Gender(s) by Kathryn Stockton

Author:Kathryn Stockton [Stockton, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gender; feminism; cisgender; gender fluidity; nonbinary; identity politics; Transgender; trans; LatinX; race and gender; money and gender; gender identity; identity; representation; gender presentation
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

I saw how my immigration status was being discussed in one space, and then we were told, don’t talk about your sexual identity. . . . And in LGBT spaces, I’m like, why are we not talking about these other identities that folks have, whether it’s their immigration status or whether it’s their socioeconomic background, that limits them to have resources—in terms of what it means to be LGBT?25

“I was actually confronted with like, what am I?” adds Ester, twenty-six years old, trans, and DACA-mented. Another undocuqueer activist points out: “I think that if there wasn’t an undocuqueer movement, I don’t think there would be a push back like against the criminalization of our trans brothers and sisters.” And being undocuqueer for “Daniel” meant stepping away from the DREAMer script. Cisneros reports: “For Daniel, this [DREAMer] rhetoric reinforced class-based suppression . . . as it absolved the blame from children but continued to criminalize parents and other non-student identities.”

This is why radical counter-DREAM activists, such as Herrera Soto and others, warn “inclusion will always be premised upon others’ exclusion from the possibility for a livable life.”26 A more moving coalitional politics requires counter-DREAMing and concocting a nonnation entity, a country-less collective, trying to grasp worlds-coming-to-be.

Jetting back in time, we can hear these struggles—escape and exile—cravings for inclusion that enact exclusions—in the writings of Chicana lesbian activist Cherríe Moraga (composed around the time of the CRC Statement). Moraga is writing at the solitary scale of systems lived inside one life.

The act of uncloseting, even unburying one’s own self, can promise exile. Moraga gauged escape—into her experimental sexual life—by her exile from her mother. Hers is a version of the labyrinthine, subtle snaking of a racial sign through one’s gender—and, in her case, through a brown mother ghosting her life.

Call this a browning of Freudian theory: returning to your mother who signifies a color you are destined to relate to, fitfully, unconsciously. Moraga’s story pivots on the axis of her mother, in Loving in the War Years. Moraga is a moon to her brother’s sun. Pale and “exiled into the darkness of the night,” she states, she is “writing in exile.”27 She is like the Aztec moon, she says, “severed into pieces in the war against her brother,” he who as a male receives her mother’s love unreservedly, just as she gives it without measure.

Moraga’s moon metaphor renders her exile—into both whiteness and her desires. She is fair-skinned, passing for white, knowing the “danger of putting . . . ‘lesbian’ and ‘Chicana’ together on the same page.” No wonder Moraga, at twelve years old, dreams of lying in a hospital bed: “[My] breasts are large and ample. And below my stomach, I see my own cock, wildly shooting menstrual blood totally out of control. The image of the hermaphrodite.” She is “bleached and beached,” as she says succinctly. And she is betrayed by the very woman—her Chicana mother, married to an anglo—who has strangely inspired her love of women by withholding motherly love from Moraga.

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