I have found my identity not because of my experiences with intimate-family toxic masculinity but despite them. In my own tragedy, I had to find ways to honor my strengths and my ability to take care of myself, despite the monster under my bed.
In my country, like many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is a series of stories we pass down orally. One famous story is that of La Llorona. In the La Llorona story I knew growing up, a mother, when she discovers her husband is having an affair, kills her children. She comes to her senses only after the act is done, and today her ghost roams the streets looking for her children. In the story, all children are in danger of being taken and claimed as her own.
The story lacks details like time and place, and serves as a warning to keep children indoors after the sun goes down. Like many stories, there is a lesson to be learned, a warning. This ghost story is a very common tale growing up in a Latin American household. Telling and retelling this tragedy is a cultural norm.
In graduate school, I discovered a series of these stories shared by many Latin American descendants. La Malinche is one of those stories. As I have heard this story, La Malinche was an Indigenous woman who served as a translator for conquistadores and helped in the colonization of the Aztec empire. I have also heard that she was bought and sold throughout most of her life, and that is how she was able to know multiple languages and serve as a translator. La Malinche is generally seen as a traitor.
Her story also goes on to say that she eventually becomes the mistress of Hernán Cortés, a Spanish conquistador. La Malinche has children with Cortés and she, too, kills the children, after the conquistadores depart to return to Spain.
Like La Llorona, La Malinche’s story is a tragedy. Many scholars believe that both of these stories are the same, and many have reclaimed La Malinche. They believe that she had no agency. As a slave and mistress, she was not willingly abandoning her people but was a tool for a larger and more powerful empire. La Malinche is a victim of colonization and male domination, and today she roams the streets crying, mourning the tragedy that was her life.
In a patriarchal society, the focus of the story is on the evils and emotions of the crying women, rather than on the male aggressors and the injustices that brought about these tragedies. And that is why I tell my own stories, because I am not my anger, my fear, and my sadness. My emotional responses to trauma are just a small window into the larger experiences I have lived through.
Women’s main activities are reduced to two: suffering the male presence and mourning male absence.
—Elizabeth E. Brusco
In my household, tears are a display of weakness that is scorned. Growing up, mi mami had a parrot that could speak. This parrot called me “llorona” whenever I entered a room. She called me that because everyone in my home called me llorona. For most of my life, I believed that I was a crybaby, but in hindsight I can see things more clearly: I was crying out for help after years of mistreatment, but our culture had desensitized us to female mourning, female tears. We have been taught through La Llorona that those tears are a trick at best.
As I got older, I realized that this was neither healthy nor normal. When I learned to reclaim these particularly female tragedies, I learned to stop being ashamed of my own tears. So today, I allow myself to cry often. I know now that crying is not exclusively a female trait and not a weakness. Rather, crying is a way to name the tragedies in our lives, and it is a way to release them. I’ve learned that I did not cry because I was a llorona, just as La Llorona did not only cry because she killed her children. La Llorona was mourning her life, a life that was robbed from her. And I cried because I did not know how to explain emotional abuse or how to deal with it as a little girl. Yet I was dismissively called llorona, while no one ever corrected the behavior that caused my tears.
We do that. We call mujeres locas, lloronas, putas, and a slew of other terms that are specifically meant to shame women for not following the rules and for speaking up for themselves.
I was called a loca when I left my ex-husband. A puta when I decided to enjoy sex and have lots of it. And a llorona for trying to thwart abusive behavior. I now know that this coded language was used to stop my protests and stop me from living life on my terms.
I hope that we can move away from being a society that blames women instead of protecting them. I hope that people continue to reclaim the pantheon of Indigenous deities who were discarded or vilified for the preferred Christian God. I hope that we can dare to look female tragedies in the face and try to heal from them instead of running away, like I was taught to do.
I identify with La Llorona because I wanted to be loved. Instead, I was abused by this monster under my bed, who also slept next to mi mami and in the room next to mine. And for years, nobody listened. And until we learn to listen, I will remember my childhood self as La Llorona. A little girl, desperately crying for help, who had to figure out how to survive in a household that placed so little value on her that they managed to mock her instead of coming to her aid.
Yet, still, my heart has always wanted to embrace you, even if you did not embrace me, and that is the real tragedy.
CHAPTER 7
INTERSECTIONALITY
Intersectionality [is] a way of framing the various interactions of race and gender in the context of violence against women of color.
—Kimberlé Crenshaw
This one is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls who were not allowed to shave their legs until they were at least twelve years old, and then when you were finally allowed to, it was strongly advised that you shave below the knee and not above it. Because only putas wear clothes short enough to show the upper part of your legs.
This is for the girls who pleaded, begged, cried to be allowed to shave sooner and were met with unsympathetic glares from your mami and papi. This is for the girls who secretly shaved the hair on their toe knuckles just to wear sandalias, since pants were all they felt they could wear once someone pointed out their hairy legs.
