Transformaciones del sujeto poético femenino en la obra de una decimonónica mexicana

• In Event: La riqueza de las publicaciones periódicas, siglos XVIII y XIX

Abstract

From the middle of the nineteenth century on, there emerged a number of talented women writers in Mexico who challenged their male colleagues’ reductive textual representations of women and their attempts to exclude them from any position of public influence and to limit them and their texts to a purely ornamental dimension. These women effectively negotiated an ever widening space for themselves and later generations of women writers, by appropriating the rhetorical strategies of their male counterparts for their own liberationist ends. I show specific examples of the ways in which they transformed the predominant topoi for the construction of female subjects in their representations of themselves focusing on the works of one representative 19th Century woman poet. I lay bare the emergent practices with which some women poets displayed their mastery of the topics that had been described by the most important Mexican writer statesmen as beyond the reach of their inferior feminine minds. Their double discourse ensured the appearance of their texts in the most important periodicals of their time and broke the long exclusion of women from the printed page that had started with the censoring of Sor Juana and her recantation in the 17th Century. The success of the decimonónicas over the numerous attempts at excluding them from any sphere of public influence was crucial in opening new spaces of authority and expression for women in Mexico.

Author

• Maribel Moheno, University of California, Berkeley