Chicana Narrative of Dissent: Corporeal Containment and Sexual Excess in Castillo's Give It To Me

• In Event: Political Prowess in Ana Castillo’s Chicanx Literature of Dissent

Abstract

In 2014, Ana Castillo published her latest novel, Give It To Me. As a Chicana writer of prominent publishing history known for her politicized novels, this narrative, completely about sex, sent reviewers roaring. Prior to the book release, The Feminist Press (who published Give It To Me) wrote on their website that the novel was the “Chicana Sex In the City;” a type of sexual liberation narrative that showed the agency of the Chicana protagonist, Palma Piedras. On the other end of the spectrum, the Weekly Publishers review exclaimed with unfaltering enthusiasm that, “Another issue…is the nature of Castillo’s heroine, who invariably makes the poorest choices available and then wonders why things aren’t going better.” Between the two discourses of female liberation, a politically conscious Chicana narrative and that of “bad choices,” an American assimilation novel, is the novel Give It To Me. This article is concerned with what is foreclosed and lies at the interstices of these two bold literary reviews, which is a turn to the excessive Chicana body politic in Chicana Literature.
Following the theories of Sandra Sota, Maria Juana Rodriguez, and Frederick Luis Aldama, I maintain that to read Give It To Me as a narrative of dissent and excessive sexuality and hypersexualization is to resignify the pathologized, overly sexual and excessive Chicana figure in narratives to reveal how normative valuation of racialized bodies under global capitalism mask her historical positionality and racialized sexuality, which deem her not productive and therefore not deserving of a safe life. Through Palma and her more than twenty sexual encounters, Castillo pens a novel that puts excessive sex at the forefront not to liberate or chastise Palma, but to undermine all sense of certainty through the deployment of hyperbole, metaphor, and parody. There is power in sex in this novel and it doesn’t follow a conventional second-wave feminist agenda of liberation. It lays out the terms to investigate the logic of hierarchies and exploitation regarding sex. Palma sits amongst a well-written trajectory of sexually excessive Chicana protagonists, however, what makes Palma distinctly different from many of the others is her moral center or lack therefore; compared to Cherríe Moraga’s Cerecita in Hereoes and Saints and Emma Perez’s unnamed protagonist in Gulf Dreams, to name a few. Palma’s lack of empathy and perspective construct her as a vapid and empty character on the surface. But, upon meeting Palma in Chicago and her quick summary of how she was sexually active since elementary school with no clear career path all within the first chapter, readers are quickly confronted with her postmodern subjectivity that cannot contain her excessive “Chicananess.” However, Palma cannot be encapsulated by the postmodern subjectivity that breaks down the knowing subject. Rather, Castillo’s vapid characterization of Palma and her excessive sex maps meaning onto the hyperbolic representations of Chicana sexuality, which emerge from a racialized and gendered distinction.

Author

• Bernadine Hernández, University of New Mexico