ABSTRACT
When women of color, Third World feminists, and lesbians started calling out the second wave of the women’s movement for its exclusions of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other forms of difference, they initiated what we now refer to as third wave feminism, with names like Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, Trinh T. Minh-ha, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga at the forefront of those critiques. In Chicano/a studies, the last two names began to dominate the discourse in the 1980s to the degree that they have become synonymous with both Chicana feminism and Chicana lesbian identity, and in some circles, tokenized as the only writers of their kind. A survey of the last 30 years of Chicana/Latina literary production reveals that not only are there more than two Chicana lesbian writers, but also that Chicana feminists and Chicana lesbians have been charting a new course for the field of Chicano/a studies since 1981. This vanguard in the field makes sexuality as central to the discussion of gender, as race and class are to a discussion of colonialism. In my 1993 review essay, “Tortillerismo: Work by Chicana Lesbians,” published in
Signs while I was still a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, I discussed the problem of homophobic Chicano/a critics whose discomfort with lesbian literary representations compelled them to ignore the work. This exclusion simultaneously “promote[d] the invisibility of lesbian literature and exercise[d] the heterosexual privilege of those critics who disregard texts that make them ‘uncomfortable’” (Gaspar de Alba 1993: 956). The purpose of that essay was to bring Chicana lesbian writing out of the critical closet and look at the few anthologies and other works in circulation prior to 1991. My purpose here is to historicize the exponential growth of Chicana/Latina lesbian literary production since 1991, by looking at selected novels, multigenre anthologies, autobiographies, and critical/theoretical texts authored by self-identified Chicana/Latina lesbians, with an overtly lesbian purpose, during each of the last three decades. What I mean by an overtly lesbian purpose is
that the text is written by a lesbian and/or it deals explicitly with lesbian characters, lesbian life, lesbian identity, lesbian desire, and/or other issues related to lesbian sexuality. Space constraints force me to discuss only those titles that have contributed directly to the task of constructing a Chicana/Latina lesbian discourse and making visible the Chicana/Latina lesbian body. To fully appreciate the reasons behind this exponential growth in Chicana/Latina
lesbian literary and critical production, these texts must be situated within their historical and cultural contexts. Thus, this chronology is roughly divided into three decades that correspond to what I see as three generations of third wave Chicana feminism: Generation A, Generation X, and Generation Q, which I discuss in more detail below. The word “generation” implies a chronology of time, but I am using it here to signify the constellation of ideas and concerns about gender and sexuality that have informed Chicano/a studies from the 1980s to the present. My approach to the selective process for the texts I have included here is necessarily along the lines of what Gayatri Spivak in The Postcolonial Critic called “the strategic use of essentialism” (Spivak 1990: 109) in that, speaking from my politics of location as a Chicana lesbian author and critic, I will self-consciously construct a bibliographic portrait that is as much a representation of my own subject-position as it is an articulation of the overarching themes and movements of thought in the work produced by Chicana/Latina lesbian writers and theorists. “Subsuming the study of lesbians under a general homosexual umbrella
often erases the gender hierarchy and gender ideologies inherent in most societies and thus renders lesbians less visible,” wrote Lourdes Torres (2003: 3) in her introduction to Tortilleras: Hispanic and US Latina Lesbian Expression. In 2003, the Journal of Lesbian Studies published a special issue on Latina lesbians edited by María Dolores Costa that included a panoramic overview of Chicana, Latina, Latin American, and Spanish lesbian writers, artists, performers, and texts. Both collections contribute to the emerging field of Latina lesbian studies; however, just as lesbian existence should not be subsumed under the homosexual umbrella, it is important that the “Chicana” not be homogenized under the “Latina” experience, particularly since it is in large part Chicana lesbians who have forged the theory by which Latina and other lesbians of color have come to analyze and understand the junctures and fissures between their lesbian bodies/identities/desires and their own culturally specific realities. This is not to say that Latina lesbians have not contributed to the discourse. Indeed, one of the earliest voices in Latina lesbian letters is Luz María Umpierre, Puerto Rican poet par excellence, whose openly lesbian chapbook of poetry, The Margarita Poems (1987), is a classic in the field. Umpierre is also known for her theory on “homocriticism,” that posits that queer readers are more apt to find queer meanings in literary work. Chicana and Latina lesbians have also collaborated in putting together important collections such as Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983), edited by Alma Gómez, Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana RomoCarmona and Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Traditions (2001) by a collective of Chicana and Latina authors that calls itself the Latina Feminist Research Group, and that explores issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality through the personal/ critical genre of testimonio. However, I agree with the following point that Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano makes:
Thanks in large part to the creative struggle of Chicana feminists and Chicana lesbian feminists in particular, the idea of “difference within” ourselves and within our communities has multiplied, rather than fragmented, sites of social action and critical intervention.
