Narratives of transgression: Deviance and defiance in late twentieth century Latina literature.

Abstract

This project explores the pathologization of Latinas in works by Dominican American, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and Cuban American writers Loida Maritza Perez, Irene Vilar, Ana Castillo, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, and Gloria Anzaldua. Literary studies, community psychology, postcolonial theory, Latina/o Studies, and U.S. Third World Feminism form my intersectional and interdisciplinary framework. These fields locate depictions of Latina lunacy within particular historicities, underscoring how diagnoses of Latina alterity in Geographies of Home, The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets, So Far From God, Dreaming in Cuban, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Borderlands/<italic> La Frontera: The New Mestiza</italic> emanate from legacies of colonization, imperialism, and/or dictatorship. This study posits an integral association between individual and collective. By alluding to archetypal figures of female madness in literature, folklore, and history, the texts in this project connect the Latina figures branded deviant to such predecessors. The mistreatment of land mirrors the harm imposed on these figures' bodies and minds, linking the classifications of Latina aberrance to the historical dispossession of their material resources. Exposing the relation between environmental, mental, and corporeal corrosion, I contest the dominant disjuncture between body and mind. Since voice arguably functions as the junction between body and mind, I illustrate how ascriptions of lunacy harm Latina voices. The injurious words casting Latinas as aberrant operate under the guise of care, effectively controlling the bodies of women of color. Perez, Vilar, Castillo, Garcia, Alvarez, and Anzaldua criticize the ready pathologization of Latinas springing from dominant systems of care and Latina/o communities themselves. These writers emphasize that dominant and alternative modes of care must nevertheless work together and recognize that categorizations of Latina madness stem from and perpetuate oppression. Some Latina figures internalize this oppression, exacting an unceasing self- and externally-inflicted harm, while others resist the deviance thrust upon them. Yet, even this defiance is re-classified as deviance. Examining the insidious nature behind diagnoses of deviance, and grounding such labels in their socio-historical and literary contexts, I emphasize that any literary study of Latina alterity must consider the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender.