Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska. Boob Lit by Emily Hind (review)

Emily Hind's highly original study of Mexican women intellectuals from the colonial period to the present and their struggles to create a place for themselves as intellectuals in a society hostile to that notion, makes a valuable and unique contribution to literary studies and to feminist criticism in Latin America and beyond. In her "Introduction" she states several goals that inform the entire study and point to its innovative qualities. These are, to "explore the difficulty of writing criticism truly sympathetic to the feminine" (1), to write in a rational style about readings that value the "perverse" (in the sense of the improper and the unreasonable) (1), to avoid engaging in "competitive" modes of criticism and critical rivalries (2), and to employ a sense of humor, often reflected in word play. To that end, she artfully deploys the phrases "boob lit" and "busted criticism" in a double gesture of poking fun and seriously interrogating the critical and theoretical enterprises that sustain academia. Her book treats selected figures, beginning with three colonial-era archetypes, La Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and then jumping to the twentieth century to examine the modes of intellectual practice and the role of "woman intellectual" as performed by Rosario Castellanos, Guadalupe Amor, Elena Garro, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Elena Poniatowska and Guadalupe Loaeza. Hind regularly debunks the traditional respect and even reverence for the figures under study, and chapter titles such as "Poniatowska as Bearded Lady" and "Barbie, the Boob and Guadalupe Loaeza" put the reader on notice that this is no ordinary, solemn take on the achievements of highly regarded cultural icons. Rather, it is both a highly serious and a seriously entertaining piece of scholarship that is sure to challenge its readers to rethink not only their prior reading of the writers that she treats, but their own critical practice.

In the "Introduction" Hind reviews the cultural obstacles to a woman's assuming the role of intellectual in Mexico, and she identifies the common traps into which women writers and their readers have fallen in their efforts to reject limiting stereotypes. A brief nod to familiar aspects of the gender bias of Western thought is followed by a critique of two well-regarded manifestations of feminist theory and criticism. Hind deems French feminism's privileging of the irrational as too dependent on masculinist psychoanalysis, and she characterizes Judith Butler's theory of performing gender as emulating "the abstruse style of philosophical texts written by white males in the western tradition" (5). Nevertheless, both performance and the irrational are key concepts in her study. This leads to an understanding of what Hind means by a "femmenist" criticism: one that draws on humor and delight in the female body, strives for clarity of expression, rejects binary categories, is highly skeptical of notions of progress and social improvement, rejects critical rivalries and one-upmanship, and debunks cultural saints and heroes.

Each of the five chapters of analysis treats one or more of the women identified above. A systematic summary would extend to many pages, so I will simply identify examples of the sometimes surprising interpretations that Hind offers in her characteristically playful mode of writing. Of the three colonial archetypes examined in Chapter 1, only Sor Juana represents a possible model of feminine intellectuality, but Hind uses her as an example of the tendency — still current in the twentieth century — to divorce the woman intellectual from the body and biological maternity. Popular works by Carmen Boullosa, Angeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel that have reached wide audiences illustrate this point.

Chapters 2 and 3 afford a contrast that captures the spirit of Hind's irreverent approach to Mexican intellectuals. "Asexuality and the Woman Writer: Queering a Compliant Castellanos" resists the mainstream readings of Castellanos's persona and writing as models of feminism, and interprets the canonical author's emphasis on reason, service, decency...