Latina Authors Tackling Sexual Repression & Contributing to an Awakening

Edwin Rosario

Critical Paper

Profesor Melissa Coss Aquino

English 147

May 6, 2018

     Latina Authors Tackling Sexual Repression & Contributing to an Awakening

Straightforward talk about female sexuality in the Latino culture has been a taboo for many generations; it has long been a theme to avoid or suppress. To speak openly about female sexuality would be consider the talk of the devil according to the moralist’s guidebook. Fortunately, something happened in Latino literature, and it became a powerful tool that serve as a platform that could help liberate readers, while testing the lens through which many see female sexuality, poor souls blinded by the stranglehold of the many taboos in our culture. One must then present the following questions; how can the talk of the devil, as labeled in the inner circles of the “puritans”, become a political and social statement of liberation for both females and males via literature? Has the topic of female sexuality been properly expressed in the writings of modern day female authors or discourage by male authors and they’re misogynist literature?  

To touch the subject in an objective manner is a daunting cause, especially when the task has been assumed at this moment by a male. Nevertheless, the prose of a couple of Latinas and one Latino are instrumental in this critical analysis. The writings of the two Latinas depict the female experience of her sexuality via sexual love as an exercise of power, which is very important and a liberating message for women. The Latino with his writing gives the impression that the sexual love a female professes is a gateway where women could be exposed to suffering and stigmatized as amoral in the hypocritical eyes of the older folks, disposable pawns in the game of lust for the boys, a becloud and misdirect idea of sexual objectification of a women.

With little or no doubt, two of the female authors that touch the experience of female sexuality in multiple phases are Annecy Baez and Sandra Cisneros. These two female writers have help readers explore the women experience and how they express their sexuality from childhood through advanced age, each in very different styles. Moving beyond a traditional focus on sexual functioning, their books emphasizes the intricate interaction of psychological, social, cultural, and biological influences on the making of individual sexual meanings, central to each woman's experience of herself not only as a sexual person, but as a liberated being and this is a very influential social and cultural statement. The authors show us how these meanings are often problematic and contradictory, causing many women to feel disconnected from their bodies and from their needs and desires. Yet at the same time both demonstrate how problematic myths and misogynist messages can be challenged and destroy, they outline ways that women can be empowered to create a more comfortable and self-defined sexuality throughout life and this is a powerful political statement. It challenges the power and privilege man have enjoy since Adam washed his hands to blame Eve for their original sin, which ironically was the free expression of their sexuality.

The stories of Annecy Baez were present in many of the girls in all of our neighborhoods, families and in our conflicted thoughts about female sexuality. The suffering of the female characters that were ~and to an extent still are~ the product of a misogynist culture. This culture is a product of a society whose sexuality was castrated by the influences of religious dogmas and gender inequalities, which have plagued humanity for generations. No Latino parent was open minded enough to speak to their young girls about how to deal with their sexuality, they always did however seem very eager to suppress their sexuality. Annecy Baez brilliantly presented the brutal truth of what many young women endured in their dealings with the psychological, social, cultural, and biological challenges impeding their sexual freedom in her book “My Daughther's Eyes and Other Short Stories” (Baez, 2007). And all of us all can relate to the main character, we all saw many Mia’s suffered unwarranted physical and verbal abuse from their fathers and mothers, all because they were threatened by the idea of their daughters being sexuality active.

There isn’t a Latino here who hasn’t heard a father spew the following lines “we did not come to the United States to raise whores” (Baez pg. 46). Yet, it was very confusing to all to not see the boys recive the same beatings for expressing their sexuality in predatory fashion, it was ok if they impregnanted a young girl, that was not evil, it was macho. Aura a character in Baez’s book, chimed in on this while trying to rescue Mia from the humilation and pyshical beating she received from her father; “Would they do the same with the boys if they made a mistake, would they?” (Baez pg. 46). And this is the  clear charaterzation of a unhealthy culture that demonizeds  female sexuality, demostrating how the eternal curse of the mtyhical story of Eve in Genesis would impriosned girls and deprived them of their sexuality in our society. It cause so many psychological scars that in the future became barriers in acquiring the art of love for a Latina.

Baez was so brilliant in her writing that she gave female readers a short story to motivate them to reflect upon their biological needs, via a metaphor that were as clear, bright and colorful as “The Red Shoes” the character Zuleika desired (Baez pg. 17). It is a story that helps mend a broken bridge, perhaps allowing the female readers an opportunity to transit with liberty to the other side and achieve a better and healthier understanding of their biological self and needs. Rejecting the notion that those feelings where, as professed by both females and males in our society, an act of lust. No longer succumbing to the shadows of guilt and shame, free at last.

 Red, a color that in many ways speaks to the changes of a woman’s body, when she steps out of the cocoon to become a woman and learns of her monthly date with that color. Or red, the color of lust and the devil, oh what an evil color some say, red the provocative color of the whores. Baez in a stroke of genius uses this short story to dissociate the idea that a female’s biological transformation is something to be shameful for. No, it is beautiful and it is red, liberating idea indeed.

Sandra Cisneros gets more provocative in her literary work, in her writings we meet the powerful women who show us how sexual love becomes an exercise of their power and a mechanism of defense against the misogynist society that doesn’t intimidate them (Cisneros). In Woman Hollering Creek, “the female characters both accept and push back against how men treat them. Sometimes they acquiesce to gendered expectations, but more often than not they find ways to subvert negative treatment and disingenuous attention, leveraging misogyny to gain power” (Lannamann). Her characters challenge all social and cultural walls to express that their sexuality is theirs, their body belongs to them and no one can question that power. “Borrowed. That's how I've had my men. Just the cream skimmed off the top. Just the sweetest part of the fruit, without the bitter skin that daily living with a spouse can rend. They've come to me when they wanted the sweet meat then. So, no. I've never married and never will”. One can hear the macho males and conservative mummies tremble after this, this woman owns her sexuality and exposes the double standards of a misogynistic culture and obliterates the idea that this behavior is the norm for men, and an awful for women, she is free.

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