76 pages • 2 hours read
Kali Fajardo-AnstineSabrina & Corina: Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Sabrina, “Sabrina & Corina”
In the titular “Sabrina & Corina,” Sabrina is Corina’s cousin, and her cause of death is strangulation. Sabrina was known for her physical beauty and popularity, but she was led astray by drugs, alcohol, and her affairs with predatory men. The truth of the complexity of both Sabrina’s identity and her lived experiences are sanitized and flattened through the literal act of applying makeup to her corpse, which is then put on a stage during her funeral. Through this plotting, Fajardo-Anstine asserts that Sabrina was objectified and flattened all of her life—so much so that this flattening objectification dominated even her death. This flattening objectification is brought about mostly through the assertions and actions of other women. Notably, Sabrina’s male murderer is never named or expanded upon—he is rendered as a shadow, unimportant. The person giving powerful sanctions to treat Sabrina as either a beautiful object or a cautionary tale is a woman: Corina’s grandmother.
The onus for the mistreatment and myopia toward the truth of Sabrina’s existence lies squarely on the shoulders of the women who choose to interact with Sabrina in a clearly oversimplified and therefore dehumanizing manner. In this way, Fajardo-Anstine depicts the insidiousness of patriarchal logic. She shows that women can be and, in practice, often are key enforcers and producers of their own collective oppression—when they uncritically participate in the oppression of their own by valuing or celebrating women only for their beauty, and not for their full humanity.
Corina, “Sabrina & Corina”
Corina, the narrator of this story, tells this story from her past. She recalls the day that her grandmother called her while she was working at the Macy’s makeup counter. Her grandmother told her that Sabrina, her cousin and purported best friend, had been strangled and killed. The news of Sabrina’s death spurs within Corina a series of flashbacks of both good and bad memories.
Corina struggles with how things appear on the surface versus how things actually are. This struggle is intimately tied to her position as a woman. The central conceit of Corina performing makeup magic to prepare Sabrina’s corpse for visual consumption by her supposed mourners crystallizes this theme. Sabrina is fetishized by everyone from the mortician to Corina’s grandmother, who base the entirety of their mourning for Sabrina on her good looks and femininity. However, Corina glimpsed the darkness, sadness, and desperation that lay just beneath the surface of Sabrina’s supposed glamour. She also saw Sabrina’s recklessness—her selfishness and cruelty. In short, although their relationship was contentious, Corina saw Sabrina’s full, flawed humanity—in contrast to others, who only saw what was on the surface. Other community members, and notably female members, were only too happy to interact with Sabrina’s life and death as if Sabrina were merely a pretty doll.
Doty, “Sisters”
Doty is a queer character who is fundamentally incompatible with the imposed strictures of her environment. Unlike her sister, Tina, who wants nothing more than to assimilate into the dominant White supremacist, patriarchal American culture to lay claim to the most advantages she can get within it, Doty is uninterested in donning the identity of a heterosexual wife to a White man. Although she is light-skinned, she is not interested in using her phenotype to secure proximity to Whiteness and the benefits that proximity would grant. However, her position is not one of purposeful resistance or rebellion either. While she rejects her sister’s attitude, she does so from a position of passivity. She does not articulate or critique the how Tina’s choices make her complicit with misogyny or White supremacy, and even often begrudgingly participates in the mating rituals that Tina shoves down her throat. We can see, then, that Doty’s outsider status is not one based in her own agency, but in the way that the dominant order marginalizes her. In Doty, then, Fajardo-Anstine presents a tragic queer portrait, characterized by cruel oppression, rather than a triumphant queer portrait characterized by purposeful rebellion and resilience.
Alicia, “All Her Names”
Alicia’s secrecy and double-life are a consequence of her coexisting marginalization and drive to fulfill her own desires. For one, she is alienated by an American cultural and economic system which, through the gentrification of her community, seeks to erase her existence. In response, she belongs to a subculture of taggers, who, through the adoption of alternate identities that aid them in evading legal repercussions of their activities, boldly assert their creativity and identities through their artwork. This is one of Alicia’s double lives: On the surface, she is a law-abiding woman named Alicia. As a tagger, she is K-SD, and she can access a transcendent, deeply fulfilling art practice that dwarfs her day job in terms of emotional release and satisfaction. Alicia is also carrying on an affair with her old boyfriend, Michael.
In many ways, Michael knows her more authentic self, and she can communicate with him in an intimate, mutually understanding way. They must conduct their relationship in the shadows, as Alicia is married to a White man named Gary. Through Gary, Alicia can access material wealth and social stability, but she is not respected, affirmed, or uplifted for her whole identity, which is something that Michael does—because they are from the same community and share a history together that Gary can simply never understand. Alicia must use the flawed avenues that are available to her to attempt to satisfy her desires. This happens because the overarching economic, racial, and cultural system of America marginalizes her.
