Ambitos Feministas vol. 12 spring 2024 (2024)

Towards a Latina feminism of the Americas: Repression and resistance in Chicana and Mexicana literature

Latino Studies, 2011

Review: Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature

Hispanic Review, 2010

Latin American Gender Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Comparative Critical Studies, 2009

(2008) “Communal Feminisms: Chicanas, Chilenas, and Cultural Exile, Theorizing the Space of Exile, Class, and Identity by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs”, The Americas (Washington), 64:4 (April).

Sitios y Lenguas: Chicanas Theorize Feminisms

Hypatia, 1998

"Introduction: The Practice of Latina Feminist Recovery"

Latina Histories and Cultures, 2023

This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture. Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and María Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge. In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.

Notes from Chicana Feminist Ethnographer

Review of Antología del pensamiento feminista español (1726-2011) by Roberta Johnson y Maite Zubiaurre, eds (review) Kathryn Everly Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo XLVII, Número 3, Octubre 2013, pp. 582-584

Virginia Newhall Rademacher. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 10.3 (Sept. 2009): 375-77.

(De)Forming Woman: Images of Feminine Political Subjectivity in Latin American Literature, from Disappearance to Femicide

The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation. The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.