Chicana Sexuality and Gender

Blake Debra J. Blake

Description

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers' radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. Lopez and Yolanda Lopez.Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernan Cortes during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

Sujets

• USA
• History of art
• Spanish
• Oral history
• États-Unis
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822381228
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Abookintheseries lati n ameri ca otherwi se: languages, empi res, nati ons Serieseditors: Walter D. Mignolo,uDekUinversity

Irene Silverblatt,uDyUekveniitrs

ChicanaSexualityandGender

Sonia Saldívar-Hull,nUTexaofsityiveroinotnAnaS,s

a b o u t t h e s e r i e s

LatinAmericaOtherwise:Languages,Empires,Nationsis a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad inter- play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a contin- uous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.taniLiracAemerwiOthse: Languages,Empires,Nations is a forum that confronts established geo- cultural constructions, rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and correspond- ingly demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. Beginning in the precolonial indigenous past, cultural symbols such as the Aztec mother earth goddesses have exerted a profound impact on the way women of Mexican descent have understood their sexuality and have imagined their roles within society and the family. Later history added other icons to the Aztec goddesses—namely, La Malinche, La Llorona, and the La Virgen de Guadalupe. Through legends, myths, and stories told to children and shared within communities and families, each of these fig-

ures has influenced generations of individuals in the construction of their gender identities. This present work examines the way di√erent groups of Chicana and U.S. Mexicana women have made use of these cultural sym- bols to negotiate, contest, and transform the forces that have confined or demeaned them. The women reimagine (or ‘‘transcode,’’ to use Stuart Hall’s term) the negative elements attached to these figures and assign them new meanings as part of a struggle for self-empowerment and to defeat racial stereotypes and discrimination. In studying these cultural refigurings,GneadnilytxeauSnacahiCder: CulturalRefiguringinLiterature,OralHistory,andArtfocuses on two dis- tinct groups: Chicana writers and artists, who constitute a professional intellectual class, and other working-class and semiprofessional women whose oral narratives of their own lives collected by the author are ana- lyzed along with the writing and visual representations of the professional intellectuals. To accomplish this Blake employs Michel Foucault’s concept of residual countermemory. Following George Lipsitz’s use of counter- memory, Blake positions the narratives of these women as ‘‘the local, the immediate, and the personal’’ that builds out toward the total story, even though the total may never be fully known. Such narratives, Debra Blake argues, check the impulse to valorize a single unifying story and reveal the buried histories not written into the dominant discourse. She demon- strates how for both groups this cultural refiguring arises from the inter- related processes of revising history and recovering memory. In brief, the women follow the example of ‘‘the woman of discord’’ by disrupting the dominant discourses that have constructed these icons. This meticulous interdisciplinary study rea≈rms the importance of recognizing the diversity within a single culture, and accepting that so- called unitary symbols inspire diverse practices.

DebraJ.Blake

! chicana sexuality and gender

CulturalRefiguringinLiterature,OralHistory,andArt

duke university press0u0D8amrhndaonLn2do

2008 d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

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for gloria e. anzaldúa,

a brilliant scholar of incomparable humility

!

for all the women

who have been abused or violated

!

for my foremothers,

helen, pauline, and germaine

!

contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

ix

1. The Power of Representation History,Memory,andtheCulturalRefiguringof LaMalinche’sLineage 13

2. Chicana Feminism Spirituality,Sexuality,andMexicaGoddessesRe-membered

70

3. Las Historias Sexuality,GenderRoles,andLaVirgendeGuadalupeReconsidered

4. Cultural Anxieties and Truths Gender,Nationalism,andLaLloronaRetellings

144

5. Reading Dynamics of Power OralHistories,FeministResearch,andthePoliticsofLocation

Conclusion Notes 223 References Index 273

215

253

185

102