Jeanette Rodriguez
Gutierrez y Muhs brings a distinctive hermeneutical perspective as a Chicana poet, linguist, and literary critic. Her ability to transcend and make use of intrapsychic epistemological borders gives her an edge and clarity in identifying transportable and non-transportable crossings, whether they are physical, intrapsychic, political or cultural. Her work is exciting, not only for its content but for its methodology. Dr. Gutierrez y Muhs is destined to make a major interdisciplinary contribution to cultural studies, Latin American criticism, ethnographical field work, women's studies and modern thought and history. Dr. Gutierrez y Muhs is not only examining experiences of cultural exile women of the United States and Latin America; she is building bridges,
bridges that in a deeply conflicted world are extremely necessary, and hoped for.
Yolanda Flores Niemann
Communal Feminisms breaks new ground in the breadth of issues covered and implications across disciplinary fields. One of these fields is psychology, with the issues on identity and self and other perception, issues that are part of psychology in general, but which often lack a global and intercultural perspective within that field. It has implications for Women's Studies, a discipline in which the word 'women' usually refers to the experiences and perceptions of white women and the experiences of Women of Color, especially in the United States, are often ignored. In the fields of Literature, Rhetoric, and English the stories of racial identity and of the rhetoric of diversity still follow a mainstream perspective; this book will challenge that perspective. In the field of Ethnic Studies, this book will facilitate discussions on the intersections of race and gender. The book also crosses fields of sociology, political science, and communication. It is a good resource for scholars and students.
Mary-Antoinette Smith
Gutierrez y Muhs' book is an amazing representation of what it means for women of Hispanic descent to experience a gendered version of what W.E.B. DuBois referred to as double-consciousness . . . [that] sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. It might be posited that Dr. Gutierrez renders narratives more befitting the label 'triple-consciousness' in relation to her contributing authors. The true gift of this book is that readers are able to live experientially what Dr. Gutierrez calls 'extentity' by placing themselves within the narratives of the contributing authors. This is an amazing must-read book that has important cultural import at the helm of the twenty-first century.
