Helena Maria Viramontes explores the complicated relationship between the marginalized woman and her perceived femininity in her novella Under the Feet of Jesus, juxtaposing Estrella’s unconventional womanhood with the nurse’s traditional femininity.

Estrella does not fit society’s ideals of what a woman should be: she’s Chicana, poor, and a laborer. Her clothing, often not feminine, is worn, dirty, and secondhand. The constant labor of the past several years of her life has taken a toll on her body, molding it into something that doesn’t resemble the bodies of the thin, dainty white women in magazines and media. Estrella doesn’t express any distress at the fact that she doesn’t resemble the typical idealized woman until she encounters the nurse at the clinic.

The nurse is Estrella’s opposite in every way: white, sweet-smelling, and soft-skinned from a lack of hard labor. She works, but it’s a relatively easy job inside with air conditioning and isn’t physically demanding. When she enters the room, “She [has] on a fresh coat of red lipstick, and the thick scent of carnation perfume [makes] Estrella think she [is] there in the trailer all along, in the bathroom” (137). We see her through Estrella’s eyes, and the first things about the woman Estrella fixates on—lipstick and perfume—are both stereotypically feminine things about her. These are also things that distance her from Estrella, who doesn’t and never will appear traditionally feminine. The family is already in a vulnerable position with the nurse, who holds more power than them in this situation, but her appearance and displays of traditional / “ideal” femininity hit Estrella where she’s already vulnerable: 

[Estrella] became aware of her own appearance. Dirty face, fingernails lined with mud, her tennis shoes soiled, brown smears like coffee stains on her dress where she had cleaned her hands. The nurse’s white uniform and red lipstick and flood of carnations made her even more self-conscious. (137)

The fact that the nurse can make Estrella feel insecure about her own womanhood by existing in her own body highlights the power imbalance between the two women based on race and class, both of which allow the nurse to perform her femininity in ideal ways.

The scene in the clinic comes to a head when the family is forced to use their last couple of dollars—dollars that were supposed to buy gas money for the drive home—on the nurse’s diagnosis, which is essentially information that they already know. Estrella is already stressed, overheated, and agitated, and in a moment of desperation and determination, she threatens the nurse with a crowbar in order to retrieve her family’s money. This is the most violent and angry Estrella gets, and though her reaction is arguably justified due to the conditions of the situation and the inherent violence of the nurse taking their money in exchange for no medical assistance, Estrella feels out-of-her-body and torn: 

She did not feel like herself holding that money. She felt like two Estrellas. One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested, while the other held the crowbar and the money. (150)

In this section, Viramontes lays out Estrella’s experience of being keenly aware of the difference between her feminine and unfeminine sides. With the description of the first Estrella, words like “silent” and “obediently” suggest it’s the feminine version of her, docile and submissive. The contrasting Estrella—the one existing in real time, crowbar in hand—weaponizes violence and fear, using her body to threaten the nurse. An idealized feminine girl wouldn’t do such a thing, and Estrella is cognizant of this.

Her awareness of her departure from her perceived femininity in this moment further distresses her, as the next line is “The money felt wet and ugly and sweaty like the swamp between her legs” (150). Here, she directly connects the sense of being split into two (the feminine and unfeminine) to her vagina and her internalized disgust with it, calling it ugly and sweaty. It’s important to note that the vagina isn’t at the center of what it means to be a woman as not every woman has one. But it is at the center of womanhood, the abstract cultural ideals that dictate what being a socially acceptable woman looks like. “Ugly” is a harsh word in any context, but it’s especially hateful when referring to one’s own body, even more so when describing genitalia. Estrella takes the feelings of shame and self-hatred brought up by seeing the nurse easily fit into feminine ideals and subconsciously directs them at herself and her own body simply because she recognizes that she herself does not fit into these ideals.

Femininity and womanhood are concepts constructed around societal and cultural ideas of gender expression and gender conformity. In Under the Feet of Jesus, these concepts are unavoidable. Estrella is a girl on the cusp of adolescence, existing in a body that is by no means considered traditional and isn’t always perceived as feminine. Her experience in this scene reflects the experiences of women everywhere: separating herself into the feminine and the other, the woman and the animal, the proper and the primal. Being a woman is all about dichotomies, and in this scene, Viramontes demonstrates the impossibility of marginalized women existing in the confines of femininity while still feeling like themselves.