words, images, symbols which represent the significant events in their life and which allow to build them in the feminine” (Why Different32). Similarly, Irigaray argues for the possibility of two women united in lesbianism to communicate beyond the closed circuit of phallocentrism. Just as in the mother-daughter relation, a shared feminine body facilitates this communication. At the end of her work This Sex Which is Not One, in the essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” an unnamed narrative voice speaks of this body as “our whole body” (212). This essay describes lesbian ontology as being “prior to any representation,” and lesbian lovers as being in need of inventing a language in order to express desires that would otherwise go “unrealized” in the “words of men” (216, 214). In what appears to be an attempt at this language, Irigaray speaks of a body that is “ours,” that is not a copy of another, lips that neither

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close nor open on the entrapment of categories, lovers that move and are becoming, evading the system that would confine them in false meanings, loving outside of limits. The importance of Irigaray’s fluid lesbian subjectivity is not so much in its practicality but rather in its contribution to theorizing a feminine symbolic that is not reducible to, or contained within, male imagery. In contrast to Irigaray, Julia Kristeva theorizes the feminine as being part of signification and representation rather than being outside of it. She counters the silencing of the maternal body in psychoanalysis in her theory of the relation of the symbolic and the semiotic. The symbolic is that power relegated to the paternal function, which organizes, delineates and names, that which makes reference possible: “this inevitable attribute of meaning, sign, and the signified object” (“From One Identity” 102). The semiotic, on the other hand, is comprised of bodily drives that make their way into language and the maternal body as rhythm and intonation (102). Although semiotic and symbolic are inseparable, certain kinds of discourse involve these two signifying processes to different extents. The semiotic pushes to the foreground in poetic language and music, while the symbolic shadows the semiotic in scientific discourse. It is this ability of the semiotic and symbolic to come together in different combinations, in flux and fluidity, with which Kristeva resists placing the feminine outside of legislative law and instead sees this law already within and infused by the semiotic. In the words of Kelly Oliver, in her introduction to select writings of Kristeva, “The logic of signification is already operating in the body, and therefore the transition to language is not as dramatic and mysterious as traditional psychoanalytic theory makes it out to be” (xxii). This perspective posits the female subject in a more active position in relation to language, creativity, interpretation, and the production of meaning. For Kristeva, the female subject does not enjoy the privileged position of the male subject in patriarchal society, yet she is intimately linked to signification, even if, as Freud would have it, she is only the blank canvas on which the word will be written.

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The novelsIn the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez (2000) and Soledad by Angie Cruz (2001) reflect Irigaray and Kristeva’s interest in the power of language and communication of the feminine. The protagonists of both novels, Camila and Soledad, undergo separation from their ill mothers and have lesbian experiences that seem to aid in healing their difficult experiences with the maternal. Camila, the protagonist of In the Name of Salomé, shares many secrets with her lovely friend Guarina, but there is a hidden desire that she keeps to herself when they read the words of her mother, a patriot poet of the Dominican Republic: “But there is a secret Camila cannot admit even to her best friend: the funny sensation she has when they have sat together in bed, propped up on pillows, reading her mother’s poems” (288). Later in her life, Camila develops a passionate relationship with an American woman named Marion. Her brother, Pedro, fears that the relationship will have a negative impact on public perception of the family and on his political life:

Over the years, he has been very concerned about her ‘personal life,’ as he terms it in his letters, as if he already knows that in the future his correspondence will be published (he is that famous), and this phrase is the safest way to refer to his sister’s perverseness. (109)

Marion’s extroverted and unselfconscious behavior stands in contrast to the Latin American models of motherhood and femininity that are familiar to Camila. Through her relationship with Marion, which provides her with some critical distance from the demands of the male members of her family, Camila develops her voice and arrives at her own understanding of her mother’s legacy. Similarly, in Soledad the protagonist (whose name is the title of the novel) struggles with her desire to connect with her distant mother. While striving to develop her own sense of self, Soledad has a brief sexual experience with Carmel, her lesbian friend. Carmel unites Soledad with the feminine, saying, “Soledad, our mamás are our mamás. You know what I mean? It’s a life law. We must honor our mother, our great-grandmothers, no matter what.

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It’s one big cycle of events” (100). Soledad is able to unite with her mother and cure the past in a dream-like purification ritual evoking the womb at the end of the novel. Lesbian desire is linked with the “true feminine,” a place from which both Soledad and Camila from Alvarez’ novel are able to redefine themselves in relationship to their distant mothers. Both Alvarez’s and Cruz’s novels reinforce an idealized female body that unites women in their sameness, despite differences in their personality or particular social situations. In her book Lesbian Utopics, Annamarie Jagose address such sameness theoretically by mentioning Irigaray’s privileging of lesbian sameness, of the mother and daughter, that it is yet another utterance and reinforcement of the sameness that underpins the phallocentrism that Irigaray initially sets out to avoid (29). Jagose links Irigaray’s move to Foucault’s theory of power in The History of Sexuality: Volume I in which legislative law is both prohibitive and productive. The idea of a prohibited female sexuality is an insidious effect (or product) of legislative law and does not lie wholly outside of it. To insist on what is outside of the law reinforces the law and is itself a product of the law, aiding in the delineation of its parameters, outlining its reach, and reinforcing its presence. The problematic of representing the feminine cannot be resolved easily; however, the articulation of lesbian subjectivity and an awareness of gender inequality are closely related to this endeavor. The women’s movement has helped to raise awareness of women’s participation in the production of culture, and subsequently, attention to lesbian desire in language has been growing. Some authors of the burgeoning genre of lesbian narratives assert that lesbian desire requires its own specific language, just as the title of Rosamaría Roffiel’s novel Amora (1989) suggests. The struggle to assert an identity through language, such as that which occurs in lesbian texts, resembles the process of establishing national unity and identity through language. Although a fully developed lesbian language is nonexistent, there are a growing number of dictionaries that reify the microlenguajes of LGBT and queer culture.4 In making this observation, I am not suggesting the necessity of developing an

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independent lesbian language, nor do I wish to imply that such a language could simply be consciously willed into existence. Rather, I wish to indicate that the relation of language to national identity reflects the relation of language to sexual identity. The binary suggested by separate heterosexual and queer languages is something that Hélène Cixous attempts to move beyond in her theory of écriture feminine, a writing available to both sexes but distinguishable from the binaries of masculine writing:

[S]ince a feminine subject position refuses to appropriate or annihilate the other’s difference in order to construct the self in a (masculine) position of master, Cixous suggests that a feminine writing will bring into existence alternative forms of relation, perception and expression. It is in this sense that Cixous believes writing is revolutionary. Not only can writing exceed the binary logic that informs our present system and thus create the framework for a new “language” and culture, but, she stresses, through its transformations, feminine writing will initiate changes in the social and political sphere to challenge the very foundation of the patriarchal and capitalist state. (Sellers xxix)

Although cast as being available to both sexes and not inherited through anatomy, the feminine economy of this writing and its connection to pleasure and the inside are, according to Cixous in her essay “Extreme Fidelity,” something that women are closer to culturally. The increased possibility of women gaining access to this economy and écriture feminine underscores the difficulty of breaking the dialectic of gender discourse. The creation of new words and modes of writing may not break this dialectic, may not escape the entrapments of the word, but it does make plain the difficulties and pleasures of expressing what phallocentrism occludes. The dual aspect of language, both able to define and yet unable to fully capture what it refers to, is particularly evident in the literature of minority groups. The problematic of language in such a literature is addressed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s essay

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“What is a Minor Literature,” and the relation between language and identity that they describe resembles that of the function of language in lesbian narrative. Their essay examines Kafka’s works as being part of the writing of a minor group in a major language, specifically Jews in Prague writing in German: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). Lesbian literature occurs similarly as the writing of a minor group in the major language that is the hegemonic discourse of heterosexuality. Lesbian literature has the characteristics of a minor literature: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 18). Women are a minor group within male privileged heterosexual discourse, and lesbians are both part of and excluded from this group. Their position reflects what Deleuze and Guattari observe of Jewish writing in Prague in the German language. Lesbians deterritorialize love and desire when writing and speaking from within male privileged heterosexual discourse. As a minor literature, lesbian literature is one in which individual concerns are political and the social implications of these concerns are urgently pressed into writing, as is national consciousness: “[…] national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature” (Deleuze and Guattari 16). In addition to being political, lesbian novels have the characteristic of being collective in nature. Deleuze and Guattari note the poverty of high literary language that often couples the collective character of a minor literature: “Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation” (17). Not all novels, however, participate in this collectivity in the same way, and within the broad scope of lesbian narrative, there are varying degrees of literary talent. As we will see later on, Sylvia Molloy’s En breve cárcel (1981) is a novel that both participates in the collective nature of lesbian literature by narrating a lesbian relationship and challenges lesbian identity by omitting the term lesbian, thus rendering problematic the relation between language and representation.

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Susana Guzner’s La insensata geometría del amor (2001) provides a clear example of deterritorialized language in minor literature. As two women in love, María and Eva find that words associated with sexual pleasure in a heterosexual encounter lack meaning when reterritorialized in lesbian pleasure, and as María notes, “En alguna ocasión aislada yo había mostrado sutilmente mi desagrado por determinadas palabras e iba desterrando expresiones como ‘correrse’, ‘polvo’, ‘irse’ u otras similares que entre mujeres carecen de sentido” (222). María remarks on her lover Eva’s creative use of langauge to describe their encounter:

Concibió una primorosa metáfora para expresar la proximidad de su orgasmo: “Estoy subiendo”. Me pareció muy elocuente y me sumé a su hallazgo. “Subir” connotaba con acierto la bella percepción de que el placer es alado y te transporta hacia arriba hasta tocar el cielo con las manos. (222)

Eva’s invention resonates with Irigaray’s lesbian eroticism in “When Our Lips Speak Together” that is always in movement, evading limits. Presented as a metaphor, the example of subir attempts to refer back to a feeling that reaches upward toward an unknown place without limits, toward the heavens. In flying instead of “running” (correrse to have an orgasm), this lesbian language is a “flight of escape,” such as what Deleuze and Guattari find in Kafka, language that pushes against a limit. This pushing past what can be spoken, speaking into and toward the unspeakable, counters the limitations that would erase, block, and otherwise make invisible the expression of a minor group.

3.2 Taking Up the Pen

Taking up the pen is a prominent act in Hispanic lesbi narrative, and female protagonists are involved with language and writing in multiple ways. They are novelists, writers of short stories or other genres, graduate students writing theses and literary criticism, poets, journalists, and/or translators. For example, the novels Julia (1970)

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by Ana María Moix; Beatriz y los cuerpos celestas (1998) by Lucía Etxebarria; and El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) by Esther Tusquets, have female characters that are students or professors of language and literature. Often times female protagonists fall in love with women via written communication, such as occurs in Carmen Nestares’Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) and Mabel Galán’s Desda la otra orilla (1999). Even in Sylvia Molloy’s En breve cárcel and Sara Levi Calderón’s Dos mujeres (1990) that are not explicitly concerned with definitional categories of identity, the representation of a lesbian relationship in writing is a primary focus. In this genre, part of the significance of portraying of the act of writing—explicitly concerned with language and representation—involves how literature functions in relation to power and identity. One function of literature in the modern nation-state is to reify the myth of relative homogeneity that comprises the apparent “natural” unity of the nation. Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin Americanotes that during the founding years of a nation, literature consolidates and legitimates culture, depicting conflict and rupture only to build toward its resolution and the solidification of national identity. As the paradigm par excellence of identity, nationality is a principal organizing theme of literary canons, and the close relationship between nation and writing echoes in the literature of emergent and contested identities of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Of such contested identities, marginated sexual identities are currently receiving much political attention, as are the growing number of narratives about them. Writing’s relation to power informs its relation to identity. The bond between language, specifically in its written form, and power is evident in national myths and the expansion of empires: “The Spanish Empire was ruled by the law, and the law could only be learned, disseminated and obeyed by people who knew how to read and write. Writing […] was a form of legitimation and liberation” (González Echevarría 66). The ability of writing to legitimate the topic that it addresses is evident today in the formation of literary genres, canons, and academic area studies that recognize marginalized groups (African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, etc.).

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Literature is a representational space of the nation and, as such, writing is one way to participate in national projects and the social imaginary. Despite the existence of women writers in both Spain and Latin America over many centuries, women have not enjoyed the same access as their male counterparts to education and cultural production. In the postindustrial age of the women’s movement, however, there has been an increase in the production of women’s writing and critical attention to women-authored texts. One potential function of the act of writing is to document, reify, and legitimate sexual identity in a nationalistic manner: lesbian writing solidifies “lesbianness” and the Lesbian Nation5 just as a nation’s literature cements its national identity. Lesbian narrative sometimes represents lesbian sexuality, excluded from national models of female sexuality that stress biological reproduction within the heterosexual family, in mimetic national terms. This process involves creative reworking of the system of codes and symbols traditionally bound to heterosexual desire, as well as creative inventing of a specifically lesbian language. Secondly, this engagement of language and representation does not escape the difficulties of language as such, regardless of the sexuality of the subject in question. This is not to suggest that it does not still retain cultural value, especially for readers who do not see themselves included in national canons. Although contemporary lesbian novels pertain to an historical context long after the founding years of the nation when national identity was a paramount and daily concern—an investment in identity—whether explicit or inexplicit, still marks them. An increase in the production of lesbian fiction is occurring alongside an increase in the development of Queer Theory and an insistence on the limits of identity. This shift helps to contextualize two general tendencies within the genre of lesbian narrative. One tendency is to engage identity, public discourse, and the representation of a unified self through the reworking of language. The other tendency is to stress multiple subject positions and the limits of language. These tendencies sometimes occur in the same novel, and the tension produced in their interaction relates to another prominent aspect of the genre: border crossings.

