Resistance and transgression of the Caribbean feminine other
Description
This dissertation will trace the representation of marginal feminine subjects in literary narratives produced in Puerto Rico in the nineties to see whether the peripheral position provides a space in which the feminine Puerto Rican subject can de-center and de-stabilize the dominant discourses of the West The discourse of miscegenation is embedded in the national fabric of the countries of the Hispanic Caribbean. As a result, the mulatta woman has traditionally represented the embodiment of the Spanish and African races in the narratives of national identity. In the first chapter, I propose to study the novels written by Mayra Santos-Febres and Mayra Montero to analyze the presence of the contemporary black woman and offer a vision of her struggles and desires, as well as to trace the relationship which exists between the woman of color and national identity. Furthermore, I will attempt to determine whether her racial identity reveals an emerging state of liberation or a continuing state of cultural dependency. This first chapter will include the theoretical framework provided by the works of Marco Moreno Fraginals, Antonio Benitez Rojo, and Vera Kutzinsky In the second chapter, I will study the transvestite subject in the works of Mayra Santos Febres in order to see how this presence parodies and disrupts the concepts of gender and national identity. Furthermore, the study will stress how the theatrical performance of the transvestite, accompanied with its elements of disguise, music and acting, can serve as a postcolonial satire which points to a Caribbean that masks itself so as to denounce the voyeuristic and fetishistic behavior of a colonizing First World. In this chapter, I will use the theories of performance and gender elaborated by Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Chilean feminist critic, Nelly Richards In the third chapter, the investigation will focus on the feminine subjects that transgress heterosexual codes in order to show how their identities express erotic discourse as an element of resistance against the processes of objectification and heterosexual oppression. These subjects oppose compulsory heterosexuality and gender constructions in order to liberate their true selves and desires. This analysis will take into account the theories of feminist and gender critics such as Monica Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Luce Irigaray and Nelly Richards The literary narratives cited above offer discourses that oppose hegemony in an effort to counterbalance the distribution of power. These texts, which seek to challenge authoritative power, also aim to give marginal feminine subjects a space from which they can generate alternative interpretative modes and in turn speak out and become an agent of her own history. The dissertation will conclude that feminine subjects that are positioned in the peripheries move about in a series of resisting movements---translocations, transvestisms, masqueradings---which protect the Caribbean feminine subject from being totally exposed and decoded, and these acts of resistance serve as a buffer to help prevent continuing acts of appropriation and colonization on the part of dominant Western powers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)