Chicaría Outlaws: Turning Our (Brown) Backs on La Ley del Papá(cito)

Abstract

This essay explores the representation of gendered agency in the writing of Chicana authors Ana Castillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Cherríe Moraga. It both describes and textualizes what the author has termed, elsewhere a fronterótica, or borderotics. It effects a close textual analysis grounded in cultural studies to determine that Ana Castillo cultivates a poetics of playful erotic ambiguity, whereas Cherríe Moraga, an out butch lesbian playwright, poet, and essayist transgresses “la ley del padre” in a much more definitive way. I read Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s poetry in a complex theoretical framework, acknowledging the tension between the temptation of the transgressive and the refusal to allow the figure of the lesbian to inhabit an essentialized exterior to dominant discourse. Gaspar de Alba’s poetic speaker is not going “elsewhere” but rather back to the frontera, which is represented as a hybrid, porous geosexual space. I join these three authors here because of their extended meditation on the contestatory possibilities for Chicana erotic agency, beyond their differences of gender/genre. Butch, bisexual, or queer, all exploit a postmodern sense of ambiguity which prizes apart long-cherished notions of “lo Chicano.”