Finding the Trans Lesbian in Chicana Lesbian Feminism

Chicana lesbian feminist writer and activist Cherríe Moraga has been roundly critiqued by Chicanx and Latinx trans scholars for the gender essentialism and concomitant transphobia she espouses in her essay “Still Loving in the (Still) War Years: On Keeping Queer Queer,” published in 2011. Left unanalyzed and untheorized in trans studies, however, are the trans femme and trans lesbian figures and subjects Moraga represents in her hybrid texts published in the 1980s and 1990s. The structuring ambivalence toward trans embodiment that Moraga exhibits in these early texts enables generative readings of her work that her later essay disenables. Using trans and reparative reading practices, this article argues that Moraga enacts a self-transing by her identification with the trans femme and trans lesbian figures and subjects peopling her early hybrid texts. The reparative readings offered by the author carve out a discursive space within Chicana lesbian feminism for the inclusion of trans femmes and trans lesbians via this historical moment in Moraga's oeuvre, thereby countering and revising the narrative and legacy of Chicana lesbian feminism as a trans-exclusionary movement.