Encarnacion
Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: Fordham University Press
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments
This project has roused in me tremendous passion for my subject, and I begin with my gratitude to Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrıé Moraga, Ana Castillo, Maya González, and Diane Gamboa for so vividly capturing the permeability of our bodies and our identities. I have found in their work models for responding ethically...
Introduction
Inga Clendinnen, historian of Aztec and Mayan cultures, turned to self-representation when she found herself disabled by liver disease. Her memoir, Tiger’s Eye (2000), relates an incident in which her nose began to bleed uncontrollably...
1. Feeling Pre-Columbian: Chicana Feminists' Imaginative Historiography
In Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985), arguably the most influential work about pain in the Humanities, pain figures as the paradigmatic negative, the horizon of acceptable experience. It is so opposed to our self-understandings as living...
2. Pain: Gloria Anzaldua's Challenge to "Women's Health"
To talk about the work of Gloria Anzaldu´a is to cross borders, not just national borders but also the lines between biography and criticism, body and theory. Her recent death troubled these borders more radically as her passing and her suffering...
3. Medicine: Cherrie Moraga's Boundary Violations
Pain, illness, and disability are politically significant, in part, because they defy contemporary norms for how bodies should look and act. When Gloria Anzaldu´a struggled to find spiritual transcendence through the fluctuations of...
4. Movement: Ana Castillo's Shape-Shifting Identities
If we accept pain and illness as viable corporeal states, we must think more about how such bodies are able to move and to thrive in the world. In So Far From God (1993)—the Ana Castillo novel that might seem like the most obvious ‘‘fit’’ for this study because of its emphasis on pain, illness, and medicine—the...
Conclusion
The epigraph from Frida Kahlo separates mobility from corporeality when she suggests that she does not need wings to fly. Kahlo’s injuries and surgeries led her to see past her body as the horizon of her being. In fact, she disavows disability in this...
E-ISBN-13: 9780823247776
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823230846
Print-ISBN-10: 0823230848
Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2009
OCLC Number: 647923402
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Encarnacion
