Reclaiming My Clitoris: Locating the G(od) Spot of Institutionalized Experiences (2015)
Published in Hermes Magazine.
Please note that Denisse no longer identifies as a woman and uses they/them pronouns.
Reclaiming My Clitoris: Locating the G(od) Spot of Institutionalized Experiences
“Like every woman who matters to me, I have had to search for her in the rubble of history.”
-Sandra Cisneros, Guadalupe Sex Goddess
About a week ago, a student approached me after class and asked if I had enjoyed the piece we read for class discussion by Sandra Cisneros, Guadalupe the Sex Goddess. I thought what Cisneros said, “You could always tell [who’s] Latina” but replied, “Yes, I liked it very much did you?” I realized that while Cisneros had revealed the peccadilloes of her sexual history she had not escaped the image of the peasant-Virgin Mary-Latina, the simply dressed child-mother with a baby secured politely to her hip, and that my classmate had put my head inside of the hole of Cisneros’ vulva. I was being asked if I stood in solidarity with a 33-year-old Chicana, as if either of us could understand the reality of this woman’s liberation from depression when her story was being exchanged for a raised hand and a number.
Meanwhile, I was oscillating between two separate identities: my stable-quiet-white-heterosexual-decency that is dependent on the homo-solidarity system to feel understood and my fluid-deviant-brown-Latina-whore-indecency that stands against the institutionalization of my history. Instead of accepting a mythological reality where these two identities stand separately from each other, I am proposing a conversation that values an undifferentiated variety of sexual options by liberating myself from an academic experience as a marginalized individual, an experience that forcibly positioned me as a symbol for the painful history of my people. I have chosen to resist clitoridectomy, I have chosen to preserve my pleasure by preserving my feelings.
When a student questioned why and how Sandra Cisneros could return to her religious history that caused her so much pain and suffering, it was clear that Latina(ed) sexual history was being examined akin to a straight and heterosexual theological process that disregards the variability and instability of gender and sexuality and ignores the bones left behind from the attempts to recast history through the exclusion of people of color.
In her story, Cisneros identifies her sexuality with the Virgin Mary but her sexual history differs from the biographical Systematic theological style of reading and construct that assumes a linear progression, like the names humming for pages and pages in the Bible that explicate divinity’s dissemination through Jesus’ genes. Assuming that sexuality cannot return to its beginnings supports a mythological reality that declares sexual chaos does not exist normally; that sexuality progresses forward instead of being an aggregation of disordered sexual locations throughout time that swell and multiply. Most importantly, it denies the legitimacy of a Latina’s reality, her identity and Latinas who identify with these personal stories. It assumes that every Latina has the same Virgin Mary, the same G(od) spot, the same sexual identities that are not truths unless positioned correctly within naturalized past Latina narratives that are centered on white experiences. Approaching Cisneros’ story with white sensibilities that imagine liberation only exists in the future, fixes Latinas within a prescribed and homogenized form of solidarity. People who question a Latina’s narrative for reasons and answers are not trying to listen to her experience. They are trying to fit an experience within their white ordered mythological reality.
Latinas simply do not fit here. There is no future for Latinas here.
That day, after slides with depictions of the Virgin Mary in Renaissance art surfaced one after another for the class, these stories were disrespectfully abandoned until the last 25 minutes. Yet when we began foreplay and I finally touched them, I became a spectator to the interpretation of my history, implicit and complicit in the same trend that demands students to regulate affective experiences with the hope of eventual progress within educational institutions.
I feared the hegemonic white phallus I had underneath my skirt, which emerged in class only to honor my institutional setting. Like Cisneros, I envied the white women who could speak without thinking, unashamed of their bodies—the same white women that could neatly close their books after class and tuck my history into their backpacks. Simultaneously, I yearned to legitimize my identity through them, with them, to slip my head through the hole of each of their funfair photographs, while also feeling guilty and shameful because I didn’t embrace the lips and hardness of my own clitoris. The humility and submission anchored by my own sexual history that runs beside and sometimes within Systematic theology, bared why the Word of God was the Highest Phallus man could conceive of. Like Liberational Theologists, I silenced my body for the sake of preserving my spiritual investment in an institution. When I did speak, I felt possessive over the texts, converting them into objects and reproducing false consciousness.
This is how I perform the clitoridectomy of my own people.
Effortlessly, I was still eager to fit into this normative institution and approached my Professor hoping that she would not meet my emotions obliquely. Instead, she placed an object between us, suggesting that I write about my feelings in a ‘creative writing piece,’ enhancing the gap that allows her to distance herself from responsibility. Through this suggestion she administered that I must defend myself from her oppression, that my future actions are dependent on white guilt, that “I am in one of the best positions to write about this” because I am placeholder for a painful history, and that I am the only one responsible in preventing further alienation. Our histories do not fit into intellectual essays and discourse, and cannot and do not, because intellectual systems are structured to avoid this conversation and more violently, they function only when we learn the white man’s words. As I was leaving, this Professor put thousands of years between us, she guarded herself with yardsticks of time, she said, "I'm sorry about genocide. I'm sorry about history."
Again, Latina’s do not have a future here.
This sense of alienation caused by the separation of my identity as a Latina and unfortunately my identity as an assimilated white-Latina(ed)-American, manifests because I have become spiritually invested in a discourse that does not value pleasure or lust outside of an intellectual understanding that is heteronormative and white. We separate ourselves from our surroundings, suppress the emotional connections we experience, and pretend to enter neutral spaces, all under the guise of liberation through education. I keep wondering when it will make me feel free. The mythological reality of Wesleyan University works by suppressing the nuances of our surroundings to reward the proliferation and reproduction of white colonialist histories. This moment in my education is the “short-circuited kind of goddess-empowering ritual” where “generations of young women have crashed their heads and hears infinite desolation and terminal sadness.”[1] I find that I cannot even hear my head crashing anymore.
Similar to Mary’s symbolism existing within a religious imagination, the symbolism surrounding my history is not my genuine history. Yet, I carry the regulation of Latinas when I accept these mythological realities. I am a symbol for Latinas because I have to be, because our history has brought me here. Yet, I also love my mythological realities and don’t want to let them go. I resemble statues of the Virgin Mary that are painted to match the skin color of my people: a superficial image that Latinas can identify with, a Latina that makes her mother proud by being an ‘exception,’ but in reality, underneath I remain white enough to make my mami proud.
I may have replaced my plump sticky pink vulva with stone, but doubting my position within an institution that is both the microcosm and macrocosm of a larger political economy, documents audibly and publicly my personal experience as a Latina. While there is no homogenized reality and no homogenized G(od) spot, I am becoming exposed to levels of Christian myths within the educational system that propose homogenized forms of freedom. My nationalism and my traditions are divided geographically and it is getting more difficult to reclaim pleasure without thinking of the trite virgin|whore complex. I am encouraged to choose between political independence or cultural innovation, between supporting the dead master narrative of the immaculate conception and the indecent woman, between staying silent during class and speaking without being called on. I choose to be indecent not as a diatribe or with a clear ending in mind, but simply to embrace the potential of injecting pleasure, the potential of saying what one feels, as one of my options for transiently feeling free.
[1] From Marcella Althaus-Reid’s book Indecent Theology, pages 49 and 78.