Content area
Abstract
Nationalism is rooted in fixed notions of identity, and as a result, stable gendered identities are produced, regulated and imposed upon the objects of national discourse. Consequently, patriarchal univocal interpretations of biological and cultural reproduction are imposed on women as they are relegated to representation on a symbolic plane as “Mother” within the imagined community. The following comparative study analyzes how Chicana and Latin American authors confront the sign “Mother” as it is constructed within the patriarchal nationalist discourses of their respective countries. As these writers challenge the socio-familial structures that “nationess” is based upon, the Mother figure, and by extension the feminine, are no longer excluded or devalued as they transcend the inscriptions traditionally imposed upon female and cultural identity. Such re-elaborations of the Mother explore prohibited zones and negated sources of knowledge that shed light on the marginalized spaces rejected by the nation. As a result, the redefined Mother figure becomes a point of origin and creation for alternative feminist genealogies and new gynocentric values within a re-imagined Home/Nation.
By incorporating feminist theory that deconstructs both patriarchal socio-familial structures and the mutually exclusive relation that such structures sustain between maternal and discursive reproductions within the nation, I examine how the silencing of woman as M/Other is ultimately questioned in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Mireya Robles, Mercedes Valdivieso and Luisa Valenzuela. Throughout the textual analysis and theoretical discussion used to explore “Mother” as a contested term in this dissertation, the various intersections of class, race, nationality, and sexuality represented within these texts do not allow for any sweeping generalizations about “a” latina response to the relation between gender and “Nation” across the Americas. By developing a multi-national and multi-locational approach to questions of gender and its relation to nationalism, this comparative approach between Chicana and Latin American writers takes into account the fact that one cannot speak of an essentialized global-wide “Patriarchy” or “Woman”. Instead, the ideological substratum of the Latin American authors and the Chicana feminists differs according to their context, thereby affecting their sense of patriarchy, nation and ultimately womanhood and motherhood.
