“A Detour in Longing”: Gender, Sexuality and Lesbian Desire in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings and Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams

Abstract

Questions of gender and sexuality have oftentimes been portrayed as taboo in traditionalist conservative societies. Gloria Anzaldúa claims in Borderlands/La Frontera (1999) that “she [the lesbian of color] goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. The Chicana lesbian, as a matter of survival and motivated by sexual impulses, struggles to surpass the passive role repression assigns to her and refuses to accept the heteronormative rule. In the present paper, I investigate how the narrative strategies and cultural references bring to surface the emotions and experiences that form subjectivity and sexual desire in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams (1996) and Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings (2003). Such transgressive narrators are of different ages and thus undergoing different maturity processes, but they begin both novels as young Chicana women attempting to explore their sexuality and uncover their own prohibited desires while becoming aware of the patriarchal and machista system in which they are inscribed. Here female sexuality and lesbian desire intertwine. The chosen novels enable a debate on women’s sexual development and exploration and society’s influence, judgement and punishment on female sexuality. Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Carla Trujillo, Emma Pérez and other feminist Chicana critics aid this analysis.