In Moraga’s “It is You, My Sister, Who Must Be Protected” excerpt, Moraga explores her relationship with her family and simultaneously her queerness. She battles against what’s expected of her as a woman, fights to provide for the women in her life she cares for, and above all hopes to receive love back in the end.<\/p>\n
Moraga makes a point to repeat a certain phrase: “It is this queer I run from.” Foremost, she wishes to distance herself from how her father’s queerness has manifested: he has completely shut himself off from feeling in order to pass as straight. Still, he has moments where this facade breaks, such as when he was left alone in the house for once and the family “…came back to find our
\nhome in shambles. My mother…started throwing onto the floor
\nboxes and boxes of cereal, seasons-old and opened, now crawling with
\nants and roaches” (Moraga, pg2). His inner turmoil is forever unresolved. He has, in a way, become the heteronormative absent father, in which his neglect towards Moraga’s mother later manifests into the mother’s physical abuse (Moraga, pg3).<\/p>\n
Additionally, Moraga feels inclined to fulfill the role as the loving “protector,” both encouraged and held back by her identity as a woman. She feels for her mother’s lack of love and appreciation; “…it takes
\nevery muscle in me not to leave my chair, not to climb through the silence,
\nnot to clamber toward her,” Moraga admits (Moraga, pg5). She sees herself as capable of receiving and giving love in a way that her father is no longer able to: “It is this queer I run from” comes to mind again. When she tries to have a heart to heart with him, she acknowledges that her identity as a woman unconsciously lessens the validity of her words to him. “If I were a man,” she reflects, “I could be one bastard of a sensitive guy. Since I am a woman, people\u2014men and women alike\u2014 drink from me” (Moraga, pg7). Just like her mom, she receives the quiet violence from her father because it’s what expected from her. Moraga’s gender identity and her performance seem to constantly wage a war in her throughout her life.<\/p>\n
This relationship with her family and identity comes back to Moraga later in life, reflected by the excerpt “The Slow Dance.” She thinks back on how her mother insists that “A real man, when he dances with you, you\u2019ll know he\u2019s a real man by how he holds you in the back\u201d (Moraga, pg25). Moraga wishes to take on that role in her own, queer way, so she can guide a woman through dance like her mother wishes she could’ve had with Moraga’s father. However, she finds Elena and Susan, two women she’s observed and admired, with each other rather than with her. She reminds herself she’s “…used to being an observer…I am used to imagining what it must be like” (Moraga, pg26). Once again, she finds herself unable to experience queerness, much like her father, and must continue to grow and learn about herself to distance herself from such a fate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Moraga’s “It is You, My Sister, Who Must Be Protected” excerpt, Moraga explores her relationship with her family and simultaneously her queerness. She battles against what’s expected of her as a woman, fights to provide for the women in her life she cares for, and above all hopes to receive love back in the … Continue reading Love and its Absence: An Analysis on Cherr\u00ede L. Moraga<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5694,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5694"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}