Sabrina & Corina: Stories

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.