Book Description

This groundbreaking study explores feminist theory and literary criticism embedded in seventeen works by Hispanic American authors and Latina writers in the United States. The books bring out women's philosophic and historic concepts of becoming a woman politically in the public sphere of society. Philosophers like Luce Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari have realized that woman's representation in philosophic discursions are missing. The universal "mankind" or the omnipresent "self" can no longer ignore that women have different experiences than man in both the private and public realm. Each aesthetic work whether novel, poem or short story brings a woman-centered concern written by a woman author. The first fourteen lie in diversity; historic, national, cultural and ethnic experiences that Hispanic women undergo daily or during times of social upheaval, mainly dictatorships. How they write imparts experience and action in her trials of becoming multiple selves or subjectivities which theorists and female critics alike identify is missing from two thousand years of Western Philosophy. The stories are unique as the introduction underlines the basis of the concept of becoming which women may embrace in writing themselves politically in literature. The last four works by U.S. Latinas is further problematized through the process of immigration. Hispanic women on their way to becoming Americans have many factors to consider: race, gender, ethnicity, education and social class, which applies to all the main woman characters in each selective work. The criterion is set in the Introduction and applied to work which inspired it. Written from a multicultural standpoint draws from an interdisciplinary perspective whether, psychology, economics, feminist theories, philosophy and history. The study intends to look at ways of thinking the woman question and how she defines herself in the process.