Dissident Mexican women: Textual and performative reconfigurations of national models of gender since 1970
This dissertation focuses on the work of contemporary Mexican women writers and performance artists who, from 1970 up to today, have created dissident cultural expressions that challenge the underlying logics of gender and nationality in the post-revolutionary cultural discourse. My analyses of the complex reality of Mexican women's cultural production require the use of theoretical frameworks that allow me to analyze the intersections among gender, social class, ethnicity, trans-nationalism, and globalization. From the 1970s, Mexican women writers and artists have challenged the monolithic discourse of mexicanidad by means of creating a radical body of works and styles. Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante and Monica Mayer), Carmen Boullosa, Astrid Hadad, Sandra Cisneros and Petrona de la Cruz have created a dissident body of works that deal with the representation of plurality both in the experience of being Mexican and of being women. I argue that Mexican, Mayan and Chicana women culture producers contest the hegemonic and 'national' conceptions of gender and nationality through three basic thematic and formal strategies: rewriting official history to recover marginalized feminine and indigenous identities; dislocating heterosexuality by daring to denaturalize 'sacred motherhood'; and re-conceptualizing the cultural and territorial Mexican map by demonstrating how national discourses proclaim an artificial homogeneity and an imagined community. As I argue, the innovative stylistics in women's performance and art and literary production reconfigure the mythical and historical narrations about gender and nationality in Mexico, and propose within their works alternative models of women that overcome the reduced and binary gallery on feminine models in national life