La Frontera nortena femenina: Transgresion y resistencia identitaria en Esali, Conde y Rivera Garza
by Silva Rodriguez, Graciela, Ph.D., ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2007, 251 pages; 3270620

Abstract:

The present doctoral study examines the narrative production of three writers who delineate the evolution of feminist writing in the Northern border zone: Estela Alicia López Lomas (Esalí; n. 1944), Rosina Conde (n. 1954), and Cristina Rivera Garza (n. 1964). Chapter one presents a historically detailed social context once dominated by the masculine voice but now feminized. A biborderlands and interdisciplinary critical framework is developed in chapter two for interpreting the zone's geographic location (the vicinity with the United States and the distance from Mexico's center) as well as the literary Genesis of the region, allowing us to uncover the principles in border literature written by women (Anzaldúa, Hicks, Fox; Berumen, Gómez Montero, Trujillo, and Cortés Bargalló); the gendered social conditions like the role assigned to women in traditional Mexican society (Carner, Giraurd, Ruby, Lamas, Amorós, and Butler); the migratory processes and social identities (Trigo, Valenzuela Arce, and Giménez); the subordinated role of women within hegemonic society (Rodríguez, Moreiras, and Spivak), and the borderlands neo-fantastic that shows that "the fantastic does not exist; everything is real" (Todorov, Jackson, Alazraki, Corretjer and Sánchez). Using as a base this critical discourse, we interpret in chapter three to five the works of the above mentioned female writers—respectively, Terramara (2004), La Genara (1998), and La cresta de ilión (2002), whose literary style widely varies: poetic, epistolary, and neo-fantastic—from a tripartite otherness: as women, as writers, and as border dwellers. In order to carry out this exegesis, we use, as part of our complex critical framework, such axis concepts as border, culture, subaltern, identity, and gender. Consequently, our critical reflection on three decades of female border writing marks the spatial dimension of specific cultural phenomena in order to understand their resonance in the creative process, from which same phenomena it is possible to understand that the female border writer constructs a world view that does not romanticize, mythify or stereotype, but instead reveals the real Northern border in order to expose and put an end to a certain social character (a painful psychological reality built on misogyny, classism, and social demarcation) which morally, intellectually, and physically affects its female characters.

 
Advisor
SchoolARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
SourceDAI/A 68-06, p. , Oct 2007
Source TypeDissertation
SubjectsLatin American literature; Women's studies; Language
Publication Number3270620
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