Encarnacion: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature / Edition 2

by Suzanne Bost

Overview

Encarnación takes a new look at identity. Following the contemporary movement away from the fixed categories of identity politics toward a more fluid conception of the intersections between identities and communities, this book analyzes the ways in which literature and philosophy draw boundaries around identity.The works of Gloria Anzald£a, Cherr¡e Moraga, and Ana Castillo, in particular, enable us to examine how identities shift and intersect with others through processes of incarnation.Since the 1980s, critics have come to equate these writers with Chicana feminist identity politics. This critical trend, however, has been unable to account for these writers' increasing emphasis on bodies that are sick, disabled, permeable, and, oftentimes, mystical.Encarnación thus turns our attention to aspects of these writers' work that are usually ignored-Anzald£a's autobiographical writings about diabetes, Moraga's narrative about her premature baby's medical treatments, and Castillo's figure of a polio-afflicted flamenco dancer-to explore the political and cultural dimensions of illness.Concerned equally with the medical-surgical interventions available in our postmodern age and with the ways of understanding bodies in the Native American and Catholic traditions these writers invoke, Encarnación develops a model for identity that expands beyond the boundaries of individual bodies. The book argues that this model has greater utility for feminism than identity politics because it values human variability, sensation, and openness to others. The methodology of the study is as permeable as the bodies and identities it analyzes. The book brings together discourses as disparate as Mesoamerican anthropology, art history, feminist spirituality, feminist biology, phenomenology, postmodern theory, disability studies, and autobiographical narrative in order to expand our thinking beyond what disciplinary boundaries allow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823230846
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2009
Edition description:	2
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

SUZANNE BOST is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Feeling Pre-Columbian: Chicana Feminists' Imaginative Historiography 34

2 Pain: Gloria Anzald?a's Challenge to "Women's Health" 77

3 Medicine: Cherr?e Moraga's Boundary Violations 114

4 Movement: Ana Castillo's Shape-Shifting Identities 151

Conclusion: Rethinking Body Politics: Maya Gonz?lez and Diane Gamboa 193

Bibliography 215

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

Innovative, engaging, and eloquent. Bost's readings of Gloria Anzaldúa,
Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo are groundbreaking.

Texas Woman's University - AnaLouise Keating

Deeply expressive, intellectually profound, and very moving. It offers new paths into, beside, and through identity politics.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities - Katie King

Deeply expressive, intellectually profound, and very moving. It offers new paths into, beside, and through identity politics.-Katie King

Innovative, engaging, and eloquent. Bost's readings of Gloria Anzald£a,Cherr¡e Moraga, and Ana Castillo are groundbreaking.-AnaLouise Keating

"This interdisciplinary, multilayered approach suits this insightful study, which offers a new methodology for understanding Chicana feminism."-Choice

". . . Bost explains the vital ways the intersections of bodies and environments can inform the constitution of individual identities."-Susan C. Mendez, MELUS

From the Publisher