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Born in Argentina and now living in the United States, Sylvia Molloy is author of the prominent novel En breve cárcel, which demonstrates these two tendencies of language use in lesbian narrative. The unnamed protagonist writes of the loss of her lover, Renata, and her relationship with her ex-lover, Vera, from the same small room where their love affair took place. Her act of writing challenges heterosexist culture and lesbian invisibility:

Whereas the traditional literary discourse places heterosexual relationships at the center of relational experiences, the novel privileges relationships among women. By writing, the woman claims lesbians’ rights to articulate their lives as well as their history. (Martínez 143)

Acts of writing and references to other lesbian writers build upon lesbian tradition, literary history, and a sense of cultural unity in much the same way that literature has historically strengthened a sense of national unity. Yet acts of writing within the genre of lesbian narrative sometimes indicate the limitations of language and its inability to be true to reality, lesbian or otherwise. This dual character of language, both intimate and distancing, is reflected in the first line of the novel when the narrator speaks of the protagonist writer: “Comienza a escribir una historia que no la deja: querría olvidarla, querría fijarla. Quiere fijar la historia para vengarse, quiere vengar la historia para conjurarla tal como fue, para evocarla tal como la añora” (13). This act of writing, borne of a wish to forget and establish the story of lesbian desire that it narrates, blurs the identity of the protagonist who is constantly narrated in relation to her lovers, women in her family, and even Molloy since “the writer” evokes both the protagonist and the author (Kaminsky 112-13). Critics, such as Elena Martínez and Marcia Stephenson, note that Molloy’s scholarly knowledge of Borgesian texts is evident in the novel’s use of fragmentation and repetition that call into question the potential of language to reflect reality. Martínez’ observation of the tension produced in Molloy’s novel when writing simultaneously articulates history and questions its

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relation to authenticity and truth can be extended to the broader context of Hispanic lesbian narrative. The political motivation to state a marginalized identity does not find a simple solution in the act of writing, given that the deferrals and differences of signification described by Jacques Derrida in his essay “Différance” complicate knowledge of all identities, marginal or normative, sexual or national. By portraying a lesbian woman writing, En breve cárcel brings this problem to the forefront of the reader’s attention: “Even as Molloy’s narrator longs for a sense of wholeness, her writing does violence to this idealized desire so that any notion of identification and coherence is continually besieged and repeatedly fragmented” (Stephenson 3). By focusing on the intimacy of lesbian relationships, instead of lesbians’ marginal position in society, what David William Foster refers to as the novel’s “off-handed treatment of the lesbian nature of the love affair,”En breve cárcel posits an unproblematic lesbian subject that is nevertheless complicated by the relation between language and representation (112). Amy Kaminsky notes that the complex role of writing in the novel is, on the one hand, positive in its creation of a space for lesbian desire that leaves “no place for the lascivious heterosexual male to stand” and in its ability to form a “protective coating” for the protagonist writer and that, on the other hand, it is able to cause harm and obfuscate the truth (99, 106):

In perhaps the only truly amusing moment in the novel, Renata, having learned that her ex-lover is writing a book, pays her a visit, behaves perfectly charmingly, and rewrites a little of their personal history so that she will come off well as a character. Both Renata and the writer know that stories can harm. Renata tells gratuitous lies that fail to hide her infidelities, and the writer elaborates tales of infidelity with which to wound her lover. (107)

By representing both the expression of lesbian desire and the sus- pect relation of words to the truth via the protagonist’s writing, Molloy’s novel lays bare the freedoms and entrapments of writing,

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which extend beyond, but do not exclude, the specificity of the lesbian subject. Writing and space are key aspects of the histories of sovereign national territories, and both haunt the intelligibility of the lesbian subject in the room where the protagonist of En breve cárcel met her lovers and writes her story. Kaminsky notes that heterosexuality is grafted onto the geography of a dream that the protagonist has of her father who wants her to go to the no longer existent shrine of Artemis, goddess of fertility: “What her father wants is for her to return to a heterosexual mythology that no longer exists” (111). In contrast, Kaminsky finds that the dream landscapes where the protagonist accompanies her mother and sister are comprised of the names of real cities that “can, potentially, be transformed” (111). Through her writing, the protagonist fashions new spaces for lesbian desire, female connections from which to reimagine the outside world. Lesbian lore speaks of an origin indelibly marked by language, place, and the act of writing, culminating in the poetess of Lesbos, Sappho. Her writings help to create a type of lesbian nationalism, and Lesbian Nation, like other nations, lauds national writers that consecrate its culture in words and promote an idealized “natural” origin. In her analysis of lesbianism and Sappho, Monique Wittig suggests that Sappho’s Lesbos was a manifestation of lesbian culture that coexisted with patriarchy from outside of it, beyond a merely resistive position (116). Although Wittig strives to debunk patriarchy’s assertion of a natural fundamental difference between the sexes, she posits an equally problematic ontology of the lesbian as natural, separate, and a priori in relationship to a supposedly universal patriarchy. I contend that lesbian does not escape the “political, economic, ideological order” that Wittig insists is present, despite the illusion of its absence, in “natural” categories that connote difference under patriarchy (115). Often, upon mentioning Sappho, an ideological order that positions lesbians in a natural and supposedly superior position imbues lesbian. If nationalisms are gendered in such a way that women are represented as the “authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and

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natural)” then to a certain extent, Sappho upholds this conservative principal (McClintock 92). In writing the nation, however, Sappho also counters the traditional gender coding of nationalism by being both a woman and wielding a potent pen. Hispanic lesbian narratives sometimes reference Sappho explicitly and sometimes indirectly when characters engage in the act of writing. The act that relates Sappho directly to love between women counters what Marilyn R. Farwell describes as an intellectual effort to deny homosexual topics:

Sappho’s lyrical poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered problematic homosexual texts. Vast intellectual effort has been expended to prove that these two paradigmatic poets of Western love lyricism did not write on homosexual topics despite the seemingly obvious indications to the contrary. (108)

Sappho appears as a clearly lesbian inspiration that helps to consolidate relationships between the women in Con pedrigree (1997) by Isabel Franc. The character Adelaida, an author of lesbian novels, listens to three telephone messages: the first from Tea, a journalist and literary critic interested in her work; the second from her editor; and the final message from Karina, a woman she is hoping to seduce. Writing and lesbian desire are linked in this Sapphic scene:

Tea fue una de las voces que Adelaida oyó en su contestador aquella semana de alta intensidad telefónica. La otra era de su editora anunciándole que Novias en la noche sería traducida al griego (el sueño de Adelaida era ver sus textos impresos en la lengua de Safo). Y la tercera … la tercera era la voz de Karina. (23)

The sequence of the messages suggests that success with the pen leads to success with the woman. Karina, aware of Adelaida’s success as a novelist of lesbian fiction, invites her to the bar Gay Night where she works. The writer’s talent with the pen is referenced in the scene where she is finally able to comfort Karina, who is at

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odds with her mother, and eventually to seduce her: “—No puedes seguir así—declaró con aquella rotundidad literaria que la carac- terizaba—. Lo primero y más importante es que te reconcilies con tu madre […] Yo te ayudaré—oyó que la escritora le susurraba al oído, acompañando la frase con una tanda de besos en el lóbulo” (272). “La gran diva de las letras lésbicas,” as she is described on the back of the novel’s dust jacket, is so talented in her seduction that Karina, who previously thought that she was heterosexual, declares that she is a lesbian. Sappho also plays an important role in Maria-Mercè Marçal’s novel, La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994). As a Catalan feminist, Marçal was intimately aware of the connections between language, gender, and nation. Her novel is a fictional account of the poet Pauline Tarn, born in England, who wrote in French under the pen name Renée Vivien. The novel combines multiple layers of fictionalization and narrative positions as it tells of a doctoral student, Sara T., and her investigation of the personal letters and works of Renée Vivien and her writing of a script about Renée’s life. The unnamed author of the introduction uses the third person to refer to “the narrator,” hence placing the latter in a fictional position along with Sara T. as a character in the novel: the unnamed author of the introduction tells the story of the also unnamed “narrator.” This self-reflexive writing explicitly manifests the process of representation and mediation within the text, aligning itself with feminist goals to raise awareness about representation. The novel’s two parts are divided into oscillating stories: the private papers of Sara T. in the 1980s, the notebooks of Salomón in the 1920s, sections that depict particular people in Renée’s life, and sections with titles that address the doings of “the narrator” in the first decades of the twentieth century. This narrative fragmentation facilitates an association between Sara T. and Pauline T. (or Tarn) as it cuts back and forth between the two. Pauline does not identify with the English nationality, or assumed heterosexuality, assigned to her at birth. Renée (Pauline) expresses her lesbian identity and adopted national identity in the French language. Her friend Marie notes Renée’s passionate affilia-

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tion with France: “Ja li semblava bé aquell fervor cap a França que ella mateixa compartia, i amb més causa. En darrer terme, Pauline només era francesa d’adopció. Però amb quina insistència reclamava que en els sobres de les cartes hi figurés mademoiselle i no miss! I l’anell que duia al dit petit, amb els tres colors de la bandera...!” (99). Renée’s act of writing symbolizes the freedom to identify, both nationally and sexually, as one wishes to identify. La passió segons Renée Vivien’s contemporary character, Sara, finds that she shares Renée’s interest in creating links between women that form a feminine genealogy beyond traditional national identification: “Cerca les baules d’una genealogia invisible que uneix indestria- blement feminitat, revolta i dolor” (92). As both Sara and Renée make pilgrimages to Lesbos, the figure of Sappho exemplifies this genealogy of the feminine. La passió segons Renée Vivien incorporates multiple levels of epistolary correspondence: letters written by Renée to various lovers as well as Sara’s letters to her lover Chantal. Sara continually references Renée’s words and life experiences while she negotiates her own emotions towards the woman she loves. The act of writing works to dissolve the boundaries and impositions placed on lesbian desire, and one of Renée’s lovers, Kerimée, says:

I la veritable connexió, la trobada, es produïa sens dubte en aquell espai comú que generen dues quimeres trenades estre- tament a través del mots. La irrealitat, en canvi, l’atmosfera de somni, va embolcallar sempre la fugacitat intensa de les seves visites i el breu, àvid, i lent incendi dels nostres cossos en l’amor. I de fet, des del cor mateix del foc, el record de la paraula escrita n’atiava les flames, com un vent poderós, i, després, la paraula escrita en perllongava encara els dominis en el temps, fora del temps i, alhora, esdevenia llavor de nous records incendiaris. (226)

While La passió segons Renée Vivien affirms the lesbian identity of particular characters and their “lesbian nationality,” e.g., Lesbos, it also complicates identity by the blurring the distinction between

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characters. Writing plays an integral part in both instances, because this dual act of affirming identity and rendering it ambiguous is a contradictory aspect of language that is part and parcel of understanding the problematic of lesbian narrative and representation. Patrick Paul Garlinger relates a similarly powerful connection between women through writing in Confessions of the Letter Closet: Epistolary Fiction and Queer Desire in Modern Spain. He describes how Catalan writer Carme Riera’s “Jo pos per testimoni les gavine” (1977) opens with a letter written to Riera’s editor, which thanks Riera for her collection of stories Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (1975): “The unnamed letter writer expresses her sense of indebtedness to Riera for the first story: seeing her life transposed into fiction has emboldened her to take an unprecedented step and voice her sexuality in the public sphere by publishing a letter of her own” (88). Riera’s writing moved this woman to compose her own story about her real-life lesbian relationship in Spain during Franco’s regime. The ability of words to move past boundaries that the anonymous woman of the letter describes mirrors the importance of letter writing in Te deix: the text appears as a letter that the protagonist writes to her lover across the distance that her father, and society, have imposed between them. She recounts her father’s words upon finding out about their relationship, “‘Aquest és el camí de la depravació. T’enviaré a Barcelona, si això dura un dia més’” (23). After she goes to study in Barcelona, she expresses her longing in words that fall silent in the absence of her lover: “Certament vaig passer tota la nit amb tu. A estones la ploma sobre el paper escrivia amb tanta morositat, tan delicadment que era com si t’acaronés en silenci” (32). The narrative of “Te deix” appears as a letter written to her lover later in life after she has married and is going to give birth, afraid that she may not live through the experience. This last letter ends with the wish that the baby be named after her lover, María, whose gender is only explicitly revealed at the end. In his essay “Virtual Sexuality: Lesbianism, Loss, and Deliverance in Carme Riera’s ‘Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora,’” Brad Epps underscores the vexed nature of writing and lesbian identity in the story since the letters function as an expression of lesbian desire.

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Yet the story is one of longing for contact, a perpetual absence narrated in ambiguity about the gender of the lover, that threatens to maintain lesbianism in a state of virtuality. This state extends beyond the characters to Sappho via an epigraph of the poetess at the beginning of the story that ends with the words “fragment mai no escrit” (9). Epps explains that these words at the end of the epigraph are part of the story’s virtualization of lesbianism, affecting Sappho’s authority, presenting it “as inauthentic, even ghostly; it is evoked yet altered, invoked yet subverted” (“Virtual Sexuality” 320). Given the physical separation of the lovers, the haunting and virtual writing in the story seems to bring the two lovers closer than they would be otherwise. Letter writing is also prominent in Cuban writer Mireya Robles’ Una mujer y otras cuatro (2004). The protagonist, called Mochi by her lover Marisol, lives in Caimanera and goes to live in a boarding house and attend school in Havana. Mochi and Marisol start their written correspondence when Marisol has to go home to help her mother sell pajamas and handkerchiefs to pay for her schooling. Far from providing a safe and free space to express their desire for one another, writing is a dangerous game for the two secret lovers as Mochi’s mother opens her letters before handing them to her. Sometimes the couple uses the secretive language of love, Greek—Sappho’s language—, in order to express themselves while hiding their feelings from others. Language coninually unites the two girls despite various impediments to their being together. During a time when they are trying to renounce their socially prohibited feelings for each other, they exchange words that transcend any barrier between them:

[P]or las noches seguimos en la renuncia y la misma necesidad de siempre y cada una en su cama cuando empezamos a hablar de lo que haríamos si no fuera por la renuncia y terminamos hablándonos como si estuviéramos haciendo el amor, y de pronto, los senos de Marisol, esperándome, hasta que interrum- pimos la renuncia. (105)

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Eventually Mochi moves to the United States and using Sappho’s language in her letters is no longer viable: given the political tensions between Cuba and United States during 1961, Cuban officials might perceive letters written in Greek as part of a plot against the government. When Mochi’s mother opens a letter from Marisol to find explicitly intimate and loving words, she angrily listens to Mochi who lies to her explaining that, “hay que hablar con un lenguaje de amor cuando uno quiere referirse a lo que está pasando en Cuba, es una forma de transmitirnos noticias” (142). Mochi creatively shifts lesbian love away from a publicly intelligible position of meaning, moving it from that which is hidden (in Greek) to that which putatively hides (the real situation in Cuba). Mochi goes on to study literature at the graduate level and eventually wins a literary prize for her own writing. As an author, she is united with other women writers of various nationalities that are associated with lesbian desire and that are mentioned in the novel: Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, and Gabriela Mistral. Una mujer y otras cuatro makes explicit connections between women based on lesbian desire but also confuses the boundaries that define them with its style that breaks with conventions of punctuation and results in a blurring of voices and identities amongst the absence of periods:

[S]altan los meses, y en mí, una búsqueda que se confunde ahora con la soledad; tengo pesadillas frecuentes en las que aparecen Marisol, la Bibi, Chachita con nombres distintos, transcribo la más reciente: se presenta la madre anciana y vigi- lante de Rosa María, transparente, sin materializarse, como los espíritus. (188)

An enduring sense of longing permeates the novel, and Mochi suf- fers language’s inability to hold anything, including her lovers, permanently close. Although not everlasting, the intimacy that Mochi gains is inextricable from language, creating at least momentary unification with other women, be they in close proximity or only where words can find them.

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3.3 Political Writing, Visuality, and Commodity Fetishism

The effect of repetition and the power of ritual can help turn a fiction into a perceived truth. If national unity is a myth, it is also a powerful force that is gathered in the visual display of unity that flags and parades evoke. We can be sure that writing is not the only legitimating force of discourses of nationality and sexuality, and that the spectacle is a bedfellow of “truth” in modern societies. The title of this chapter,Se le ve la pluma, is an expression used in reference to a person that the speaker suspects of being gay or lesbian, and in it we find the unification of homosexuality, writing (via reference to the pluma or pen), and the implication that homosexuality is visibly identifiable. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s fruitful concept of visuality, “the intersection of power with visual representation,” is a prominent aspect of contemporary Western culture (4). As citizens and consumers, many turn to visual media as a source of information and meaning. While the potency of visual events and images can help us to understand reality, visual culture contains a dichotomous struggle between truth and fiction. Marginalized groups that seek to challenge the inequalities of sociopolitical reality often call for greater visibility within society. They are faced with the difficulty of promoting a more favorable visible presence in society, while simultaneously contesting representations that are misleading or that propagate harmful stereotypes. For example, consider the stereotype that women are homemakers by nature and lesbians are androgynous man-haters. Equating visibility with social equality, however, does not take into account the agendas of those who control the means of visual production, which may heed more to market pressures than to the political agenda of marginalized groups. Lesbian cultural production provides clear examples of the relation of visibility and social equality as well as criticisms of it. For some marginalized identity based groups, visibility is a key factor in bringing about sociopolitical and economic transformation. Feminist, lesbian activist, and writer from Spain, Beatriz Gimeno argues that visibility is a key factor in recognizing the specificity of lesbian experience in both heterosexual and gay society:

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Somos invisibles, luego nuestra voz no se escucha. […] La cultura gay, más valorada social y políticamente, y desde luego más fuerte económicamente, se ha impuesto sobre una frágil y escasa cultura lesbiana que corre el peligro de convertirse en una mala copia de aquella. (21)

