Queering the Sacred: Love as Oppositional Social Action

Abstract

In “Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History,” Yolanda Chávez Leyva uses storytelling to unravel the multiple meanings of silence in the lesbians’ existence. Silence, she states, can be “a way to put love first, to reconcile very different expectations, a way not only for the daughter to defer to her mother, but also a way for the mother to show respect for her daughter” (1998, 432). This “silent tolerance” or “unspoken truth” is, by no means, the forcedsilence that Mariana Romo-Carmona describes in Compañeras: Latina Lesbians:

How many daughters, mothers, sisters, godmothers and grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and best friends have lived and died unknown? Each woman’s forced silence was a denial of her existence, as if she never loved another woman, never rejoiced in their union, or cried for her, or waited for her to come home. (1987, xxiii)