Abstract
In response to white, patriarchal, elite, hetero-normative U.S. culture’s multiple marginalizations of Chicanas, some voices in contemporary Chicana literary criticism work toward creating an essentially Chicana body of criticism that excludes voices of dominant U.S. culture. While at the heart of this trend lies the desire for Chicana creativity to escape marginalization, this movement dismisses rather than confronts problems within dominant U.S. culture. But it appears that, as contemporary Chicana literature becomes increasingly accepted by and published within mainstream U.S. culture, Chicana creativity is moving in a different direction. In the following analysis, I examine two contemporary novels, Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999) and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002), that are very much within yet remain openly critical of the dominant U.S. culture of which they are a part. As critical works that closely examine the subversive power of working within while deconstructing structures of oppression, both Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s feminism on the border and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection inform my study of these novels. In her examination of Chicana identity politics, Saldívar-Hull explores how contemporary Chicana literature challenges dominant U.S. culture’s exclusion of Chicana voices and recovers the histories of those who have been denied expression within dominant culture. And in her psychoanalytic study of the negotiations of power involved in abjection and marginalization, Kristeva examines the transgressive power of those who deconstruct dominant culture as outsiders within. With these theories to provide the framework of my argument, I study how Castillo and Cisneros de-essentialize and expand Chicana literature by creating novels more richly complex than culturally essential, and how they deconstruct Chicana abjection and propel Chicana feminist narratives into new territories.