Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Argentine Women’S Narratives Of Leadership, Ileana Andrea Mocciola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated and examined the narratives of Argentine women leaders while obtaining and exercising leadership positions. This research was based on narrative theory and the feminist standpoint theory. Argentine female participants (N = 10) were subject to interviews that overall lasted 600 minutes and were conducted through the Zoom platform. Fifty-five pages of single-spaced transcripts were analyzed and studied. The results of this study revealed that Argentine women face major challenges when it comes to tokenism, exclusion, mentorship, and stereotypes that prevent and limit them from reaching and succeeding in leadership positions.

We: Women In A Traditional (Zapotec) World, Ida Day

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This chapter focuses on the female roles and relationships in Natalia Toledo Paz’s bilingual collection of poems, Ca gunaa gubidxa, ca gunaa guiiba’ risaca/Mujeres de sol, mujeres de oro (2002). The author sets her poems in a world, where all the themes and plots are performed by women. Natalia is the daughter of Francisco Toledo, a prominent Mexican painter, sculptor, and graphic artist, and Olga de Paz, a Zapotec weaver and hammock maker. In 2004, she was awarded a prestigious Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Indigenous-Language Literature. Her bilingual works (Zapotec/Spanish) have been recognized in numerous anthologies all over the world and …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Outperformed: Exploration And Comparison Of The Tongue-And-Cheek Tragedies Of Women-Animal Relationships In Selected Short Stories By Samanta Schweblin And In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’S Film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Sawnie Smith

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

The unsettling short stories that comprise Samanta Schweblin’s 2008 collection Pájaros en la boca are textured and populated by the flesh of not only humans, but also the skins of species that belong to a wider zoological and mythical scope. Those creatures in Schweblin’s literary output who possess scales, feathers, and wings find themselves variously rubbing up against, crushed under, and orally engulfed by human dermis. This essay seeks to explore the charge of gender politics that courses through interactions between human women and (demi-) animals in two short stories from this collection: “El hombre sirena” and “Olingiris”—animal contact with …

La Economía De La Violencia: La Ciudad Juárez Y El Mercado Libre De La Muerte, Kritika Amanjee

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the utilization of human life to further the parallel economies of manufacture and narco-trafficking in Mexico. It begins by recalling the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico’s local economies. Shifts in economic dynamics that resulted from NAFTA internally displaced thousands of impoverished Mexicans, ultimately pushing them into the growing economies of manufacture and narco-trafficking. The manufacture industry and its effects on the common people are examined with a specific focus on Ciudad Juárez, a border city in the state of Chihuahua. The growth of maquiladoras attracted thousands of young women to work, …

La Genara: La Libertad Falsa De La Mujer Elite En México, Emily Sullivan

Honors Theses

The goal of feminism is to ensure the equality of all genders. This goal means that women are supposed to be seen as equal to men in society. However, despite the many feminist efforts to bring this equality into reality, many in the world still believe that women are inferior to men. This belief stems from historical oppression of women that has continued up until modern day times. In Mexico, there is still strong beliefs that exist that prevent women from achieving liberation and freedom in society. Ideas related to traditional family values, machismo, and internalized misogyny all act as …

Para Donde Miran Los Ojos: Confluencias Entre Locura, (Des)Identidad Y Violencia En La Obra De João Guimarães Rosa, Silvina Ocampo Y Luis Martín-Santos, Giseli C. Tordin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the representation of madness in the literary works of three twentieth-century authors, namely, João Guimarães Rosa (from Brazil), Silvina Ocampo (from Argentina), and Luis Martín-Santos (from Spain). The first chapter argues that madness in Ocampo’s “El castigo”, Rosa’s “Buriti”, and Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio, reveals a series of conflicts between tradition and modernity, rather than the alleged symptoms of an individual suffering from a mental illness. After comparing the three works, it is evident that the decisions of their characters reproduce certain values idealized by authoritarian cultures. The second chapter discusses Rosa’s “Substância”, Ocampo’s “La casa …

Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, And Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 2016., Julia Watson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.