The need for improved lesbian visibility is evident in the slogan of the 2008 Gay Pride Day in Spain: “Por la visibilidad lésbica.” The importance of visibility extends beyond sexual minorities. In a dialog sponsored by Forum Barcelona 2004, the President of The United Nations’ Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, Ole Henrik Magga, underscored the importance of visibility for indigenous peoples: “Para los pueblos indígenas lo peor no es la resistencia abierta, sino el abandono. Queremos más visibilidad, porque la visibilidad y la igualdad están estrechamente vincula- das” (qtd. by Forum Barcelona). In the United States, five short years after the famously bold gesture of Rosa Parks in 1955, the relation of visibility and racial equality came to the forefront of national attention. “Colored” or “Negro,” college students in North Carolina sat at the “Whites Only” lunch counter at the large F.W. Woolworth’s retail store in Greensboro, and the protest that they began continued until they were finally served lunch six months later, where they had once been invisible. Though other acts, such as the strikes led by César Chávez, have directly addressed inequalities in education, healthcare, and income, many advances in civil rights are explicitly marked by consumer values in a capitalist economy: the middleclass values of the African-American family portrayed in the television series The Cosby Show and the heavy emphasis on product marketing in the television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Visibility in these contexts might redress social inequalities to some degree, but throws into question what degree of material well-being one must have to be “equal.” For sexual minorities left out of sight, in the closet, the question of visibility is particularly cogent. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the closet, in addition to being the “defining structure for gay oppression in this century,” has marked many binary impasses

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(natural/unnatural; public/private; health/illness; same/different) that are central in epistemologies of twentieth-century Western culture, where visibility plays an important role (71). By engaging theories of visibility, we are better able to understand the relation between the binaries equal/oppressed and visible/invisible and the role visibility plays in sociopolitical constructions of the lesbian subject. Activist Mariana Pessah’s claim for the importance of El día nacional de visibilidad lesbiana in Brazil stems from a recognition of the invisibility of women’s sexuality coupled with the invisibility of lesbian sexuality, both in heteronormative6 society and in the male dominated homosexual movement. The relation of visibility and homosexuality is not a simple one, and the intelligibility of the homosexual subject is tied both to visibility and invisibility. Though rooted in an examination of male homosexuality, Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of the visually inflected process by which the “temporary aberration” of the sodomite becomes the homosexual “species” in The History of Sexuality, is also relevant to the formation of the lesbian subject. Speaking of the sexuality of the nineteenth- century homosexual, Foucault notes that his sexuality is “written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away” (The History of Sexuality43). The epistemology of the homosexual subject is constantly informed by the visual: “The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality,” and this power “set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes” (History of Sexuality 44). Attempts to make the lesbian subject visible do not simply run counter to a history of invisibility, but rather are part of a “machinery of power” that constitutes the homosexual subject. As we will see, feminist- lesbian contestations sometimes extend beyond making the lesbian subject visible in order to tackle the problematic relation between visibility and equality. In his analysis of homosexual representation and visibility in Argentina, Guillermo Olivera notes that the question of visibility for the gay movement has changed greatly since the 1970s. He explains that in the ‘70s visibility was associated with transparency, or shin-

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ing light upon hidden, but otherwise unproblematic, gay identity: “[L]os gays pensaban su política como un medio para lograr la transparencia de las relaciones sexuales y sociales” (151). By the turn of the century, however, he argues that gay politics became more concerned with making “visible” the conditions of visibility than with shedding light upon which subject could be found in which closet (e.g., homosexual, bisexual, transsexual). This trajectory can also be traced outside of Latin America, in an analysis of Terri de la Peña’s novel, Margins, that she began writing in 1982, and Isabel Franc’s novel, Con pedrigree, published in 1997. Both Margins and Con pedrigree portray the intersection of lesbian identity and visuality. They also represent the visibility of lesbians in relation to marketing practices, calling our attention to the commodification of identity and the role of social reception in its constitution. Margins concerns itself with the assertion of a sexual identity that has traditionally been restricted and censored in the public sphere. In this case, the fictionalized public recognition and intelligibility of lesbian identity is a key motivation of the portrayal of visual events, and the text equates public validation of the visible lesbian subject with the approval and validation of lesbianism. Novels that explicitly manifest a concern with writing and audience reception, such as Margins and Con pedrigree, direct our attention to how textual representations influence people. As discussed in the previous section, Carme Riera’s short story had a clear political impact on one of her readers, motivating her to share her own personal lesbian desire in a public venue. As we have seen, lesbian fiction demonstrates an acute awareness of the relation between reader and writer. It is common to mention the names of “real life” women authors who have influenced fictional women authors and how the latter influence other women characters via writing and, as a result, these novels provide social commentary on market practices and direct the reader’s attention to them. Margins equates the success of the main character’s struggle to assert her identity as a Chicana lesbian with her stories being accepted for publication by a gay and lesbian student magazine and also by Jacaranda Review (UCLA’s journal of the arts). The

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visibility of the lesbian author in public surfaces again at the end of the novel when the protagonist, Veronica, reads a fictional account of her deceased lover Joanna to a room full of women at Sisterhood Bookstore. Veronica’s public performance as an author is linked to the literacy of other women:

She smiled again, seeing some of her tutorees from the literacy program; this was their first time inside a bookstore—and with her encouragement, Veronica knew it would not be their last. All these were the women she longed to touch with her stories, to reach with her words. And she wanted to know them all. (328)

Here the visual event of Veronica’s appearance in public as a lesbian writer is associated with community building and the empowerment of women of lower social classes. Although Veronica does “come out of the closet,” the public that is able to see her is relatively small, and the novel’s title reminds us that her identity formation takes place at the margins. Her public appearance at the end of a narrative about the formation of her identity creates an association between visibility and the legitimation of that identity. In contrast with Margins, Con pedrigree offers a more critical treatment of lesbian visibility, representation, and the market through its character Tea de Santos. As a reporter who has recently been given her own television show, she capitalizes on the intrigue of sexual identity by only conducting interviews with women “claramente reconocidas dentro del bollerío,” without ever making direct reference to her own or her guests’ sexual identity (97). When questioned by her friend and author of lesbian novels, Adelaida Duarte, about how she will get the topic out in public, Tea responds, “Las telespectadoras lo advertirán en los entresijos de mis preguntas y de las potenciales respuestas de las entrevistadas que se precien. Tendrán que escuchar entre líneas, las 625 líneas de la pantalla” (80). The intrigue of lesbians who are visible but not “out” is a commercial gimmick emphasized above any concern for lesbian politics. Con pedrigree underscores that the primary motivation of greater social visibility is not necessarily an interest in dealing with

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the social inequalities marginalized groups face. Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes also addresses the commercialization of gay and lesbian sexuality:

Nuestros amigos y amigas hacían todo lo posible para hacerse fácilmente reconocibles: llevaban anillos en los pulgares, tatuajes en los antebrazos, pequeñas chapitas con triángulos rosas y collares con los colores del arco iris. La mayoría llevaba el pelo muy corto, sobre todo ellos, que además se lo teñían o lo remataban con un copete de Tintín. Todos los chicos tenían al menos un disco de Barbra Streisand; y las chicas, uno de K.D. Lang. (48)

The main character, Beatriz, questions the benefits of such homog- enized visible markers, which harden community boundaries. She sees that while they may make individuals easily identifiable, they are also restrictive of sexuality and hence do not always amplify sexual connectivity. I agree with Alberto Mira when he insists in De Sodoma a Chueca that the problems of consumerism are not specifically gay problems (607). They are, however, problems that gather particular meaning for a community that society tolerates superficially so long as it preoccupies itself more with spending money than with demands for political equality and the eradication of homophobia. Directly addressing this problem, the work of the activist Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona provides us with an opportunity to consider the implications of linking gay and lesbian politics with the market.7 These activists demonstrate a concern for making lesbians more visible in society while criticizing extant images of the gay and lesbian community. One example of their concern for making sexuality transparent is their effort that began in 1999 to have a street in Barcelona dedicated to a lesbian. Lobbying techniques ranged from actions in the street (sticking names of famous lesbians to the street signs) to exhibitions and the publishing of materials. This continued every year until 2004, when Barcelona finally named a street after Sappho, a major Greek poet” (Grup

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Lesbianes Feministes, “Exploring New Ways,” 110). This visual display stands in contrast to those that retail shops and clubs promote that are scattered throughout Barcelona’s neighborhood, Eixample, or “Gaixample” (gay-Eixample), as it is commonly called. As previously noted in chapter 1, the Grup de Lesbianes Feministes plastered posters on almost every street corner of “Gaixample” in the summer of 2004, an area that boasts a reduction in crime and augmented commerce since the 1990s when the gay community started opening bars and shops there. The bright pink posters with radioactive symbols in the middle ironically congratulated the “normalized” gays and lesbians in the “controlled zone” of Gaixample for being glamorous, for going to the most “in” places, for having a Visa or MasterCard, and for being trendy. This criticism of fellow gays and lesbians occurs in a national context where it is not gays and lesbians that are being accepted but rather individuals who best exemplify middle class values and consumer behavior. As Alexandra Chasin says in Selling Out, “[T]he capitalist market makes possible, but also constrains, social movements whose central objective is the expansion of individual political rights” (XVII). Following the implications of commodifying gay and lesbian identity and increasing visibility in the market one step further, we can see that it amounts to commodity fetishism when the political aims of the gay and lesbian movement are obscured in the process of their commodification: “[…] visibility is still fetishized to the extent that it conceals the social relations new urban gay and queer identities depend on” (Hennessy 115). Representation in the market does not always work to counter gay and lesbian stereotypes. Gay and lesbian literature is often understood to be erotica. In Spain, for example, despite the presence of non-erotic gay and lesbian novels in stores, shelved by the last name of the author, store clerks often have difficulty indicating a single non-erotic lesbian novel. Once in a Casa del Libro in Barcelona I was led to a shelf containing two Spanish lesbian novels, one by Carmen Nestares and one by Marta Fagés, as well as Yestergay by Miguel Fernández.8 Nestares’ novel, Venus en Buenos Aires, tells the story of a young Spanish woman who falls in love with

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an Argentinean woman and focuses on the emotional difficulty she experiences as a lesbian in a homophobic family. Venus en Buenos Aires was shelved alongside the Kama Sutra. Non-Spanish authors write the majority of gay and lesbian novels shelved in the erotica sections of bookstores. The message that such commercial practices send is that being gay and lesbian is reducible to erotic experience and that gay and lesbian novels are almost exclusively written by foreigners and rarely, if ever, in the Spanish language. The specific ways that LGBT literature has entered the marketplace demonstrates that marketing practices are culturally charged, politically motivated, and not always to the benefit of gays and lesbians. Marriage ceremonies are a lucrative market enterprise, and recently the topic of gay marriage has received an unprecedented amount of publicity. Marriage ceremonies are marvelously powerful visual events that represent a couple’s legitimate emotional and sexual unity. Visual components strongly reinforce the legitimacy afforded to relationships through marriage: wedding bands and a public ceremony. The legalization of same-sex marriage in Spain in 2005 prompted many to celebrate what appeared to be a sure step forward for sexual rights. Though many gays and lesbians would agree that as long as marriage is the sole legitimating institution of intimate relationships that the State recognizes, then the State should allow them to participate in it, not all agree that marriage furthers sexual equality, despite the visual cues that assure us that it does. Dominican-born activist Ochy Curiel questions the benefits of marriage and visibility:

La mayoría de las lesbianas feministas se inscribe en la política de la diferencia, del reconocimiento y del rescate de una identidad y ahí se queda. Si vemos las acciones políticas van en la línea de la visibilidad, de salir del closet, de sentir orgullo de ser lesbiana y muchas proponiendo el matrimonio o la unión civil. Ésta parece ser la única política posible y no se entiende que estas políticas mantienen intactas las lógicas del sistema patriar- cal. Es cierto que la visibilidad es importante, es fundamental para poder colocar nuestras posturas en el ámbito público; sin

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embargo, la visibilidad por la visibilidad no es suficiente si eso no contiene presupuestos políticos. Yo puedo ser visible como lesbiana, y sin embargo, la discriminación me puede seguir afectando, igual que la explotación económica, los estereotipos y prejuicios que se me imponen. El matrimonio, por ejemplo, es una de las instituciones en donde descansa el patriarcado, no entiendo cómo es posible que muchas aspiren a él. Creo que como la heterosexualidad es el referente válido muchas quieren gozar de sus privilegios sin cuestionar de fondo lo que significa para las mujeres y para las lesbianas. (3)

In Barcelona, the Grup de Lesbianes Feministes question the benefits of gay marriage and assert that it would do little to address the socioeconomic inequalities of daily life or to guarantee sexual rights. They handed out a pamphlet at Barcelona’s Gay Pride Parade in 2004 that called into question the benefits of marriage: “Rights must be based on persons, not on couples. The necessary measures should be adopted so that everyone’s basic needs are provided for, regardless of whether or not they are in a couple” (Grup Lesbianes, Més, 21). Visual representations are often so powerful that we fail to examine them critically. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord outlines the power of the spectacle in modern societies: “The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear’” (145). This moralizing logic of the spectacle implies that what is distasteful, inappropriate, or evil is invisible; relegated to society’s “closet,” it has not seen the light of reason. Debord asserts that in societies dominated by modern conditions of production, the spectacle is not only tied to the good, but to the real and cannot be separated from objective reality. The spectacle collapses the distance between reality and representation, since “[it] is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 142). So powerful is the spectacle, that democratic societies often conflate the fight for equality with the fight for visibility. In his essay revised from a lecture in 1979, “Capitalism and

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Gay Identity,” John D’Emilio asserts that gay identity is a product of history that is associated with the development of capitalism and the change of the nuclear family from a primary unit of economic survival to a primary unit of emotional bonds. The conflation of social equality and middle class values requires that we continue to examine the role of economics in the relation between visibility and social equality.

NOTES 1 A phrase used in reference to a person that the speaker suspects of being gay or lesbian, indicating that someone’s “pluma” (feather, quill, or pen) is showing. I use it here to evoke writing and to indicate the historical association of homosexuality with visibly identifiable characteristics. Isabel Franc’s novel Plumas de doble filoplays on this association of lesbian identity and writing. 2 Freud’s essay “Fetishism” includes this erasure of the maternal sex. 3 See Teresa de Lauretis’ reworking of psychoanalytic theory in order to articulate lesbian subjectivity. 4 For example, Alberto Mira’s Para entendernos. Diccionario de cultura homosexual, gay y lésbica (1999) and Félix Rodríguez’ Diccionario gay-lésbico (2008). Although immersing itself in the often humorous and ironic context surrounding slang, Ferran Pereda’s El cancaneo: diccionario petardo de argot gay, lesbi y trans (2004) also explains that coded language develops out of fear of discrimination. 5 Lesbian Nation is still in use after Jill Johnston’s coining of the term in her book by the same name. For example, see www.nacionlesbiana. com.ar and its links to “national” lesbian short stories and electronic postcards. 6 A term coined by Michael Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet that refers to the institutionalization and perpetuation of heterosexuality as normative within society (xxi). It is related to Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality.”

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7 My field research was conducted in Spain during the summer of 2004 with the help of grants from the Tinker Foundation and the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities. 8 This observation was originally made in 2004, however it likely remains true today.