This is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls whose arm hair was the butt of jokes in elementary school. This is for the girls who found the bleaching creams for body hair at Eckerd’s one day. For the girls who then bleached their arm hair blonde, only to realize that it did not erase the thickness of their mane. The bleach only seemed to highlight their hairiness against their darker skin.
This one is for the girls with hairy knuckles, for the girls who shaved those knuckles once someone else pointed out their hairiness.
This one is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls who never noticed that women also grow mustaches, to differing degrees. This is for the ones who were happy and enjoying their lives, until their older brother made fun of the hair above their upper lip in front of a guy they thought they were going to marry.
This is for the girls with happy trails. For the girls with that thick patch of hair on their lower back. This is for the girls who were told that “only boys” have hair on those parts of their bodies.
This is for the girls who were made to feel less like a girl, less like a woman, because not only were they hairy but their hair was dark and it was thick.
This one is for all the girls whose eyebrows have a life of their own. I started wearing prescription glasses my senior year of high school, and when I first tried them on, my eyebrows touched my lenses. I remember mi mami laughing at me, saying I had mi papi’s eyebrows. I began to trim my eyebrow hairs on that day.
This is for the girls who tried everything to eliminate their eyebrows once they discovered tweezers. This one is for the girls who obsessed over trimming and maintaining their eyebrows, only to find out that thick eyebrows were the new trend for white girls.
This is for the girls who wondered where all this hair had come from and wished to be free of it. For the girls who cried because they just wanted to look like those girls in their magazines: the hairless, cute ones, the ones who did not have to worry about when they would have to
shave next.
This is for the all the girls who have had to love themselves despite everyone telling them otherwise. Being a hairy girl means that this world has taught us how to erase ourselves with lasers, waxing, bleaching, shaving, tweezers, and the like.
Being a hairy girl means learning to love yourself in this new hairless version that you’ve created or learning to love the hairiness as it is—but it means learning to love yourself either way. It means that for a long time you were discouraged from looking like you did, and that you had to take that information and either reject it or run with it.
This is for all those tears you’ve shed and all that work you’ve put into loving yourself.
I see you. I am you, and I am still learning and unlearning all the Eurocentric ideals of beauty that fueled my own self-hatred. But we will overcome and raise a proudly hairy generation who will be forces of nature.
Body hair readily denoted this evolving regard for self-ownership and self-determination.
—Rebecca M. Herzig
I started this chapter with this particular hairy girl experience because, despite what feminism has insisted, our experiences as women—whether assigned female at birth (AFAB) or otherwise—are vast and varied. This vastness, including the vastness of impacted oppressions, is addressed within intersectionality. Black, Indigenous, and women of color do not have the option to separate their oppression due to racism from oppression due to sexism; they experience both, from all communities. As a facet of that violence, white beauty ideals are both patriarchal and racist, and they suffocate Black, Indigenous, and women of color.
When I wrote this particular story, I was not thinking about all the cute, white hairless girls I had grown up being taught were normal through television, magazines, and the Limited Too. When I wrote this story, I was thinking about all the hairy Black and Brown girls who were socialized to believe that something was wrong with them because they did not reflect European standards of beauty.
Seeing things through an intersectional lens allows me to decenter the norms of whiteness and maleness. The white male experience has been taught as the universal, representative human experience. It is not. I remember learning about intersectionality in graduate school and feeling struck, because up to that point I had assumed that the “universal” included me. Even when I had experiences that told me otherwise, that universal assumption seemed to overwrite those experiences. I had to accept that the default human experience had never included me. It hurt that my differences were not recognized, much less honored. Instead, I was expected to absorb the dominant white worldview, even when whiteness did not want me to exist. This displacement was painful.
Sometimes I think I just assumed that displacement was always going to be my reality due to my migration. I had to learn to carve spaces for myself by reading the work of Black, Indigenous, and women of color. I first had to learn about intersectionality before I could even begin to do that work.
The word “intersectionality” gave me the language I needed to name the experiences I had been dealing with my entire life. It gave me the tools to turn that displacement into something generative and healing, for myself and for others.
The act of writing this opening letter to hairy girls, for me, is layered. I first published a version of it online, on the Huffington Post, to carve out one small place where my hairiness was not shamed and my experiences as a hairy girl were not erased.
My assertion of pride in my hairy female body was never meant to include any white women. The pressure to shave is present for all women, but hairy Black and Brown women experience it in a different, violent way. This letter allowed me to speak to people who would intimately understand this as a distinct experience for Brown and Black women. I have read this story to a room of more than fifty BIWOC who all had tears in their eyes, and I have read this story to a room of mixed races and genders, where I saw a white man get up from his seat and leave mid-story. This story is not meant for a mixed audience; this story is meant just for us.