Monstrous Dolls: The Abject Body In Rosario Ferré’S Works, Mackenzie Fraser

Senior Theses

In this Honors Thesis project, I examine two literary texts, “The Youngest Doll” (1991) and The House on the Lagoon (1995), by Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) with attention to her depiction of the abject female body as a figure analyzed by both theories of gender and the subaltern. Using these critical frameworks as well as my own textual analysis, I argue that Ferré offers a postcolonial feminist critique of the double oppression—patriarchal and colonial— operating upon her female Puerto Rican characters. Yet these women also turn this abjection into transgression, allowing Ferré to expose the paradoxes of female …

Mujer, Tradición Y Conciencia Histórica En Gertrudis Gómez De Avellaneda, Ana Lydia Barrios

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the historical consciousness in the literary production of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814, Cuba – 1873, Spain). The numerous novels, plays, and legends, as well as articles written by her, display an array of female characters selected from history, traditions, and the Bible. This focus of women undoubtedly shows the author’s concern with the condition of women in society, which transcends her own time and place in history, nineteenth century Spain, as her stories attempt to establish a connection between herself and her readers, and women of different times in history. In doing so, Gómez de Avellaneda’s …

Keja L. Valens. Desire Between Women In Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Vii + 214 Pp., Mary Mccullough

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Book Review of Keja L. Valens. Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. vii + 214 pp.

The Crafting Of The Self In Private Letters And The Epistolary Novel: El Hilo Que Une, Un Verano En Bornos, Ifigenia, Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela, And Cartas Apócrifas, Angelica A. Nelson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inherent flexibility of the letter form or epistolary mode of writing frees the writer within the framework of salutations and closings to use vocabulary and language to create, to omit or to invert conventional constraints imposed on women by a patriarchal society. The letter begins as a blank page but becomes the space for writing one’s personal thoughts and emotions to the absent other in a communicative effort to minimize the separation.

This dissertation examines the female narrator in actual letters written during the Spanish emigration to the New World in the sixteenth century and four epistolary novels written …

Considering Triple Self-Portraiture In The Work Of María Izquierdo, Brooke Lashley

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper looks to María Izquierdo’s paintings, Prisioneras (Prisoners) of 1936 and Sueño y presentimiento (Dream and Premonition) of 1947, as case studies for activating a theory of triple self-portraiture. The theory reflects how plurality arises in the singular or in single significations of the self and disrupts homogeneity in thinking about identities for the self and others within the genre of self-portraiture. In activating a theory of triple self-portraiture, I found three forms of the self in Izquierdo's works: the self as oppressed (the past); the self as oppressing (the current); and the self as an emancipator (future). Although …

The Patriarchy’S Role In Gender Inequality In The Caribbean, Erin C. O'Connor

Student Publications

While gender equality in the Caribbean is improving, with women’s growing social, economic, and political participation, literacy rates comparable to those in Europe, and greater female participation in higher education, deeply rooted inequalities are still present and are demonstrated in the types of jobs women are in and the limited number of women in decision-making positions. Sexism, racism, and classism are systemic inequalities being perpetuated in schools, through the types of education offered for individuals and the content in textbooks. Ironically, the patriarchy is coexisting within a system of matrifocal and matrilocal families, with a long tradition of female economic …

Claire Legendre’S Portrait Of Hypermodern Society, Michèle A. Schaal

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theorists from various academic disciplines believe Western society has entered an age of excess and exacerbated modernity: all areas of life are affected by a will to be or do more at an always faster pace. This article focuses on French writer Claire Legendre’s literary translation of hypermodernity, especially in her narratives published over the past decade. First, it examines her portrayal of contemporary individuality, marked by all sorts of excesses and especially by the imperative to make the most of oneself and one’s life. This ideal being in itself excessive, her characters resort to extreme behaviors. However, they never …

“To Say Nothing”: Variations On The Theme Of Silence In Selected Works By Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Sandra Cisneros, And María Luisa Bombal, Hannah M. Frantz

Student Publications

This paper explores the various ways in which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s La Respuesta, Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and María Luisa Bombal’s “The Tree” address the theme of silence. It interrogates how the female characters in each of these works are silenced as well as their responses to that oppression. Meaning is subjective, so writing is a safe outlet for the oppressed. These works each identify an oppressor, either a husband or the male dominated church, as well as an oppressed individual, who is the female lead. In La Respuesta, the Catholic church, and specifically …

An Account Of Señorita Maquiladora, Rosina Conde

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Performer and scholar Rosina Conde finds that Señorita Maquiladora is the performance piece that has gone through the most transformations, not in its script, but in its text, as it is constantly being rewritten to speak to contemporary social issues. She believes that Señorita Maquiladora has potential because it speaks to global themes that affect workers in the assembly plant industry, not only with respect to the questions of the environment and health, but also in terms of the patriarchial patterns that force these women to compete in an atmosphere of a vertical structure dominated by men, with all the …

Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Helena Parente Cunha's novel, Woman Between Mirrors explores the many ways in which a dominant and domineering patriarchy can and does impose itself upon its subjects through what Louis Althusser calls interpellation. Parente Cunha's woman, a true twentieth-century heroine, faces her divided self—a self determined by ideology—and begins a quest which will end when she becomes an "I" before her shattered mirrors. But before that can happen, she must author herself, and, in the process of writing herself, she must overcome the demons of location and recognition. In the material sense, the woman must locate herself geographically, historically, socially, and …

