A genealogy of women’s writing in Northern Mexico and the United States

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

If ideas of national literary identity are often conceived of in masculine terms, then writing as a woman can often appear as a separatist position. If the lyric voice does not come easily, and the comfortable assertion of belonging in a public place - due to the pressure to appear in a certain way, or the threat of violence - is not available, if comfort in a private space is, as Virgina Woolf showed, contingent on economic fortune, what tools are available to the writer, and where does she write from? This panel will present a series of investigations into work produced by a few women writers, between the late 19th century and the present, which doesn’t quite fit into the canon of Mexican literature because of its form, its content, or because of where the writer is located. These writers employ seemingly minor forms, such as appropriation, adaptation, and dialogue, as well as non-spectacular representations of violence. The materiality of their texts provides a mode for sharing and inscribing the writers’ identities, and a basis for regional histories.

Sub Track

• Literature of the Americas

Session Organizer

• Anastasia P Baginski, University of California Irvine

Chair

• Viviane A Mahieux, University of California/Irvine

Individual Presentations

• Scenes From My Room: Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s "Nenitas" and "Todo eso es yo" - Martha Torres Mendez, University of California, Irvine

• La poética regional y feminista de Rosina Conde - Anastasia P Baginski, University of California Irvine

• “La Patria es impecable y diamantina”: Performing Diamantina in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Fiction - Thania Munoz Davaslioglu, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• A Social Poetics: Gender and Verse in Nineteenth-Century California - Vanessa M Ovalle Perez, University of Southern California