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Taking Place in Time: Somewhere over the Rainbow

4.1 Sexuality and Temporality in the Bildungsroman

n intensely intimate connection, or “becoming one” with another person, can blur the spatial boundaries between oneself and another and appear to bring on a simultaneousA change in temporal experience (e.g., “time stood still”). Such expressions, commonly used to describe heterosexual encounters, gather particular meaning in the context of a relationship that does not conform to heterosexually coded conventional temporality, or what Judith Halberstam describes as a temporality of fixed stages involving marriage, reproduction, and death What’s( That 1). How does the lesbian subject go through time, imagine the future, when this temporality excludes her? The protagonist of Kleya Forté-Escamilla’s novel Mada (1993), Raquel, describes her sexual union with another woman as taking her to a place “inside a world still being created” (26). The youthful (still being created) temporality of her union with Mada is resistant to defining the future of their relationship. It is a temporality that renders problematic the concept of identity as something that persists through time: “The way we made love, what we did to and took from each other, bordered on making extinct everything I thought was real: my personality, my identity as a lesbian, all I had fashioned to contain and limit myself” (26). The bildungsroman is uniquely posed to address the inherent

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contradiction facing lesbian youths: as the traditional motto would have it, the “youth are the future,” and yet these youth are bared from the conventional forward-moving temporality of the future. A comparison of the depiction of characters’ experience of time in three novels, El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) by Esther Tusquets, Réquiem por una muñeca rota (2000) by Eve Gil, and Nunca soñé contigo (2000) by Carmen Gómez Ojea, illustrates the relation of the lesbian subject in formation to the time-line of the bildungsroman narrative, challenging, even if only temporarily, a resolution with society that would eclipse lesbian desire. The condition of being outside of a constantly progressing linear temporality is antithetical to the “historically intact” nation and stable identities. Hence, characters’ experience of temporal disjunc- tion sometimes accompanies an increasingly ambivalent national affiliation, such as occurs in the novelVenus en Buenos Aires (2001) by Carmen Nestares. The bildungsroman, with its focus on the temporality of youth, lends itself to an analysis of such ambivalence in the process of identity formation. The “experimentation” with the limits of social relations during one’s youth shows that identity is a historical construct open to flux despite societies’ perpetuation of the myth that it is overdetermined, essential, and fixed at birth. Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, explores the opportunities that youth cultures provide for theorizing gender and sexuality given their disassociation from the adult imperatives of reproduction and family: “[W]e can see that preadult, preidentitarian girl roles offer a set of opportunities for theorizing gender, sexuality, race, and social rebellion precisely because they occupy the space of the ‘not-yet,’ the not fully realized” (177). This stage of not-yet is maintained by the legal system and is reflected on a juridical level in the “not-yet adult” laws applied to juveniles. Some Hispanic narratives depicting young adolescent girls’ sexual encounters function as bildungsromans, narrating the inevitable end of the lesbian relationship before the girls are brought into the fold of conventional temporality and full-fledged womanhood. Such is the case in Esther Tusquets’ El mismo mar de todos los veranos and the relationship between the unnamed narrator and her young

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girlfriend, Clara.1 The two meet in a classroom, a place suspended in time according to the description of the narrator:

—¡volví a la universidad después de casi treinta años todo era, claro, muy distinto!—: lo sorprendente, lo extrañísimo, es que aquí no había cambiado—como en el pozo de sombra de la biblioteca—casi nada. (54)

The narrator describes Clara in temporal terms, as “[la] única habitante de tiempo deshabitado, de mi pasado ido, muñeca zan- quilarga que paseo morosamente por los laberintos de mi tiempo inencontrable” (87). In associating Clara with a doll and the past, the narrator infantilizes and describes her as existing in an ancient time or a time recalling the narrator’s youth: “ […] sólo quedan vivos en ella los ojos abrazados que me turban y me devuelven a la adolescencia […] todo ella desconocida historia de hace casi un milenio” (89-90). A nostalgic time, which is mirrored in the stylistic quality of the writing, unites and fixes the narrator and her lover:

A stationary, anti-narrative quality, mirroring the narrator’s psychological state, is also produced by the slow, close-up attention to detail and the enlargement of each minute, inner event. The web of images, leitmotifs and literary references that are woven and rewoven with fanatic insistence also arrest all forward flow. (Servodidio 172)

Even if the principal motive behind the narrator’s desire to unite with a female in childhood time stems from her longing to connect with her detached mother, as Mirella Servodidio suggests, the overall effect is still the relegation of lesbian desire to a temporality that is disassociated from the forward-moving “progressive” time of heterosexuality and adulthood. Just before the relationship ends and Clara leaves her, the narrator relates their relationship to the childhood story of Peter Pan: “—ni ganas tengo ya de que me crezcan alas—, de seguirla más allá del estrecho marco de cualquier ventana y emprender juntas la

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ruta hacia las tierras de Nunca Jamás” (228). This linkage between the end of the relationship and the refusal of the youthful not-yet time of the land of Nunca Jamás is again made at the end of the novel when the narrator describes Clara’s last words to her before she leaves: “acerca mucho su boca a mi oído y susurra, no sé si como último palmetazo del castigo o como signo de perdón, pero en cualquier caso como prueba inequívoca de que hasta el final me ha comprendido: “‘ . . . Y Wendy creció’” (229). The end of the lesbian relationship marks the end of youth for Clara and the end of experiencing a youthful temporality for the narrator. It marks the entrance into the “legitimate” temporality of adulthood with its “legitimate” heterosexual relationships. This change in temporal identification at the end of the novel accompanies Clara’s plan to return to Colombia and the narrator’s return to her marriage with Julio. National borders will once again separate the two lovers, suggesting that Clara will now be leaving the Never Never Land time of the narrator where she dwelled as an exotic “Angélica azteca” (78). One reading of this exotic treatment of Clara is that it constitutes a colonizing gaze on the part of a Spaniard toward a Latin American with indigenous traits. This reading is complicated by the narrator’s mention that she was always considered to be too dark for her mother’s liking: “[…] aventurar en voz amable alguna observación sobre mi piel morena—dice que incluso ahora, en el invierno, demasiado oscura— […]” (75). This hurtful treatment by the narrator’s mother during the time of her childhood offers a different explanation for why the narrator gives a positive valence to Clara’s skin color, uniting herself with Clara through their similarities, in spite of their differences in age and national identity. Mexican author Eve Gil’s novel Réquiem por una muñeca rota: Cuento para asustar al lobo also explores the liberatory potentials of a lesbian connection in the not-yet space that youth occupies. The novel opens with a quote from Luisa Valenzuela’s story “Si esto es la vida, yo soy Caperucita Roja” that establishes a young girl’s desire for knowledge despite threats to her innocence:

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Yo me echo a andar por sendas desconocidas. El lobo se asoma a lo lejos entre los árboles, me hace señas obscenas. Al principio no entiendo muy bien y lo saludo con la mano. Igual me asusto. Igual sigo avanzando. (2)

This quote from Valenzuela’s story functions as an explanation for the subtitle of Gil’s novel that poses a challenge to the “wolf,” a symbol of sexual predators of young girls, and asserts female agency over female passivity. For the narrator, Moramay, and her love interest, Vanessa, the not-yet space of female adolescence functions as an extension of the sexual abuse that both girls suffered as children. Sexual power differentials appear likely to continue as the two girls transition from teenagers into women, with one exception. The only slight reprieve from this course of female passivity in the face of male predators is the sexual bond that Moramay and Vanessa share. The differences in the two girls’ experiences with “wolves” pose difficulties to their own intimacy with each other. Vanessa’s experience of child sexual abuse happens within her family; her father molests her, whereas a neighbor rapes Moramay. Vanessa’s mother humiliates her and takes her to see doctors that will verify her vir- ginity, whereas Moramay’s parents, aiding in her mental repression of the event, do not speak of it. The silence surrounding the rape is part of a general lack of communication between Moramay and her parents, and she does not feel close to either one of them. Even Moramay’s beloved lesbian aunt, Lú, will not respond candidly to her nieces’ questions about the nature of her relationships with other women, and Moramay experiences a deep sense of solitude:

Qué injusto tener trece años. Sin duda, la peor edad de una mujer. Es como estar en el limbo, no existir, no ser. Había un enjambre de preguntas esperando su respuesta, pero en torno mío sólo veía rostros esquivos, ojos de espanto, bocas de mor- daza. Quería saber, quería entender, pero todos los adultos pare- cían confabulados para preservar mi estúpida inocencia. (5)

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Moramay’s sexual innocence contrasts with Vanessa’s sexual knowledge through experiences with young men, and the two learn to negotiate awkwardly the concomitant feelings of jealousy and frustration that these contrasts bring. They graft their mutual attraction onto the forward advances of Vanessa’s suitor, Gabriel:

Mi chisporroteante mirada viajó de un extremo al otro de la mesa, la clavé en los ojos color amaretto de quien continuaba afe- rrada a mí, y pude ver cómo una dulce sonrisa se abría paso por entre sus labios llenos y sonrosados; labios de mujer que conoce placeres impensables para mí, al tiempo que guiaba mi mano crispada hacia el mismo sitio donde la tenía Gabriel Garmendia. Y ahí, bajo la falda de Vanessa, él y yo volvimos a coincidir, batiéndonos cual espadachines por su placer. (32-33)

Both Moramay and Vanessa are impeded from passing into womanhood on their own terms, and together they create a female space that allows them temporary access to their desires. The social taboo of their sexual relationship is one obstruction to their future, and Moramay’s father and mother want to move her away from D.F. to Hermosillo, away from Vanessa and away from the influence of Moramay’s marimacho aunt Lú. Vanessa’s parents profit from using their daughter’s modeling for sexually charged photo shoots so much that they ignore her dreams and desires. Thegringo- owned companies that consume and propagate these images replicate the paternal sexual abuse of Vanessa on a national level: the paternal and exploitative United States consumes the bodies of the young daughters of Mexico. Between the time of girls and women, Vanessa and Moramay have difficulty feeling like women in their own right. Moramay notes the physical expression of this difficulty in Vanessa’s appearance: “Curiosamente, bajo su disfraz de mujer fatal llevaba calzones de niña, con olancitos y moñitos, ligeramente embarrados de sangre por un descuido, no muy distintos a los míos, salvo porque eran mucho más pequeños” (59). Vanessa suggests that she and Moramay symbolically solidify their union and create their own

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understanding of feminine corporality and womanhood. Building on the synchronization of their shared menstrual cycles and their total acceptance of each other’s bodies, they agree to share their blood, routinely switching their sanitary napkins on the first day of their periods. Moramay says of this ritual, “sí, la sangre de Vanessa que absorbí por mi vagina por once meses, me hizo mujer” (60). It is in a context of extreme male dominance and aggression that this act is able to overcome the repulsion that it initially produces in Moramay when Vanessa suggests it to her. This ritual recodes the menstrual cycle and changes it from a mark of female reception to male fertilization into an act that signifies empowerment through shared female corporality. In approaching and giving a positive valence to menstrual blood, this ritual counters what Kristeva describes as the reification of men’s dominance over women via “the ritualization of defilement,” the inscription of limits on the body, protection against the threat of the “maternal and/or the feminine” (Powers of Horror 70). It also defiantly eroticizes menstrual blood, despite the taboo against it and lesbian sexuality:

Me hice mujer el día que intercambié toallas con Vanessa; ella y yo, al mismo tiempo, al probar nuestras sangres; la sensación de su sangre casi negra, orlada de encantadores coagulitos, todavía caliente por la muy reciente tibieza de su hendidura y la presión de sus muslos, conjugándose con mis propios fluidos que yo tenía por asquerosos gracias a los aspavientos de mi mamá; era algo así como el comienzo del éxtasis, un diálogo de amor con mi desconocido cuerpo, un ritual sacrílego, o todo junto. Era metérmela muy dentro, traerla entre las piernas. (60)

This transition to womanhood, marked by lesbian sexuality and blood, is linked to Moramay’s firstsueños húmedos that she experiences after reading a famous tale about an immortal connoisseur of blood, Dracula. Like this liminal figure, Moramay uses blood to establish her own distinct relationship to temporality. By embracing a passage into womanhood that her mother would find distinctly grotesque, she disassociates herself from her mother’s experience of

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womanhood: a passive wife whose husband mysteriously disappears after dinner each night. Vanessa and Moramay are able to experience a fully-fledged sexual encounter with each other only when they are able to declare their independence from the male “wolves” in their lives. Ironically, their sexual freedom is only feasible after they make a suicide pact and write suicide notes that denounce the abuses they have suffered. This challenge to the female passivity that sustains a male dominated society is bittersweet for it is also self-destructive, and they become wolves for each other. Réquiem por una muñeca rota does not offer the reader a way out of the vicious environment that it depicts so easily, and their suicide attempt fails when Vanessa’s mother, Marianela, finds them:

Dejamos puesto el disco y justo en la canción de Cliff Richard, la aguja se atascó. A Marianela le pareció extraño que no hiciéramos nada por componer el desperfecto y tras quince minutos de repetirse hasta el hartazgo, talk anymore... talk anymore...talk anymore...acudió a llamarnos la atención. Lo que vio la hizo gritar a todo pulmón: Vanessa y yo desnudas, una encima de la otra, con una botella vacía de Johnnie Walker en la almohada, dormidas como benditas. Sobre el buró, el frasco vació de barbitúricos y el sobre membretado con Los Pitufos donde colocamos nuestra misiva póstuma. Gritó más fuerte […] Cuando al fin desperté en una cama de hospital, mamá y Lú se abalanzaron sobre mí, llorando de alivio, haciéndome arrumacos, pero sólo se me ocurrió preguntar. . . —¿Y Vanessa? (109)

After this event, the girls’ mothers conspire to keep them apart, and Moramay’s mother decides to move with her to another city. Still, the novel underscores the power of lesbian intimacy to offset temporarily the confines of female gender roles in a macho culture as Vanessa and Moramay move between temporal identifications. The final scene eroticizes temporal shifts when Vanessa asks in a

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childlike voice if Moramay loves her, and after her infantilized voice reminds Moramay of what she was like before her parents shaped her into “una modelo cuasi porno,” the two share a passionate kiss (121). The novel ends with Moramay’s mother interrupting their embrace as she comes into the room without knocking first in order to announce that Lú has arrived to take them to the airport. By omitting Moramay’s actual departure from Vanessa, the novel’s ending reinforces the couples’ ability to interrupt the imperative of adult temporality. Carmen Gómez Ojea’s novel, Nunca soñé contigo, also explores the potential of two teenage girls’ sexual relationship to disrupt conventional temporality. For the narrator, Lisa, her lesbian connection with another girl provides her with a way to mitigate her fear of the future. For Lisa, the not-yet space of being a teenager in love with a boy makes her reluctant to grow up and enter adulthood. She envies her stuffed animals’ ageless state and longs to be a child again when becoming more mature was not on her existential radar:

Por una parte os envidio a vosotros y a todos los demás, mis muñecos y muñecas, que me miráis con ojos pasmados desde el estante, porque no tenéis que pasar por todo esto de hacerse mayor y crecer, y dar estirones unas veces por fuera y otras por dentro, de modo que parece que no sabes por dónde andas. Quizá se trate de eso que se llama adolescencia y que me suena fatal, a dolencia, convalecencia (14).

When she later falls in love with another teenage girl, Chantal, she experiences a change in her relationship to time and the chance to start over: “Mi historia empezó contigo, contigo, Francisca de Chantal, amor mío” (125). Chantal also remarks on their relationship and time, noting the ignorance associated with conventional temporality that relegates youth to asexuality and adulthood to heterosexuality:

Los adultos piensan que eso de los besos y el amor es algo exclu- sivo de ellos, y que no es propio de los menores ni de los viejos.

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Y lo mismo pasa con esto nuestro, me refiero a lo tuyo y lo mío. No está bien visto, por mucho que se hable de permisividad, tolerancia y demás cuentos, que dos mujeres, dos amigas como nosotras, se quieran, se besen y se acaricien, aunque sientan la necesidad de hacerlo. Tú ahora eres mi amor, así de claro. No sé qué pasará mañana. (124)

Chantal’s uncertainty about the future does not negate her strong affirmation of same-sex attraction in the present. The strength of Chantal’s conviction and affirmation of lesbian sexuality in the present counters the social disapproval of “youthful sexual experimentation.” With Chantal’s affirmation, Lisa is able to look forward to the passage of time despite the difficulties that maintaining the relationship in a homophobic society might entail: “Ahora deseo que llegue el otoño, la tranquilidad de la lluvia, caminar juntas bajo un paraguas, vivir a tu lado la dulzura airada del invierno” (134). The narration does not follow the two characters into their adult life and, as a result, the reader is left without a conclusion as to whether or not this relationship will end as the two teenagers grow up. The novel ends with Lisa writing in her notebook about her longing to see Chantal again:

Como verás, no paro de incumplir mis propósitos de vivir al máximo cada instante, anhelando que el tiempo vuele. Soy una tonta por correr así hacia el futuro, sin detenerme a pensar que el verano, nuestro verano, todavía canta en el mar, en las calles, en el fugor de esta luna, en esta noche en que, Chantal—cómo me gusta tu nombre— te escribo a la luz de mi lámpara. Tú eres mi lámpara encendida. (134)

Nunca soñé contigo associates lesbian connections with youth, but by making fun of adults’ assumption that youth are in an essen- tially distinct time, in separate non-sexual bodies, unable to love as adults love, the novel suggests that the youth/adult binary marks a perceived rather than an objective difference. Consequently, the purported power of the adult to assign asexuality to youth with any

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legitimacy or accuracy is destabilized and with it the moral condem- nation of sexual relations between members of the same sex. The lesbian relationships depicted inEl mismo mar de todos los veranos, Réquiem por una muñeca rota, and Nunca soñé contigo challenge, from within the not-yet space of childhood, the imperative to couple heterosexually. In positing this challenge from within a temporality of youth and ending their narratives before the characters in each couple are seen as adult women, these novels reify the separation between child and adult. By depicting female sexuality within the temporality of youth, however, they also show connections between the allegedly separate categories of innocence and knowledge (i.e., sexually active), youth and maturity. This dialectical relationship between youth and maturity underscores the incompleteness of identity, whether young or mature. The essence of the subject that is purportedly understood and accepted when the “becoming an adult” child gives way to the “being” of adulthood is hence called into question.

