| Because the Chicana feminist is a woman with a specific history of sex and class exploitation, it is imperative that were problematize the feminist discussion by adding to it the complications of race and class. Chicana feminism, both in its theory and its practice, differs from Anglo-American and European feminism in its concern with material geopolitical issues that redirect feminist discourse. In addition, the Chicana feminist also confronts internal contradictions within her own, often sexist and homophobic culture. The Chicana feminists I discuss in this dissertation insist on discussing issues of gender and sexual orientation in dialectical positions with race and class analyses.In this dissertation I focus on texts that elucidate a Chicana literary production that is an implicit interruption of the literary status quo. Sandra Cisneros, in The House on Mango Street and "Women Hollering Creek," Gloria Anzaldua, in Borderlands/La Frontera, and Helena Maria Viramontes, inThe Moths and Other Stories are engaged in a cultural production that dislocates contemporary Chicana literature from its tenuous "place" within the literary institution as well as from its site on the border of the United States and Mexico. The cultural artifacts that these Chicana feminists produce relocate the site of feminist theory and pose important questions that ask for a reconstruction of the very premises of Western theory and U.S. literary production.This theory, what I call "feminism on the border," is located in places not usually recognized as sites of "theory" by women and men in charge of the modes of cultural production: in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in the testimonios of indigenous women, and in the literary texts themselves.When Chicana feminists on the border "speak to" political issues that they, as daughter of campesinas, perceive as legitimate topics of literary discourse they make the explicit connection between Chicanas, Mexican refugees, and refugees from Latin America. Chicana border feminists establish important political affiliations with women like Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Rigoberta Menchu and Elvia Alvarado whose testimonios further expand the feminist agenda. |
