By Cristina Herrera
Regardless of the becoming literary scholarship on Chicana writers, few, if any, stories have exhaustively explored subject matters of motherhood, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships of their novels. whilst discussions of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships do happen in literary scholarship, they generally tend to commonly be a backdrop to a bigger dialog on topics similar to id, house, and sexuality, for instance. Mother-daughter relationships were overlooked in a lot literary feedback, yet this publication finds that maternal relationships are the most important to the research of Chicana literature; extra accurately, studying maternal relationships presents perception to Chicana writers' rejection of intersecting energy buildings that another way silence Chicanas and ladies of colour. This publication advances the sector of Chicana literary scholarship via a dialogue of Chicana writers' efforts to re-write the script of maternity outdoors of latest discourses that situate Chicana moms as silent and passive and the following mother-daughter courting as a resource of anxiety and angst. Chicana writers are actively engaged within the strategy of re-writing motherhood that resists similar to the static, disempowered Chicana mom; nevertheless, those similar writers interact in extensive representations of Chicana mother-daughter relationships that aren't purely a resource of clash but additionally a method during which either moms and daughters may well in achieving subjectivity. whereas a number of the texts studied do current frequently conflicted relationships among moms and their daughters, the novels don't with ease settle for this script because the rule; fairly, the writers integrated during this research are hugely invested in re-writing Chicana motherhood as a resource of empowerment while their works current strained maternal relationships. Chicana writers have challenged the pervasiveness of the not easy virgin/whore binary which has been the motif on which Chicana womanhood/motherhood has been outlined, they usually face up to the development of maternity on such slim phrases. a number of the novels integrated during this learn actively foreground a unsleeping resistance to the proscribing binaries of motherhood symbolized within the virgin/whore break up. The writers severely demand a rethinking of motherhood past this scope as a method to discover the empowering probabilities of maternal relationships. This e-book is a vital contribution to the fields of Chicana/Latina and American literary scholarship.
Read or Download Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script PDF
Best movements & periods books
The Power and the Glory (Cliffs Notes study guide)
This Christian parable is a compelling and enlightening learn. It tells the tale of a "whisky priest" in Mexico, who's at the lam. even supposing a self-confessed imperfect guy, the priest still upholds his tasks to the Church and to existence.
How some distance is the United States From right here? methods American international locations and cultures from a comparative and interdisciplinary standpoint. it's very a lot on the middle of this comparative time table that “America” be regarded as a hemispheric and worldwide topic. It discusses American identities relationally, no matter if the kin less than dialogue function in the borders of the U.S., through the Americas, and/or around the globe.
Freedom and the Arts : essays on music and literature
Is there a second in heritage while a piece gets its excellent interpretation? Or is negotiation constantly required to maintain the earlier and accommodate the current? the liberty of interpretation, Charles Rosen indicates in those glowing explorations of tune and literature, exists in a fragile stability with constancy to the identification of the unique paintings.
- Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama
- Remapping reality : chaos and creativity in science and literature (Goethe, Nietzsche, Grass)
- Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics
- History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction: Victorian afterimages
- October Birds: A Novel about Pandemic Influenza, Infection Control and First Responders
- The primitive, the aesthetic, and the savage : an Enlightenment problematic
Additional resources for Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script
Sample text
But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely” (235). In trying to assert independence from the mother, daughters reject maternal identification, yet as Rich has made clear, this rejection is rooted in the daughters’ subconscious attraction to the mother. This ambivalence lies at the core of much writing on the mother-daughter bond (Nice 11), echoing Brown-Guillory’s argument that daughters are often “torn between wishing to be an extension of their mothers and yearning for their own autonomy” (4).
16 Contemporary Chicana Literature for one sees the mother’s inner struggles in shaping her daughter to conform to patriarchy yet simultaneously wishing her daughter certain freedoms not granted to her. The mother, however, is gendered as a male god, suggesting that although the mother is female, she may also enforce patriarchal limitations on her daughter. Though the speaker describes her mother as “unforgiving and demanding,” it is significant that she as the daughter nevertheless wants her mother’s approval.
This transfer of knowledge from mother to daughter is visible both in the dominant society and within Mexican and Chicano families. The notion of agency is significant, given that the role of mother is often the sole source of power granted a woman in society or culture; moreover, a woman’s role as mother allows her a certain amount of agency and status denied to childless women. Ana Castillo has agreed that mothering is socially constructed and, further, argued that “There is no evidence of the ‘maternal instinct’ being inherent in woman; although women who reject mothering may be stigmatized with the ‘Llorona Complex,’ that is, they may be shunned as a result” (Massacre 186).