Because the hairy Brown girl story is not meant for a general audience, it does not center a white experience. White people are used to having their experiences constantly centered as the norm; so much so that they cannot read any other experience as a legitimate human experience. By utilizing an intersectional framework, I am decentralizing this normative culture. This story is for people whose intersections mean that they are women with darker genetic traits and a predisposition for hairiness.
I wrote this for the BIWOC who had grown up tormented for something that they could not change about themselves. I wrote this from a place of wanting to improve our regard toward hairy folks. Starting this chapter on intersectionality with a specific marginalized perspective was intentional. I wanted those folks who are not familiar with this experience to be confronted with and feel the discomfort of being excluded, perhaps for the first time in their lives. I also want those folks who are intimately familiar with this experience to sit in the magic of having our specific reality named. I want my readers to enjoy the magic of an intersectional story that does not prioritize whiteness.
A failure of mainstream feminism is that it is white and elite. The concept of intersectionality arose, in part, as a critique of gender-only feminism. A feminism that sees the white cis female experience as the universal female experience simply cannot address the issues faced by most women on the planet—because most women on the planet are Black and Brown. And mainstream feminism lacks awareness that, while women can share some experiences (such as the pressure to shave), how we experience them is based on our intersections of race, ability, class, and sexuality, which can make that similar pressure feel very different.
It is in the details of your experiences where you will find uniqueness, and it is in the uniqueness where you will find the intersections of your layered identities. If your movement refuses to honor our differences, then your movement only serves to reinforce the status quo. A “universal” feminism only serves the default narrative, which is always white above anything else.
Recent studies indicate that more than 99 percent of American women voluntarily remove hair, and more than 85 percent do so regularly, even daily. The usual targets, for the moment, are legs, underarms, eyebrows, upper lips, and bikini lines. Those habits, furthermore, appear to transcend ethnic, racial, and regional boundaries.
—Rebecca M. Herzig
Hair seems to be a unifier for BIWOC, to differing degrees. And while not all BIWOC will identify with this narrative, there are things within it that still feel true and uniquely ours in ways that white women can never understand.
Women are socialized to depend on male approval. This means that, as BIWOC, to be considered feminine, we are pressured to be beautiful in a world where only white women are upheld as the standard of beauty. If you are not white, there is already something considered inferior about your body. When you are both Brown and hairy, you are also coded as somehow masculine, and therefore your body is a betrayal to femininity. White women have been complicit in cementing these standards.
White women have routinely stepped into their liberation from the injustices they have faced due to their gender by growing out their body hair. Yet, our fights are not the same. Even when white women face social backlash for their unfeminine body hair, they are still white. Being of the “desirable” race means that their resistance will land differently than when an “undesirable” Brown woman grows out her body hair as an act of resistance.
This piece is not for a dark-haired white woman; this piece does not center nor validate those experiences. Black and Brown women are forced to shave our hair to become desirable in a society that has taught us that our bodies are already undesirable because of the color of our skin. This chapter is about self-love and standing firm in however you have decided to thrive.
A woman of color’s self-love is political and radical, and it is unsettling for the status quo because she is choosing bravely to dismantle the narratives of racist
aesthetics against her. So when people bully a girl of color for being content and satisfied with her appearance—a reality that is subjected to racist, sexist slurs in cosmetic industries—and when they tell her to be “humble,” which is normative code for “Nah, you’re not special, you’re not light and delicate in a Eurocentric way,” then she has every right to chew their hearts and spit them out. A non-white girl’s self-love is revolutionary and anyone trying to water it down needs to back right off.
—Mehreen Kasana
Mehreen Kasana’s quote is precisely why this piece is for BIWOC with dark hair. If you have never had to walk through CVS scanning the aisles for that body-hair bleaching cream that your other BIWOC dark-haired friend told you about, that means we are not the same. And differences are beautiful; intersections are full of richness and variance. I should also note that the body-hair bleaching cream fails us terribly, and it fails due to the exact fact that your Black or Brown skin is meant to have dark hair. This story can only be experienced by other BIWOC with dark hair.
Because feminism has not actually figured out that women can also have other layered identities, feminism will continue to fail to see all women.
I am a woman and I am Brown. I am a woman and I grew up working-class. I am a woman and I am an immigrant. But also, I am a woman and I was AFAB, meaning I am cisgender. I am a woman and I am in a heterosexual relationship. I am a woman and I have multiple degrees. All that means that when I go into a job interview, those intersections will either advantage or disadvantage me. Those intersections also inform how I approach everything, and that is what intersectionality means. It means various realities can simultaneously inform who we are, why we think the way we think, why we care about what we care about, and why we cannot be expected to join movements that do not consider all those realities. It is also the first thing that people want to reject when creating movements. The women’s movement erased women of color. The civil rights movement marginalized women of color. Both movements sidelined queer and disabled women of color. Whenever a movement wishes to focus on a “unified” experience by erasing specific experiences, that means that these movements erase too many of us.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 14