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.
General
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