4.2 Queer Ontology and Identity: Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes

Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes shares with El mismo mar de todos los veranos, Réquiem por una muñeca rota, and Nunca soñé contigo the narration of an adolescent girl’s same-sex relationship. Beatriz describes her relationship to space and time as different from those of the dominant culture around her. Eliding stable and essentialist conceptions of sexual and gendered identity, she is at odds with the normative temporality that privileges them. Beatriz perceives herself as atemporal and not of the world, as an extra-terrestrial: “fui enviada al mundo con una misión: comuni- carme con otros seres, intercambiar datos, transmitir” (15). Instead of identifying with a “naturally” fixed identity, she feels that she is like the satellites that have been purposefully fixed in space and left mute, although their principal job was to communicate: “Y aunque sé que no debo ser así, el caso es que me siento a millones de años luz de cualquier señal de vida, si la hay, que se desarrolle a mi alrededor.

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Siento que navego en la órbita cementerio” (15). Her experience of space and time shares an affinity with the incomprehensible nature of the universe, and she has difficulty articulating her subjectivity within the available paradigms of identity. Beatriz follows the problematic of identification from adolescence to adulthood and counters social expectations that identity be resolved when one is no longer a teenager. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler questions the presumption that “identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coher- ent” (22). She argues that identities that are presumed to remain stable through time are difficult to separate from gender: “‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in confor- mity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility” (Gender Trouble 22). Sexuality and sex join alongside gender as “stabilizing concepts” through which identity is assured (23). In her analysis of identity in Space, Time, and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes the concept of space-time, noting that it is difficult to separate identity from the “overarching context of space-time, within which bodies function and are conceived” (100). Those subjects who feel inadequately described by stable identity categories of gender and sexuality may also feel uncomfortably positioned vis-à-vis normative temporalities and traditionally heterosexual social institutions, such as marriage and family. Thus,Beatriz is unsettling then because the protagonist’s incoherence and self-described temporal discontinuity call into question what it is to be a person. Beatriz finds herself freefalling in space-time, not residing in the world of heterosexual identity nor in the world of homosexual identity:

Y si yo no era una chica, si era algo así como una especie de alienígena infiltrado que no era él ni era ella, ¿por qué tenía entonces que enamorarme de un hombre y casarme y tener hijos si a mí no me apetecía? ¿Por qué no iba a enamorarme de quien a mí me diera la gana? (144)

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After her first mutually consenting sexual experience with a man, Ralph, Beatriz questions the implications of this encounter for her space-time location, that is, her identity: “Según el tópico, yo con- ocía lo mejor de los dos mundos. (¿Sólo hay dos? ¿Y dónde se supone entonces que resido yo?)” (221). When fixed to the atmosphere of the binary hetero/homo worlds, in which residence in one world presupposes exclusion from the other, Beatriz is bounced back into the cemetery orbit of non-communication. The narrative engages in temporal and spatial jumps between Beatriz’ adolescence in Madrid with her friend and love interest, Mónica, her university studies in Edinburgh where she lives with her lover Caitlin (Cat), and the narrative present just after she has left Cat to return to Madrid. Such temporal discontinuities again reinforce the moving quality of Beatriz’ subjectivity and sexuality, and run counter to linear time and movement and their concomitant sense of progress and fulfillment. Moments of similarity that connect these narrative threads punctuate the disjuncture between them. She describes that all around her and Mónica there is “un vacío enorme y negro, una quietud indescifrable” (15). This inde- cipherable vacuum resonates with her description of her own heart years later after she has had sexual relations with a man: “Desde la primera vez que me acosté con Ralph, desde que compartí al uno y a la otra, mi corazón se convirtió en algo borroso, indefinible, indescifrable” (221). Even prior to her sexual experience with Ralph, however, Beatriz was unable to comprehend her own subjectivity with ease and did not feel singularly identified with any one sexual orientation: “Porque si me hubieran preguntado en ese momento si yo era lesbiana o si era heterosexual, e incluso si era bisexual, que parecía la respuesta más convincente, no hubiera sabido qué responder” (221). Beatriz, who does not identity with the prevailing space- time of those around her, is also unable to orient herself sexually using terms that connote stability. During her time with Mónica, she feels attracted to a man and notes, “Habría podido acostarme con él y entonces probablemente no habría existido Cat, y quién sabe, quizá hubiera terminado por convertirme en una chica como

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tantas otras, femenina y heterosexual” (213). The assumption that heterosexuality is natural and predetermined, something Adrienne Rich calls “the bias of compulsory heterosexuality,” is countered when Beatriz speaks of being heterosexual as something that one can become (632). In a conversation with Mónica, Beatriz feels pressured to declare sides in the sexual orientation game of border patrol. Mónica is expressing how sexy Beatriz looks with a new hairdo and quickly diverts her praise to suggest that Beatriz fix herself up and get involved with a guy, being as attractive as she is, to which Beatriz replies:

—Los tíos no me interesan. —¿Qué quieres decir?, ¿que te van las tías? —No. Sólo he dicho que los tíos no me interesan—contraata- qué—. No es lo mismo. (127)

Here Beatriz counters the supposedly natural binary opposition between men and women; Saying that you are not interested in men is not the same as saying that you are interested in women. Rather than read Beatriz’ declaration that men do not interest her as a definitive indication of her “true” lesbian identity, it is more clearly a rejection of Mónica’s attempt to divert attention from her expressed attraction toward Beatriz’ appearance. Beatriz’ experience of feminine gender is also troubled, and even though she thinks that her disheveled appearance sends out the message “machos, manteneos alejados” she finds that men are still attracted to her. Faced with the continued interest of men in her appearance, Beatriz remarks that maybe she is more feminine than her mother believes: “[…] quizá yo no sea tan poco femenina como mi madre pretende. Es posible que haya que redefinir la acepción de semejante término” (54-55). This suggests that something other than what Beatriz’ mother recognizes as feminine attracts men, and if what attracts men is necessarily referred to as feminine, then the term feminine needs fine tuning. It remains unclear, given the nature of language, whether or not terms can simply be redefined without falling back into the rigidity that prompted a need for

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redefinition in the first place. Prying apart the pairing of terms such as male with masculinity and female with femininity, as occurs in the title of Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), suggests a reworking of language that avoids a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified. It is difficult to resist the impulse to find a final resolution to these ambiguities in Beatriz’ character, or to give primacy to the homosexual nature of her desire since the novel ends with her realization that she wants to return to being with Cat. Carmen de Urioste concludes that the novel defines “un espacio fluido donde los rígidos límites patriarcales no tienen cabida, subvirtiendo el sistema dual sobre el que se basa el heterosexualismo compulsivo y dejando a la interpretación del lector el análisis de un deseo homoerótico femenino” (135). While I agree that much interpretation is left open to the reader, I would add that the narrative does not support certain conclusions. When Urioste writes about the ending of the novel that, “Beatriz reconoce honestamente su homosexualidad e intenta comunicarse con Cat,” she seems to suggest that Beatriz had been struggling throughout the novel against her homosexuality (132). The narrative does not, however, support the idea that Beatriz became a lesbian, or rather, realized that she already was a lesbian and identified herself as such. Nor does it privilege her attraction to females over males, as this passage where she describes her feelings for Mónica demonstrates:

Pero la cosa no se reducía a un término tan simple como que a mí me gustaron o no las mujeres. Me gustaba ella. Ella, sólo ella, reconocible en medio de este monstruoso criptograma cuántico que es el universo. Y si hubiera sido un hombre, me habría gustado también. (190-191)

The idealization of Mónica into a realm beyond women and men is a romantic gesture that does not account for Beatriz’ attraction to Mónica’s female body. Rather than being prompted by the fear of accepting her sexual interest in women, perhaps her hesitation in saying that she does love women as women is the result of her

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resistance to confinement to a single identity category, one that does not accurately reflect other aspects of her sexuality. Beatriz’ subjectivity is well described by Grosz’s term becoming-lesbian, mentioned in previous chapters, which describes lesbian sexuality as a process rather than an essential identity. Furthering the notion that Beatriz was not resisting her homosexual desires is her realization toward the end of the novel that she is no longer in love with Mónica. Her trouble had not been her attraction to women but an attraction to people with a particular relationship to space-time. At the end of the novel, Beatriz no longer relates to space-time in the same manner as Mónica who she describes as being like a dead star that can still be perceived even though its light has extinguished: “más alejada que nunca, nada mío ya, como una estrella lejanísima, a millones de años luz” (263). It is not the traditional sense of homosexual desire between members of the same biological sex that is at stake in Beatriz. The homosexuality of Beatriz requires a broadening of the normative understanding of sexuality that does not situate itself along traditional divides. Beatriz is critical of borders, whether they be between males and females or lesbians and bisexuals. D. Travers Scott, in his essay “Le Freak, C’est Chic! Le fag, quelle drag! Celebrating the Collapse of Homosexual Identity,” describes such a position:

As it’s finally sinking in that if gender is fluid, how can sexual ‘orientation’ not be as well? How can you be rigidly ‘oriented’ toward something that is amorphous, shifting, fluid, tricky, elusive? Basing your identity on sexuality is like building a house on a foundation of pudding. (66)

Speaking of S/M and kink, bi, and transgender movements, Scott says, “They’re forcing us to question whether identity is something that really boils down to a name, label, tag, or definition. Perhaps it’s a range of experience. Perhaps it’s not one thing at all but several, simultaneous and contradictory, even” (67). Similarly, Beatriz does not fit nicely into any category and her subject positions are multiple and even contradictory.

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Speaking of her sexuality, Beatriz emphasizes that the gender of her object of desire is not her primary concern. Her sexuality is in keeping with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes in Epistemology of the Closet, namely that in the area of sexuality there are many “things that can differentiate even people of identical gender, race, nationality, class, and ‘sexual orientation’” (25). For Beatriz, gender and sexual orientation are subordinated to her interest in people’s relationship to space-time: “[…] sólo acceden a mi interior gentes con determinadas características: personas que reniegan de su pasado, en permanente huida de sí mismos, como Mónica, como Caitlin, como Ralph” (228). While this description distinguishes itself from traditional preoccupations with sex and gender, it also posits a romantic definition of Beatriz’ sexuality that ironically imitates the same formulaic models of identity that she resists. Of the three people mentioned as examples that fit this definition, Cat presents that greatest challenge to the limits that it sets out. The characters ofBeatriz that are said to be fleeing from themselves, from time and the past, are described within places that register their altered relationship to space-time:

El territorio de Mónica, huido del tiempo y del espacio mer- ced a un muy particular túnel de relatividad que ella se había construido a fuerza de voluntad, se mantenía al margen de la rutina que presidía el resto de la casa. (14)

Mónica’s room, which does not register the past, is similar to Ralph’s apartment, which Beatriz notes is clean of dust, hence free of any sign of the past accumulating on its surfaces. Just as Mónica’s room stands in contrast to the rest of the house, so Ralph’s apartment stands in contrast to the usually decrepit houses that Beatriz is accustomed to visiting, and after entering his space she thinks to herself, “Creí que había encontrado a mi segunda Mónica” (203). With its methodically organized books and music collection, the timeless apartment is also different from the temporary student housing that she has known: “distinto a todos los precarios refugios temporales, aquellos apartamentos de estudiantes” (202). Speaking

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from Madrid and having abandoned Cat without warning, Beatriz thinks to herself that if she chooses not to return to Cat, her time in Edinburgh will have been a temporary refuge, removed from her “real” temporality: “un refugio temporal, ajeno a mi verdadera natu- raleza” (56). What her space-time with Cat will be if she does return to Edinburgh is not described and nor is her “true nature.” Beatriz’ search for communication with others, particularly with Mónica, leads her toward a way to perceive and newly comprehend her past in Madrid. Abandoning Cat in order to gain this new understanding of her past threatens to lock her experiences in Edinburgh in a space-time that she will no longer be able to access. The space-time surrounding Cat and Mónica is also distinct when we consider how Beatriz distinguishes between the youth that she and Cat share and the unique time of puberty that she shared with Mónica:

Un año de diferencia, que en la juventud no significa nada y no crea una distancia exagerada, por ejemplo, entre mis veintidós años y los veinticinco de Cat, cobra una importancia signifi- cativa en la pubertad, y marcaba, de los doce a los trece, una distancia inmensa, la distancia que distingue a una niña plana y con trenzas de una mujer que usa sujetador y ya sabe para qué sirven los tampones. (140)

Despite the immense distance of the one pubescent year that makes Mónica older than Beatriz, the two teenagers are also alike in time: “En medio de ese mundo pastel, Mónica era la única que compartía conmigo aquella difusa impresión de desamparo y desarraigo, de haber crecido antes de tiempo” (124). They both feel out of place, kicked out, left without shelter, and this distancing in space pushes them forward in time in a way that is not in accordance with normative time, as antes de tiempo implies. In contrast to this forward movement that places Beatriz and Mónica together ahead of time is Cat’s infantile regression, which repels Beatriz. She experiences Cat’s talking to her “con un susurro de niña de tres años,” to be alienating:

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A veces intentaba explicarle que yo me sentía desesperadamente necesitada de alguien que me comprendiera, y que ella blo- queaba toda posibilidad de comunicación, porque ¿cómo iba a apetecerme explicarle mis cosas a alguien que parecía no estar en edad de comprenderlas? (180)

Cat’s womanly appearance, which reminds Beatriz of actress and sex symbol Nastassja Kinski, attracts Beatriz and contrasts sharply with the infantile voice that Cat sometimes adopts. Cat’s feigned movement back in time leaves Beatriz, who is attracted to experiences in a shared sense of space-time, blocked from communication. In contrast to Cat’s womanly body that repels Beatriz when coupled with a childlike voice is the vision of a childlike body with an adult message that attracts her one night in a bar. Recalling a girl who wore a shirt that read “Monogamy is unnatural,” Beatriz says:

Aquella chica había conseguido, de alguna manera milagrosa, congelar en su cuerpo ese momento inaprensible en el que la infancia confluye con la adolescencia; y se mantenía en un presente inmóvil, en un territorio propio, ajeno al lento fluir de los minutos y al inevitable deterioro que éstos traerían consigo. Me pareció la visión más erótica que había visto en la vida. Ahora me miro en el espejo y me doy cuenta de lo mucho que aquella desconocida y yo nos parecemos, eternas adolescentes, cuerpos andróginos, permiso de residencia en el país de Nunca Jamás, visado sin fecha de caducidad. (35-36)

What this dancing girl brings into focus is not so much that Beatriz’ attraction revolves around a preference for a childlike body with an adult voice (symbolized by the message on the girl’s tee-shirt) as opposed to an adult body with a childlike voice (such as Cat represents), but rather the coupling of disparate elements that seem to have miraculously played a trick on time. Cat’s occasional change in voice does not present a lasting illusion of destabilized time the way that the androgynous and silent dancing girl does. I would add