Women, Subalternity, And The Historical Novel Of María Rosa Lojo , Kathryn Lehman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

María Rosa Lojo (1954) has received critical recognition as a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Her poetic work Visiones (1984) and Forma oculta del mundo (1991), first book of short-stories Marginales (1986), and two novels Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987) and La pasión de los nómades (1994), have received prestigious awards. Lojo's most recent work, informed and inspired by archival sources, has been acclaimed by both critics and the general public for having radically altered the established representation of canonical historical figures. The novels La princesa federal (1998), and Una mujer de fin de siglo (1999), and …

Introduction To The Special Issue, Adelaida López De Martínez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is quite appropriate that Studies in Twentieth Century Literature should devote its 20th-anniversary special issue to the literature of Latin American women writers…

Female Divinities And Story-Telling In The Work Of Tamara Kamenszain, Naomi Lindstrom

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tamara Kamenszain (b. Argentina, 1947), in her creative writing and her essays, brings together two concerns. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She specializes in mythical and archetypal representations of woman. Her texts present such figures as the great mother and forest nymphs. On many occasions, she evokes a past in which female divinities were respected, even in the Judaic tradition that is frequently Kamenszain's frame of reference. The other current that stands out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal narrative. In her texts, folk narrative displaces learned and canonical narrative. …

Dynamics Of Change In Latin American Literature: Contemporary Women Writers, Adelaida López De Martínez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Over the last twenty-five years Latin American societies have undergone profound changes. Where once the legalized abuses of dictatorships gave new meaning to the word "silence" for both men and women, now large segments of the population fight hard to sustain democratic regimes throughout the Continent. Repressive governments are being replaced, and shattered economies have begun to recover. Encouraged by the ever-increasing strength of international feminism, Latin American women (from Chiapas, Mexico, to Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) have risen to play key roles in this socio-political reformation. The writing of female authors has proliferated in this environment, and the …

The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From a feminist perspective, this essay reviews and analyzes the interaction between metropolitan feminist theories and their interphase with the academic criticism of texts written by Latin American women. Discussion focuses on the question of the subject, which the author believes to be paramount in feminist theory, in as much as the construction of gender and the historical subordination of women devolve on the play of difference and identity. This paper examines how the problematic assumption by feminist theorists in the North American academy of Freudian and Lacanian theories of the subject pose unresolved problems and unanticipated complications to subsequent …

Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I propose to analyze Castellanos's trajectory from marginalized ethnographer and critic of "latino" society, to presidential insider and ambassador, and the first modern Mexican woman writer to be accepted into the literary canon. I will explore the intersection of politics, gender, and the (self-) creation of a literary persona with regard to the following issues: 1) the tension between self-exposure and self-censorship in Castellanos's literary work; 2) Castellanos's intense and problematic relationship with her illegitimate, mestizo half-brother; 3) the coincidences and contradictions between Castellanos's journalistic account of her relationship with her servant Maria Escandon, and Maria's own oral history twenty …

Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In recent years, Latin American women have begun to appropriate and fill a space once empty of their presence. This essay looks at the work of four such women, (Diana Raznovich and Cristina Escofet of Argentina, Raquel Araujo of Mexico and the Peruvian Sara Joffre), to see how they give substance and voice to their particular concerns. In the process, this essay focusses on: 1) the notion of gender as performance; 2) the feminist deconstruction of narrative; 3) the female body in theatrical space; and 4) new, postmodern ways of doing feminist political theatre.

Introduction, Jean Franco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.

Postmodernity And Fin De Siècle In Uruguay, Hugo Achugar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the end of the military regime, Uruguay has been culturally and politically divided. During the period of repression, the opposition was united against the dictatorship. Yet economic decline and the military dictatorship have profoundly divided Uruguayan culture. On the positive side, new cultural actors have emerged—women, younger poets and writers and the marginalized—on the negative side, there is a sense of malaise that has neither been adequately discussed nor theoretized.

Vital Space In The House Of Buendía, Nina M. Scott

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In terms of both narrative and thematic organization, Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude deals with tightly-closed structures. Whereas from the beginning Macondo has been interpreted in a variety of ways, critics have paid less attention to the meaning of the Buendía house itself. A close reading of the text shows that the way in which certain characters interact with the physical spaces of the house is highly symbolic and closely related to the thematic development of the entire novel. The rise and fall of the Buendía dynasty is presided over by three women, who function as the …