Filling in the Maggie & Hopey blanks

I could rave about my newfound love for Locas all day, but I doubt that would be a very productive post. Jaime Hernandez queers the genre of graphic fiction as much as possible. Nothing goes undepicted or unsatirized – sexuality, Latina stereotypes, body image, sexual assault, feminism, music, drugs, magical realism -- even graphic novel stereotypes. For now, though, I’m interested in a few scenes that depict Hopey and Maggie’s relationship. Contrasting the scenes that appear in the beginning of the collection (ie. “Hey, Hopey!” pgs 46-48) with scenes from the second excerpt of the collection, there is one giant gap in the narrative that makes me want to read the 200+ pages I skipped: How exactly does Maggie and Hopey’s best-friendship become a relationship (more accurately, the classical “confused bisexual-girl” stereotype situation where Maggie is torn between Ray and Hopey)??

My interpretation of “Hey, Hopey” – certainly not the only possible interpretation – is that Hopey is queer, and she likes Maggie, but they don’t have a sexual relationship at that point. Maggie seems to prefer men. Although Hopey doesn’t deny that she and Maggie have a sexual relationship, she certainly doesn’t affirm it. She lets their relationship status remain ambiguous, using it as an opportunity to teach her brother: “I mean, just ‘cause me and Maggie live together and sleep in the same bed doesn’t mean anything. Just ‘cause we hold hands while walking down the street doesn’t mean shit!” (47). Hopey wants her brother to stop criticizing her preference for women – one day, she hopes, he’ll “accept things for what they are” (47) – he’ll stop trying to prove that she and Maggie are sleeping together; he’ll stop labeling her as a lesbo.

If the situation is so purposefully ambiguous, then why am I trying to prove that Maggie and Hopey aren’t having sex? Unfortunately, I’m hung up on sexual details, even though they’re supposed to be irrelevant at this point in the narrative. As I read the first 100 pages of the Locas collection, I noticed that there didn’t seem to be any sexual tension between Maggie and Hopey. This definitely isn’t because Hernandez can’t portray the sexual tension between his characters; I actually thought that was a strength of his style (case in point: bottom of page 11). I think it’s because there simply isn’t a sexual connection between them in the first 100 pages or so. For example: page 98 is a perfect opportunity to show that Hopey is really attracted to Maggie. They’re in bed together, and Maggie is topless, and instead of any visible tension, they’re both wrapped up in discussing the nights they spent passed out or in jail. Skip forward to the next excerpt (pgs 337-426), and Maggie and Hopey have clearly been in some sort of sexual relationship. Maggie has a girlfriend (Hopey) and a boyfriend (Ray), and she goes on a search for Hopey. When she and Hopey are reunited, they attempt to have a threesome with Ray’s ex-girlfriend, but Maggie balks and ends up watching Hopey have sex with the ex. This sparks a conversation about how Maggie “really got used to being normal for so long with Ray” and that she was “planning to get married and have babies someday” (421). Hopey points out her use of the word “normal” – here, Hernandez once again uses Hopey to portray a queer viewpoint, and Maggie is cast as the stereotypical mainstream confused bisexual, torn between her interest in women and her desire for a “normal” heterosexual life.

Anyway, to make an increasingly long post short, I’m extremely interested in seeing how Hernandez built the sexual relationship between Maggie and Hopey. It originally became a teaching point for queer friendships and ambiguous sexuality, and somehow evolved into a teaching point for Maggie’s somewhat stereotypical struggle with bisexuality vs. Hopey’s embrace of queerness. Above all, I’m curious about how Hernandez managed to create these complex teaching points without compromising the believability of the sexual connection between Maggie and Hopey.