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to Jill Robbins’ observation in her article “The (In)visible Lesbian: The Contradictory Representations of Female Homoeroticism in Contemporary Spain,” that in addition to Beatriz’ voyeuristic gaze as she watches women perform butch and femme identities, she also engages a more self-reflective position. The vision of the androgynous girl is coupled immediately by Beatriz reflecting upon her own body and experience of time in the passage from the novel cited above. Beatriz’ relationship to time is indicative of her discomfort with the heteronormative time and social conventions that her mother represents. Avoiding a womanly appearance in her body reflects her rejection of the feminine model that her mother upholds. In a traditional heterosexual framework, little girls imitate their mothers and, as Akiko Tsuchiya indicates, Beatriz’ avoidance of looking like a woman also helps her to resist identification with her mother’s role as a woman of the Sección Femenina: “a stereotypi- cal embodiment of traditional femininity, devoutly religious and self-sacrificing” (246). This avoidance of her mother flows into the ambivalence that she feels in her relationship with Cat: “Supongo que Cat me recordaba demasiado a mi madre, así que en seguida empecé a distanciarme e hice todo lo posible por no quererla, y a veces me pregunto si de verdad la quise mientras viví con ella” (40). Although Beatriz does present a negative image of maternity, it also paints a negative portrait of paternity, as represented by the abusive figure of her father. It is not so much a vilification of the mother that the narration supports, as Tsuchiya suggests, but rather Beatriz’ rejection of the heterosexual and patriarchal system that appears to trap her parents in suffocating roles (247).2 Beatriz mentions that maternity and religious life were the only options that her mother was aware of, and she describes her mother’s experience of matrimony in negative terms: “Ella contrajo matrimonio como quien contrae una gripe” (86). Beatriz attempts not to reduce her options but finds them diminished both in heterosexual models of relationships as well as in non-heterosexual paradigms. Beatriz is suspicious of marriage-like relationships in which individual identity is trumped by the identity of the couple, locking

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two people in the same space-time coordinate: “[…] siempre tienes que estar allí. Y yo quería definirme según mi deseo de estar allí, no según la imposición” (49). Beatriz finds that she is scared by the stability of mutual love between her and Cat: “Entonces, cuando sentí dentro de mí cómo ella también me quería, me asusté” (40). She is also critical of Cat’s claim to a rigid and stable lesbian identity and Cat’s total rejection of bisexual women’s desire for other women because “en el fondo lo que quieren es un hombre” (46). Perhaps it is not only the permanence of a marriage-like union that Beatriz fears but also Cat’s possible rejection. In addition, the novel depicts the limitations of Beatriz’ own prejudices and beliefs, such as her assumption that anyone who is different and does not fit in is gay. In one particularly amusing scene, Beatriz, upon being kissed by Ralph, says, “¿Pero tú no eres gay?” after which she quickly notes “lo inapropiado de la frase” (203). Despite Beatriz’ dissatisfaction with identity categories and stereotypes applied to her, she too perceives others erroneously and is surprised when the limitations placed on them turn out to be wrong. If the dominant temporality is one that valorizes the past, imbues the future with progress and resolution, and claims full knowledge of who, what, and where one is in the present, it is a temporality that Beatriz both resists and accepts. The novel does not resolve this contradiction, nor does it offer a way out of the trappings of identity politics, but it does show that in Beatriz’ attempt to engage alternative and multiple modes of affiliation, she often imitates the very models that exclude her, never escaping the dialectic of power and resistance.

4.3 Queering Spatiality

I’m like the man who carried a brick with him to show the world just what his home looked like. - Bertolt Brecht “Homelessness” can in a sense be a virtue, an adventure – so it appears - Hakim Bey

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Home, a place where one belongs. There is “no place like home” and beginning in the nineteenth century it is treated as the unambiguous locus of identity. Traditionally, the values of the heterosexual family fix home in place, hence the relegation of queers to the “closet.” Not a home, “the closet,” according to one of its definitions listed in the O.E.D., it is a space that is not in the world: “[T]he place of private study or secluded speculation; esp. in reference to mere theories as opposed to practical measures[…] . The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in the Closet” (440). Though both the home and the proverbial “gay closet” are spaces that are indelibly marked by the strictures of privacy, the home maintains somewhat more of an open relationship with the public: though one might speak in public of the happen- ings at home, social taboos prevent speaking of the goings-on in the closet. Many lesbian narratives deal with the tensions that arise when private is made public and the public is brought into the private realm. Characters often express their experience of spatial ontology and in this expression we find a unique opportunity to theorize the relation of identity politics, spatiality, and corporality. For sexual “outsiders” confined to the closet, the act of travel is a foundational aspect of identity formation: coming out of the closet. Travel, a well-known trope in literature in general, is common in lesbian narrative and pertinent to the questions of space and belonging that characters confront owing to their marginalized status in society. It involves uprooting a person from her/his customary location, often a change in time zones, and the question of identity. In the forward to the anthology of short stories Lesbian Travels (1998), Rebecca Brown relates travel to the ontology of the lesbian subject:

“Writers have two countries,” [Gertrude] Stein wrote in Paris, France, “the one where they belong and the one in which they live really.” She could have written the same thing about lesbians. We have one country, one set of behaviors, one tradition in which we are raised and to which, for a time, we

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belong. This is the country of being daughters, of being young, dependent, pre-sexual innocents, of believing that our parents, our roles in our society, our jobs as girls are still correct. But we as lesbians have another country, too, the one in which we “live really.” This is the country we discover on our own, or with the guidance of another woman who teaches us the customs. This is the country we explore to discover an important part of ourselves, where we learn how to speak a language new to us, but that we understand immediately. It is a country where what our parents regard as strange and dangerous is familiar, welcoming, desirous to us. It is a country where we recognize our kind. (viii)

Brown’s “lesbian country” is replete with its own language, territory to be discovered and explored, and autochthonous citizens who will understand its language upon hearing it for the first time. As I have argued in previous chapters, nationalism is so strong a legitimating force that affirmative claims of lesbian existence are frequently posited in nationalist terms. Brown’s “lesbian country” negates the heterosexual family home’s claim to roots and origins and asserts a lesbian nation that transcends all other nationalisms. For some authors, travel provides the conditions to prove lesbian unity beyond traditional borders, and the writers of this lesbian nation, according to Brown, are “members of an international clan of self-made women” (ix). Annamarie Jagose in Lesbian Utopics underscores the tendency to “characterize ‘lesbian’ as elsewhere and other, as utopic” (21). Despite the importance of travel for Brown’s analysis of lesbian identity and belonging, this movement does not avoid replacing the static heterosexual family home with an equally rooted lesbian clan united by a common point of interest. Travel in this case is not reducible to fluidity and is less associated with pure movement than with a game of connect the dots. In “‘Coming home’: Queer Migrations and Multiple Evocations of Home,” Anne-Marie Fortier, looking at “identity narratives that seek to reconfigure spaces of belonging shaped through both movement and attachment,” asks,

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“Can we consider differential movements of subjects as not simply about thinking about home as mobile—not simply about the undoing of home as stasis—but as the re-forming of the very bounded spatiality of homes?” (405). Spanish writer Carmen Nestares’ novel Venus en Buenos Aires manifests such a re-forming of nation, or homeland, when the Spanish protagonist, Cristina, finds home not in her national territory of Spain but rather in the body of her Argentinean lover, Adriana: “ […] mi país eres tú” (228). Their relationship is founded in a disruption of space as they meet on the Internet and fall in love without physical proximity. The “virtual” context of their meeting facilitates a loss of concern for boundaries and identity, as Cristina’s conversation with her soon to be ex-boyfriend Jaime demonstrates:

—Estás loca, tú no eres lesbiana. —No, no soy lesbiana. Pero tampoco soy heterosexual. No sé lo que soy, pero no me preocupa no encontrar una palabra que lo defina. (33)

Throughout the novel Cristina refers to her sexuality in many ways, saying that she is lesbian, homosexual, and bisexual, and is not particularly concerned with affirming any one. Her most insistent claim is that her tendencia sexual is her choice and that “el acto sexual tanto para los gays como para los heterosexuales consiste prácticamente en lo mismo” (269, 314). She roundly disagrees with her father’s assessment that lesbianism is “de nacimiento o de vicio” (217). As in many Hispanic lesbian narratives, the family rejects their daughter’s sexuality and with it their daughter. Cristina’s familial and national bonds undergo changes as her relationship with Adriana deepens. Unable to live in close proximity to her “home” and maintain a relationship with Adriana, Cristina flies to Argentina: “El avión despegó. Madrid quedaba abajo[…] . Cuanto más pequeña se hacía la ciudad, tanto más comprendía que en mi vida había estado siempre sola y que todas las compañías de las que me había rodeado hasta entonces habían demostrado ser condicionales” (319). Although it is deeply painful for Cristina to

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leave her family, especially owing to her continued attachment to her mother, she is able to envision a new life for herself in the moment of travel. Cristina is finally closest to a sense of home while she is moving and attached. She does not identify with a future-oriented sense of time and progress but does feel united with a temporality most often associated with love, a transcendental time: “[…] lo único que me quedaba: la palabra siempre” (320). Most especially during its inception, cyberspace was emblematic of such desire for transcendentalism, breaking through borders and queering space: it has been framed as the ultimate frontier, as an illusion of pure movement, rather than linearity. The Internet has been imagined as an idealized version of society: a place that renders identity malleable, a place of frontiers and freedom, a place of endless connections and connectivity. It has been imagined as a place where the material limits of body do not impact interactions, where borders are erased and fluidity reigns. The promises of creative potential in this imagined place hold obvious appeal for those who feel especially trapped by the limits of social identifications such as gender, sexuality, race, etc. Diana Saco argues in Cybering Democracy that in spite of appearances, cyberspace is physically bound, gender coded, and infused with law and order. For example, Index on Censorship reported in 2001 that one of the largest Internet cafes in the world, easy Group, was using software that blocked access to gay and lesbian sites, even though they were not pornographic (White 1). Saco notes, however, that in spite of its inability to entirely escape traditional political and spatial orders, computer networking has begun to “complicate the notion of private property (especially intellectual property), to frustrate juridical assumptions relating one body to one identity or personality, and to violate the principle of exclusive location, on which the sovereignty of nation-states depends” (7). An example of a Web site that utilizes networking to organize women outside of traditional national boundaries is creatividadfeminista. org, which provides links to music, radio, videos, articles, and a forum for women to discuss topics of interest, including feminism and lesbianism:

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En Creatividad Feminista no ponemos el país voluntariamente y por razones políticas, vivimos en México pero contra toda forma de nacionalismo, somos ciudadanas del mundo (no tenemos ni queremos tener patria) y queremos que Creatividad Feminista sea de toda mujer hispano hablante, que las usuarias se identifiquen por el contenido y no por el país de quienes la hacen. Tocamos asuntos de todas partes. A veces nos escriben mujeres argentinas o chilenas o españolas pidiéndonos inte- grarse al equipo, creyendo que está en su país y eso nos gusta. Ya que la Web es tan impersonal al menos que sea buena para romper políticamente las fronteras.3 (Bedregal)

Collective in nature, creatividadfeminista.org prioritizes women’s issues from various parts of the world, e.g., Islamic feminism, the history of lesbianism in Cuba, and women workers in Chilean mines. In her article “Ethics, Gender and the Internet: An Exploration of Some Spanish Feminists’ Praxis,” Margaret Andrews finds that Spanish feminists’ websites also promote “what is positive about female difference and collectivity” (38). In these examples, difference as such is not eliminated, but is asserted above and across national differences. In Mabel Galán’s Desde la otra orilla (1999), one of the principal characters, Andrea, is able to use the Internet to connect with another woman, but not through an explicitly shared recognition of female difference. She seduces a woman named Alicia via her masculine gendered persona, Acuarela, in cyberspace. Her persona is masculine insofar as s/he exhibits qualities traditionally associated with male behavior. Acuarela initiates contact with Alicia, invites Alicia to continued communication, and sets the conditions for their interactions; she engages in “forward” and dominant gestures traditionally associated with masculinity. Andrea is a waitress in a restaurant that Alicia frequents, and she occupies a more powerful position than Alicia in the relationship by not revealing her identity when she chats online with Alicia as Acuarela: “Alicia, tú no me conoces, pero yo a ti sí” (22).

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In her electronic interactions with Alicia, Andrea is able to facilitate a disassociation between gender (masculinity/femininity) and sex (male/female), upsetting the “natural” association of the male sex with masculine gendered behavior. Acuarela’s act mirrors one of Beatriz Preciado’s principles of the “counter-sexual society” as outlined in her philosophical text Manifiesto contra-sexual: “exploración virtual de los cambios de género y de sexo gracias a distintas formas de travestismo: cross-dressing, internet-drag, identidad ciber, etc.” (33). Acuarela maintains “his” cyber-identity during cybersex with Alicia through computer-mediated masturbation where s/he tells Alicia how to touch herself. This encounter pushes at the limits of what might be considered lesbian sex since Alicia believes that Acuarela is a man and Andrea interacts with Alicia without breaking this assumption. For example, Acuarela describes his/her sex as being “a punto de estallar,” a description that traditionally calls to mind male ejaculation (106). When asked to describe his/her physical features, Acuarela says, “Nada extraordinario, no soy un Adonis si es lo que quieres saber, pero tengo mi encanto” (109). For women who fear being rejected by another woman sexually, as does Andrea, the Internet can facilitate a courtship that is not primarily based on physical cues and direct contact. The kinds of borders, national and sexual, that the Internet can cross are growing rapidly. There are now, for example “Internet enabled adult toys” and video cameras that allow one’s partner or an anonymous subscriber anywhere in cyberspace to control the movement of the “toy” through a toolbar (e.g., www.highjoy.com). The cyberspace of these encounters is not, however, free of limits and borders: only those who have Internet access and can afford to pay for membership and/or equipment can participate, and the ability of Web sites to archive and map data is a far cry from anonymity. Andrea’s eventual disclosure that she is the woman behind Acuarela, her “male” virtual persona, is an act that reveals “those normalizing discourses that presuppose a unitary relationship between one identity and one body, a presupposition that has depended on visible practices of incorporation that cyberspace

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excludes” (Saco 138). Alicia had assumed a unitary relationship between Acuarela’s apparently male identity and a concomitant male body despite the lack of visual cues to reinforce her conclusion. Visual cues do not, however, always clarify the relation between sex and gender, and the failure to confront this issue is exemplified by the murder of Brandon Teena in 1993 (the subject of Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry), the murder of Gwen Araujo in 2002, and also in a report outside of the United States in 2006 of deadly attacks against transgender women in Guatemala (Human Rights Watch). Andrea is not alone in her engagement of ambiguity, and the reader discovers that both Alicia and Alicia’s fortuneteller, Eloísa, maintain a certain amount of duplicity in their lives by withholding information from others. Desde la otra orilla is not so much concerned with the discovery of certain people’s duplicity and the arrival at the truth of their identity as it is with the concept informing Linda Hutcheon’s book, The Politics of Postmodernism: language and human communication are duplicitous and identity and truth are always somewhat of a fiction. Thinking to herself, Alicia is able to arrive at a truth running through Andrea’s ficticious persona: “Es una mujer muy atrevida—pensó—, pero ha sido la única persona que ha sabido romper mis barreras” (173). Alicia’s decision to maintain her relationship with Andrea is a resolution that is repeated in other novels, such as La insensata geometría del amor (2001) and Con pedrigree (1997), when one woman confronts another’s duplicity. The pattern established in these women authored novels of the twentieth century stands in contrast to the Spanish male-authored texts of the nineteenth century analyzed by Lou Charnon-Deutsch who notes, in Gender and Representation: Women in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Realist Fiction, that some kind of abandonment usually follows the unveiling of women’s excess and duplicitous nature. By diminishing the importance of the differences between orillas and elevating the importance of traversing the spaces that separate them, Desde la otra orilla depicts the Internet as a potentially liberating place for women to “travel” in spite of, and perhaps even owing to, the fictions they may encounter along the way.

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4.4 Another Stage: Countering American Hegemony in the “Utopia of the Mirror” 4

The unification of national border crossings and sexuality found on the Internet relates to the more general tensions between global universalisms and local specificities of the gay rights movement. On the one hand, this movement is figured in utopian terms as global, tied more to universalized principles of freedom than to any one place or nation. On the other hand, it is inextricably bound to the specificity of the United States and the iconic Stonewall riots that took place in New York City in 1969. This tie between the United States and the gay rights movement is so strong that for some, acceptance of the term gay or queer is synonymous with acceptance of American cultural imperialism. For others, LGBT life in the United States is a model worth pursuing, mirroring their aspirations to experience greater freedom in the expression of their sexuality. Three works that question the centrality of the United States in the gay and lesbian cultural imaginary are the filmCosta Brava (Family Album) (1995) directed by Marta Balletbò-Coll and Ana Simón Cerezo, the Mexican novel, Dos mujeres (1990) by Sara Levi Calderón, and the Latina novel Memory Mambo (1996) by Achy Obejas. Their shared topic of travel facilitates this reworking of the preeminence of the United States, drawing our attention to the relation of sexuality to the delineation of national boundaries and space. Costa Brava takes place in Barcelona where the protagonist Anna, played by Balletbò-Coll, is a comedic writer, actress, and travel guide for Costa Brava Tours, Inc. As a tour guide, Anna meets and falls in love with Montserrat, an American-Israeli seismic engineer working at a university in Barcelona. Travel and lesbianism unite the two lovers and surround Anna’s current comedic project. The two women meet during a guided tour of Barcelona and later have their first sexual experience together during a trip to the Costa Brava. This liminal place of the “Rugged Coast” is emblematic of the sexual and national borders that they traverse and that enable their being together. Anna’s monologue, Love Thy Neighbor,is also

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associated with travel and crossing borders. Staged and filmed on a rooftop with Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in the background, it depicts a housewife’s recounting of her first lesbian experience. InFeminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema, Susan Martin-Márquez notes that the phallic structure of the cathedral acts as an “ironic counterpoint to the woman’s hilarious discourse on the phallus late in the film” (289). With Gaudi’s cathedral as the setting for the narration of a lesbian relationship, the monologue contests Spanish national identity, crossing the borders that bind it to heterosexuality, family, and the Catholic Church. Also disrupting the traditional unification of heterosexual love, nation, and family, the film’s title adds Family“ Album” to Costa Brava. Kim Yeon-Soo notes in The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities, and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture that the lesbian family triumphs over Nation in the film:

[…] the lesbian family prevails over the Catholic and Catalan ideals since the view of the Sagrada Familia is either fragmented or blocked by props and scaffolding. The film redefines the family through this visual juxtaposition: family transmutes from the union of a heterosexual couple belonging to a homogeneous culture, religion, and language into the coupling of two women with two different cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. (134-35)

Anna sends her monologue across national borders when she submits a copy of the filmed version to Another Stage, a touring theater company based in San Francisco. The Unites States is figured as (an)other stage from which the lesbian relationship that is the focus of the monologue may be viewed. Costa Brava references the vast amount of public money available for funding new artists and theater in Barcelona, making clear that a rejection of Anna’s monologue would not be owing to a lack of economic resources but rather its content: a housewife’s first lesbian experience told in front of the public Sagrada Família. The review committee in Barcelona ultimately rejectsLove Thy Neighbor because, as one of its members says, “A housewife is of

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little interest.” Whether this explanation is actually what it appears to be, the blatant devaluation of the traditionally female and private space of the home, or a convenient excuse that allows the review committee to avoid an explicit confrontation with the topic of lesbianism, it augments the tension between public and private space in the film. Up until this point, the audience has not seen the couple embrace in a publicly visible place. Throughout the film, we see the two women embrace out of view of others, in their apartment and at the liminal edge of the cliffs of the Costa Brava. When they have sex in a car, the camera angle takes us around the edges of the vehicle but does not let us see inside of it.5 Their eventual embrace in a central and public location takes place, not in the United States, but in Barcelona. In the scene prior to this public encounter, we see Anna crying because Montserrat will be leaving Spain for a new job in San Francisco. The closing shot, after Anna finally gets word that Another Stage accepted her monologue, shows the two women joyfully embracing as the camera angle widens to show the Sagrada Família in the background. The two women then proceed to run toward it, hand and hand, as birds take flight. This scene places lesbian intimacy within the view of others only after the United States has accepted both Montserrat and the monologue Love Thy Neighbor.The role of the United States in the couple’s future is also clear in the novelized version of the film:

Montserrat takes Anna by the hand, and realizing that they do not have a second to lose, they run toward the Sagrada Familia on their way to the apartment. Anna is again the all-energetic, hopeful person she used to be. In the U.S. she will make her dreams come true and so will Montserrat. They are both exul- tant. (Balletbò-Coll 125)

However, neither the film nor the novel limits the expanse of the couples’ dreams to the confines of the United States. Borders remain open to the couple as Anna goes on to comment that she will get information about engineers without frontiers “just in case Corporate America disappoints sensitive Montserrat” (Balletbò- Coll 125).

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Costa Brava projects lesbian sexuality toward the United States for public viewing, and upon acceptance there, it is reconstituted publicly in Barcelona. The film points to and beyond the United States, having it function as a mirror through which an image of lesbianism in Catalonia, as represented in Anna’s monologue, is envisioned and accepted via a transnational projection. Taking up Foucault’s notion of the “utopia of the mirror” in his text “Of Other Spaces”6 helps to trace the projected and reconstituted vision of lesbianism in Barcelona that Costa Brava brings to the screen. Though the mirror is a utopia, or site “with no real place,” it also exists in reality as a “heterotopia,” or a place at the margins of other places that “exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy” (“Of Other Spaces” 231-232). Foucault explains that if one imagines oneself from the point of view of the mirror looking back, that gaze allows a reconstitution of the self, not here, but there “where I am” (“Of Other Spaces” 232). This gaze back toward the self that is usually reserved for outside onlookers is then embodied in the self and one sees oneself anew. For lesbians who have been encouraged not only to envision themselves elsewhere but also to be some place else and even to be no place at all, making mirrors of utopias provides a way to imagine oneself where one is. The film resists a simply negative portrayal of lesbianism in Barcelona in favor of a utopian lesbianism rendered elsewhere through its dual treatment of the Sagrada Família. On the one hand, the film represents the cathedral as an impediment to Love Thy Neighbor, and Anna laments that the constant sound emitted from the Cathedral has reduced the quality of the monologue and may prevent the utopian space of Another Stage from accepting it. On the other hand, when Anna is desperately hoping for a chance to continue to live with Montserrat she turns to the Sagrada Família and prays inside for the acceptance of her monologue. When the touring company arppoves it, Anna attributes her success to the performance of a miracle with all the connotations of divine intervention that the word evokes: “I’ve always suspected there was a God, now I know there’s one. And it’s a Goddess, fifty percent Catholic and fifty percent Jewish. And she understands the

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Catalan people” (124). The United States is not the central focus of this miracle that prioritizes the feminine, religious harmony, and Catalan nationalism. Like Costa Brava: (Family Album), Sara Levi Calderón’s novel Dos mujeres also unites the topics of lesbianism, family, and travel. Although Costa Brava excludes traditional family members, those established through blood relations and marriage, they are a constant negative force in the lives of the characters represented in Levi Calderón’s novel. Valeria’s parents, her brother and her children challenge the relationship between the two Mexican women of Dos mujeres, Valeria and Genovesa. Valeria narrates the story of her relationship with Genovesa and the process of writing about this relationship, such that the novel opens onto dual narrative planes. When her father mentions that he is considering bequeathing her an apartment abroad, Valeria notes that his gift would be subject, precisely, to her leaving her lover. Traditionally, distance implies stress on, rather than maintenance of, family ties. On the contrary, this other place of invisibility abroad allows her parents to envision their daughter living far away from Mexico, her sexuality easily ignored. Valeria’s father finds an apartment for her and suggests that she and her mother go to look at it. Instead of doing as her father suggests, Valeria boldly takes Genovesa on a trip with her to San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, Valeria discovers that her family has canceled her credit card, her American Express to be precise. The United States functions then as a utopian elsewhere in her parents’ imagination, an alternative site for them to envision their daughter alone without her female lover. In a last-ditch effort to bring his daughter around, Valeria’s father convinces her to go on a trip to New York, just the two of them, to have a look at apartments she could have. Remembering her previous trip to New York with Genovesa, Valeria revisions herself with her lover by revisiting streets that were familiar to both of them. With each step she takes, she leaves a print that soils the utopia her father wishes to construct, for even though her trip to New York with Genovesa was turbulent and full of fighting, she prefers it to the invisibility her father wishes upon her. Her mother

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eventually joins them in New York and Valeria overhears her suggesting to her father that they call the police and not let Valeria leave the United States. They prefer a dystopian prison for their daughter to a heterotopia she might live in as a woman in love with another woman. Ultimately, the United States turns out to be a place where Valeria’s sexuality is contested and from which she escapes, leaving the “utopia” of her parents and fleeing back to Mexico. The novel changes when Gina Kaufer translates it into English in 1991 with the title, The Two Mujeres. On the acknowledgments page of the new edition, Levi Calderón thanks Kaufer for her work and also thanks her editor, Joan Pinkvoss, for the “professional help she provided to improve this novel” (i). Though translations are certainly never the same as originals, The Two Mujeresvaries from Dos mujeres in ways that make it difficult to think of them as the same novel. The differences between the two are evident even in the jacket covers. Dos mujeres foregrounds two women in rapture while The Two Mujeresdepicts a much more banal drawing of two doors that open onto a shared balcony. Dos mujeres confronts us with the image of two women together while The Two Mujeres places them behind closed doors, closeted if you will. The back cover of Dos mujeres mentions that the two women are divorced and that one is from a rich family and has two children while the other has no family. The cover ofThe Two Mujeresdoes not mention anything about divorce or social class but instead indicates that the two women are both Mexican and Jewish (the dust jacket of Dos mujeres does not mention either of these traits). I speculate that differences in social class are not expected to appeal to American readers as much as religious ones might. Difficulties in translation do not explain all of the differences between the two novels. The ending of Dos mujeres is ambiguous, owing to the confusion between Valeria’s novel and the principal narration, which leaves the reader with multiple interpretations. It ends with the possibility that Valeria and Genovesa are able to live in Mexico, and upon hearing that her novel has been accepted for publication, Valeria cries, “Viva México.” In The Two Mujeres,the line between the two narrative planes is clearly broken as Valeria rips

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up a page of her manuscript. Instead of “Long live Mexico,” there is a dialogue between Valeria and Genovesa in which Valeria says “México brings back painful memories; you know what a high price I had to pay…and you.” “Do you regret it?”, asks Genovesa. “Oh, no…no. Freedom is too precious; I know I couldn’t write without it’ ” (211). This treatment of Mexico erases any potential challenge to the country’s democratic social project to accept lesbianism and instead concludes that liberty lies outside of the country’s parameters in a utopian elsewhere. Given that the reader likely holds the story in hand from within the United States, s/he is likely to imagine this other place as a utopian rendering of the United States. One interpretation of this addition to the novel is that denying the possibility of sexual freedom in Mexico and its future is not something that a Mexican publisher would have supported. Whether or not this is the case, such a finalizing gesture voids the novel of the political challenge and hint at return that it originally had and ironically aligns Valeria with her father by positioning lesbian visibility and its representation outside of Mexico. Achy Obejas’ Memory Mambo shifts our perspective from lesbian couples living in Spain or Latin America looking towards the United States to Latina lesbians in the United States looking toward Latin America. As discussed in chapter 1, the Puerto Rican character, Gina, claims that the issue of gay identity is an issue for “whites” in the United States but is counter to the project of Puerto Rican independence. For Gina’s Cuban immigrant girlfriend, the protagonist Juani, lesbian identity is more important. Heartbroken from her eventual breakup with Gina, Juani attempts to understand what it is about herself, her family, and her culture that might have contributed to the tumultuous end of their relationship. Titi, Juani’s cousin in Cuba, is the subject of many family conversations as they recount stories of her wild attempts to escape the island. Reflecting upon the stories that her family tells of her cousin, Juani explains that she always knew there was something to Titi’s story that everyone ignored but herself:

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Titi’s addiction to the notion of escape, her desire to come to the United States, has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that patriotic crap, but with a whole other, perhaps even crazier idea—that once here, she might be free to be queer. […] Even though I’m here, in what is supposed to be the land of the free, I share this desire with my cousin Titi. (76)

Juani resides in the place that Titi imagines herself: a United States where Titi projects an image of herself “free to be queer.” Juani then contests this queer image, rejects this utopia projection, seeing the shortcomings of life in the United States. If Juani is in the United States, yet shares the same desire as Titi, which would supposedly resolve itself upon arrival to the United States, then the space both imagine is neither in the United States or Cuba. This place “free to be queer” is not a simple utopian projection outward, for Juani intercepts and counters it. The cover ofMemory Mambo highlights an illustration by Nereyda García-Ferraz that depicts the direction- ality of the utopia of the mirror, that place somewhere between heterotopia and utopia. In the painting we see the words, “Dime por favor, cuál camino es el tuyo.” This multiplicity of directions, of paths, of gazes again reflects the multiple positions of the United States both as a screen and as a mirror for Cuba and vice versa. The central image depicts a heart with numerous valves, reflecting how blood and family flow differently in Obejas’ reformula- tion of family. The dedication to Memory Mambo illustrates this: “In memory of Pedro Javier and Eduardo, and for all my cousins, whether by blood or exile, with love” (5). Juani feels herself to be “a stranger in her own family” and her fights with Gina over the importance of coming out appear to be a fight over being in the same family (78). Juani insists that although her lesbianism is not the cause of her alienation, it is part of it. Gina positions lesbianism against family saying “I’m not interested in being a lesbian, in separating politically from my people” (77). Yet for all of her insisting on coming out, Juani resembles Gina in some respects. She protects her family by not pushing the fact that she is a lesbian into the open, into language, but instead she leaves it at the level

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of unspoken understanding (what others might consider to be, in the closet). Speaking of her father and her sexuality, she says that he “avoids not just the topic of my sexuality, but any subject that could inadvertently lead us there” and she does nothing to challenge this avoidance (80). In an effort to break silences, Juani starts writing a letter to her cousin Titi to express her desire to go to Cuba. Juani describes to her cousin Patricia why she wants to go: “‘For belonging,’ I say. ‘To get away,’ I admit” (235). Patricia responds by saying, “And when you get back, everything will still be here, pretty much just like you left it. I learned that lesson myself with my trips to Cuba” (235). From the United States, Juani projects an image of herself in Cuba with her queer cousin that will be full of a sense of belonging that she does not have in the United States; Patricia reflects her experience of travel on Juani and notes that Juani’s projection is really a deflection that will not allow her to get away. For Juani, what the utopia of the mirror provides is not a changed self, transformed in the process of reconstitution “over there,” but rather a vision of the self over a surface which is not other, not the same, not over there, or here either, but simultaneously suspended and anchored somewhere in-between. The paradox of this state of “in-betweeness” demonstrates the construction of, and challenge to, the role of borders in the production of meaning. Analyses that focus on difference and marginality too often limit their perspective by romanticizing the “freedom” of the nomad, the homelessness of exile, the “purity” of the subaltern, and the indeterminate locus of the queer. The margin is as much a product of power relations as the center, and neither wholly escapes the other. Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s “impure lesbian Puerto Rican,” Sara Levi Calderón’s sexual sui generis, and Lucía Etxebarria’s cuerpos celestes do not provide us with a way out of the dialectic of margin and center, but instead they make clear that there are more ruptures and connections, more ways to travel and be confined, within power relations than claims for essential origins suggest.

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NOTES 1 In the latest edition of the novel (Ed. Santos Sanz Villanueva, Madrid: Castalia, 1997), Tusquets names the protagonist Elia, a character name that is repeated in the other two novels of the trilogy, thus unifying them. 2 A negative portrayal of heterosexual coupling via parental characters also occurs in other novels, such as Eve Gil’s Réquiem por una muñeca rota and Ana María Moix’ novel Julia (1970). 3 This website continued to unite women beyond national boundaries until its last known operating date of August 24, 2007. After this quota- tion from 2005, however, its creators incorporated specific information about their location in a sound recording indicating that they had moved from Mexico City to La Paz, Bolivia, believing that the indigenous government offered the potential of questioning the political structures of Western imperialism: Creatividad Feminista 24 May 2006. 11 July 2008. 4 This concept, which I explain later on, is from Foucault’s text “Of Other Spaces.” 5 This scene contrasts sharply with the very visible nudity of two women embracing in Brincando el charco (1994), discussed in chapter 1. However, both films disrupt the audience’s ability to engage in simple voyeurism. 6 “Des Espaces Autres,” published by Architecture-Mouvement- Continuité in 1984, formed the basis of a lecture that Foucault gave in March 1967 (Mirzoeff 236).

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he diverse lesbian texts that I have compared in this study indicate a range of identitarian practices, desires, contestations, and conformities in relation to sexuality andT nationality. Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) reinforces identification with Sapphic nationalism through writing that functions to legitimate women’s bonds with one another. Rosamaría Roffiel’s Amora (1989) simultaneously argues in favor of women and lesbians practicing strategic essential- ism1 and a future beyond such a strategy when the protagonist, Lupe, emphasizes her preference for the term ser sexual. Carmen Oliveira’s Flores raras e banalíssimas (1995) complicates the bounds of authenticity so central to normative narratives of nationalism in its depiction of the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares and their shared love of Brazil. We have seen how Isabel Franc’s Con pedrigree (1997) also challenges traditional modes of legitimation in its parody of national and sexual identity formation. These works provide us with rich portrayals of the difficulties involved in asserting an oppositional subjectivity within an identitarian framework without reifying normative power structures and exclusive practices. The dialects of self and other, center and margin, exemplified in lesbian fiction indicate the need for a more nuanced view of the relation of nationality to sexuality. Hispanic lesbian cultural productions also include contestations of normative American models for naming and conceptual- izing sexualities. For example, we find disputes of the term gay in Con pedrigree and Amora, resistance to a utopian rendering of gay

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freedom in “Corporate America” in the film Costa Brava (1995), and the framing of sexual identity politics as a concern of the United States that impedes the aims of Puerto Rican nationalism in Memory Mambo (1996). Instead of treating sexual politics as a single issue, as so often is the case, Margins (1992) by Terri de la Peña describes the connections between sexual, gender, ethnic, and class inequalities in the United States.2 The protagonist of Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998) criticizes the homogenization of gay identity epitomized in commodities from the United States, such as albums by Barbra Streisand and the Gay Freedom or Rainbow Flags. Etxebarria’s own negotiation of the market in her controversial public persona also demonstrates an awareness of how consumerism and the media shape identity. Christine Henseler notes, in Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Publishing Industry, the international success of Beatriz despite criticism from the literary establishment that Etxebarria’s writing is more of a marketing gimmick than substantive literature. Despite their differences, the views expressed in these narratives are critical of normative identity formations as they relate to American cultural and economic practices. Asia Lillo’s recently published Internet blog El blog: Diario de una aupair bollo en USA (2006), narrates the author’s experience as a Spanish lesbian au pair in the home of republicans living in Washington D.C., suggests that this trend is likely to continue. The growing production, popularity, distribution, and acces- sibility of lesbian films and fiction in part reflects, and has no doubt contributed to, changes in civil rights protections. Not all agree, however, on the benefits of representation in commodity culture and, as we have seen in the Grup de Lesbianes Feministes’ criticism of economic practices in “Gaixample,” acceptance into the market can sometimes obfuscate the persistence of social inequalities. Understanding how globalized economies perpetuate these inequalities requires knowledge of how sexual discourses intersect in both local and global frameworks. In her presentation given at The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at The City University of New York, Kate Bedford argued that more critical attention needs

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to be given to the increasingly transnational in scope, “norms, institutions, and structures that help to naturalize dominant forms of heterosexuality and make them hegemonic, make them appear universal and morally righteous.” One example of such an institution is Disney, a decidedly American corporation with an unmistakable global scope via its theme parks, television and cable channels, films, stores, and in its incorporation of famous historical and mythical figures from nations around the world in its productions: Anastasia, Quasimodo, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and others. In their essay published in 1978, Para leer al Pato Donald, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart perform an incisive critique of imperialist ideology in Disney’s productions that can also be related to the decidedly heteronormative content of the company’s productions. Clara Martin’s short film made in Spain in 2004, STUPENDA comerciaLes, addresses this aspect of Disney: “Cine reciclado para entretenimiento y reflexión puramente comercial. Visión no-española del mundo lesbiano en los spots, en la que se evidencia la necesidad de convencer a un sector invisible social y comercialmente hasta ahora” (BarceDona 1). One of the clips in the short film shows Disney’s animated version of Cinderella kissing Snow White. Martin’s film opposes lesbian invisibility and indicates the heteronormativity of Disney’s “princess tales.”3 Contrasting with the humorous nature of Martin’s short film, Amnesty International’s 2005 advertisement campaign to stop violence against women also unites the topic of lesbianism with a global perspective. One advertisement of the campaign features a large photo of actress Patricia Vico who plays the role of a lesbian doctor named Maca on the primetime Spanish television show Hospital Central. Vico appears with ghastly bruises and lacerations all over her face along with a caption that reads,

Si Maca viviera en Colombia, podría acabar así. Salvajemente violada, torturada y tal vez asesinada por la guerrilla o los paramilitares, tan sólo por haber sido vista besando a otra mujer. En más de 70 países las lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y transgénero son víctimas de agresiones, asesinatos, persecución

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policial o incluso ejecuciones a causa de su orientación sexual, real o supuesta.4

Despite its potent visual image, there is much left out of sight in the advertisement’s wording, which all too easily suggests, given the broad scope of Amnesty International, that globally homophobia is everywhere but locally (that is, in Spain) it is nowhere to be found. According to Paz Quintero, the advertisement also participates on another level of invisibility by failing to feature someone who actually is a lesbian:

[…] los organizadores no hayan podido encontrar a ninguna actriz lesbiana española (que haberlas, haylas—tod@s lo sabemos y tenemos una ligera idea de quiénes son). Y es curioso que haya tenido que dar la cara por todas nosotras una mujer que no lo es (Patricia Vico, con su personaje Maca). […] A todas las actrices que se debaten entre el exterior o el interior de su solapado armario particular, sólo puedo aconsejarles una cosa: como dice siempre Shrek, mejor fuera que dentro.

This observation, in addition to offering another queer ventriloquiz- ing of an animation character, manifests a persistent longing for authenticity and identity, a haunting of nationalism in globalization that links to other more easily recognizable lesbian fictions and realities. A spirit of optimism following Spain’s approval of same-sex marriage in 2005 likely guides the dubious suggestion of Amnesty International’s campaign launched in December of the same year that homophobia and violent acts resulting from it are only a concern elsewhere, outside of Spain. Leonardo Fernández, coordinator of Amnesty International’s sexual minority division in Spain at the time, said of the campaign, “Queríamos una campaña que no fuese dirigida exclusivamente a los homosexuales de Chueca—barrio gay de Madrid desde hace más de una década—, sino dirigido a la gente en general” (Repiso). However, by implying that a lesbian woman would be hurt in Colombia but not in Spain, the ad not

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only directs our attention away from Chueca but also encourages “a la gente en general” to imagine that homophobia is not a Spanish problem now that sexual discrimination and related hate crimes are legally punishable. Both fiction and reality remind us, however, that sexual minorities are susceptible to prejudice and violence in Spain. For example, the novels El cielo en tus manos (2003) by Geovanna Galera and Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) by Carmen Nestares depict how homophobia affects the lives of young women in Spain, and there have been recent investigations of bullying and physical abuse attributed to sexual discrimination in Sabadell and Madrid.5 This is not to imply that lesbian fiction, whether in a novel or an advertising campaign, ought to depict local violence done to sexual minorities; in fact, many of the novels analyzed here do not. What it does indicate, however, is that the long tradition of adopting a global perspective in the gay movement is sometimes associated with a loss of perspective “at home” (something that is especially problematic in the context of a colonizing European nation pointing toward Latin America). We have seen how Hispanic lesbian fiction challenges utopian renderings of the United States, and time will tell whether equally problematic utopias are erected in its place. As lesbian narratives burgeon, they will likely continue to register a preoccupation with national discourse and the axes of space and time as they relate to the process of identity formation. Many of the characters in these narratives engage lesbian desire in writing, and they remind us that identity is a process. Despite their differences in national origin, political message, and quality of prose, lesbian narratives recurrently intertwine national and sexual discourse. They encourage us to trace lesbian sexuality within and beyond social identification and to understand the way national and sexual identity aid and impede human connection.

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NOTES 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term coined in 1987 for a group’s public presentation of itself as essential in order to achieve certain political goals. She later abandoned the phrase, but not necessarily the project that it refers to, believing it to have become “the union ticket for essentialism” (An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 35). 2 Loving in the War Years by Cherríe Moraga and Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa are other works by Chicana authors that also frame sexuality in relation to multiple social factors. 3 Since 1991, LGBT organizers have held an annual celebration of “Gay Days” at Walt Disney World, increasing gay and lesbian visibility at this famous family playground. See GayDays.com for a historical review of opposition to the event by the Religious Right and Disney’s own varied response. 4 See “Nueva campaña de Amnistía Internacional.” 5 In July 2008, Nova, a well-known transsexual, filed a report that she was beaten in Madrid (see “La transexual Nova”) and the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office of Catalonia detected cases of sexual discrimination in schools, including the bullying of a lesbian minor in Sabadell (see “La Fiscalía detecta”).

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Index

Altman, Dennis 49 De la Peña, Terri 10, 51-52, 56- Alvarez, Julia 11, 84-85 61, 79, 103, 150 Anderson, Benedict 13, 51 De la Serna, Alfonso 50 Andrade, Oswald 26 De la Tierra, Tatiana 28 Andrews, Margaret 136 De Lauretis, Teresa 109 Ang, Ien 78 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Anzaldúa, Gloria 57, 154 Guattari 86-88 Arnalte, Arturo 27 D’Emilio, John 72, 109 Derrida, Jacques 92 Bedford, Kate 150 Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Bedregal, Ximena 136 Mattelart 151 Berlant, Lauren, and Elizabeth Duberman, Martin 46 Freeman 14 Du Plessis, Michael 53, 79 Besner, Neil 20 Balletbò-Coll, Marta 49, 50, 52, Epps, Brad vii, 6, 10, 36, 97-98 139, 141, 143 Etxebarria, Lucía 4, 63, 79, 89- Brooksbank Jones, Anny 40 105, 121, 127-31, 147, 150, Brown, Rebecca 132-33 Bryson, Norman 12 Facco, Lúcia 19 Bustelo, Gabriela 53 Farwell, Marilyn R. 7, 94 Butler, Judith 5, 11, 48, 55-56, Fejerman, Daniela, and Inés París 122 50 Fernández, Josep-Anton 39 Castro, Américo 50 Fernández, Salvador C. 56, 79 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou vii, 138 Ferreira Pinto-Bailey, Cristina 18 Chasin, Alexandra 106 Fiol-Matta, Licia 15 Cixous, Hélène 11, 86 Forté-Escamilla, Kleya 9, 111 Claver, Juan Carlos 4, 15 Fortier, Anne-Marie 133 Cooper, Sarah 3 Foster, David William 6, 18-19, Cruz, Angie 11, 84-85 71, 76, 92 Curiel, Ochy 107 Foucault, Michel 7, 13, 48, 85, 102, 142, 148 Debord, Guy 108 De la Campa, Román vii, 41

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Franc, Isabel (see also Lola Van Kaloski Naylor, Ann 53, 55 Guardia) 7, 17, 28-29, 31-41, Kaminsky, Amy K. 91-93 52, 79, 94-95, 103, 109, 149 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 11, 101, Freud, Sigmund 46, 79, 81, 83, 127 109 Kristeva, Julia 11, 83-84, 117 Fuentes, Carlos 75 Levi Calderón, Sara 9, 20, 75, Galán, Mabel 14, 79, 89, 136-37 79, 89, 139, 143-45, 147 Galera, Geovanna 4, 153 Lillo, Asia 150 Garlinger, Patrick Paul 97 Llamas, Ricardo, and Fefa Vila Gil, Eve 13, 112, 114-119, 148 127 Gimeno, Beatriz 100 Lumsden, Ian 43 Gómez Ojea, Carmen 13, 79, 112, 119 Manalasan IV, Martin F. 31 González Echevarría, Roberto 89 Marçal, Maria-Mercè 12, 20, 49, Graham, Helen 6, 156 95-96, 149 Grosz, Elizabeth 10, 13, 37, 54- Martínez, Elena M. 6, 91 55, 122, 126 Martin, Clara 151 Grup Lesbianes Feministes 2, 13, Martin-Márquez, Susan 140, 151 50, 105-06, 108, 150 Mayne, Judith 47 Guzner, Susana 4, 10, 51, 63-70, McClintock, Anne 94 88 Mira, Alberto 105, 109 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 100, 148 Halberstam, Judith 10, 13, 111- Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 72 12, 125 Moix, Ana María 9, 49, 66, 89, Heiberg, Marianna 49 148 Hennessy, Rosemary 106 Molloy, Sylvia 11, 15, 87, 89, 91 Henseler, Christine 150 Montero, Oscar 79 Hutcheon, Linda 138 Moraga, Cherríe 57, 61, 154 Hutcheson, Gregory S. 79 Muñoz, Elías Miguel 43 Huyssen, Andreas 7 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances 10, Irigaray, Luce 11, 81-85, 88 17, 44-47 Nes, Illy 30, 49, 63, Jagose, Annamarie 3, 7 85, 133 Nestares, Carmen 8, 30, 79, 89, Johnston, Jill 14, 34, 109 106, 112, 134-35, 153 Newitz, Annalee, and Jillian Sandell 53

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Obejas, Achy 8, 9, 17, 42, 43, Servodidio, Mirella 113 139, 145-47 Smith, Paul Julian 15 Oliveira, Carmen L. 8, 9, 17, Soler-Espiauba, Dolores 9, 30 19-26, 149 Sommer, Doris 5, 14, 89 Oliver, Kelly 83 Spivak, Gayatari Chakravorty Olivera, Guillermo 102 154 Ortiz Taylor, Sheila 63, 79, Stephenson, Marcia 91-92

Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Trujillo, Carla 41 Doris Sommer, and Patricia Tsuchiya, Akiko 130 Yaeger 14 Tusquets, Esther 8, 13, 20, 49, Pereda, Ferrán 109 63, 66, 89, 112-14, 148 Pérez, Emma 35 Pertusa Seva, Inmaculada 7, 15, Urioste, Carmen de viii, 125 79 Pessah, Mariana 102 Vaid, Urvashi 3-4 Preciado, Beatriz 137 Van Guardia, Lola [see also Isabel Prieur, Annick 72 Franc] 7, 17, 28-29, 31 Pryke, Sam 27-28 Vila, Fefa 8, 27 Puri, Jyoti 15 Vosburg, Nancy 8, 31 Quintero, Paz 152 Walker, Brian 2, 11-12 Repiso, Luis 152 Warner, Michael 14-15, 109 Rich, Adrienne 15, 50, 109, 124 White, Caroline 135 Riera, Carme 49, 97-98, 103, Wiegman, Robyn 13 Ripardo, Sérgio 19 Wittig, Monique 93 Robbins, Jill 130 Robles, Mireya 12, 79, 98-99 Yeon-Soo, Kim 140 Rodríguez, Félix 109 Roffiel, Rosamaría 9, 10, 51, 71, 73-78, 85, 149 Rueda Esquibel, Catrióna 56, 60, 79

Saco, Diana 135, 138 Said, Edward 27 Scott, Travers 126 Sellers, Susan 86

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margaret.indd 171 11/20/08 9:26:57 PM margaret.indd 172 11/20/08 9:26:58 PM Margaret Gates Frohlich

Margaret Gates Frohlich earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish from The State University of Colorado at Denver. As an undergraduate, she studied abroad in Guadalajara, Mexico at the University of the Valley of Atemajac. She received her doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literature from The State University of New York at Stony Brook. During her studies there, she received grants for travel and research in Spain from the Tinker Foundation and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. Currently, she teaches at Dickinson College in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

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