Gender in Hispanic Literature and Visual Arts provides an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective on gender within Hispanic film and literature. The contributors analyze the relationship between the historical and social contexts of various Hispanic countries—including Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Uruguay—and the effects of their contexts on their representations of gender. This book examines gender-based violence, transvestism, lesbianism, (mis)representation, indigenism, dissent, identity, and voice as a means of better understanding the meaning and implications of gender within the diversity of people and cultures that comprise the Hispanic world.

Hierarchies and disparities based on sex and gender have characterized nearly all hominid societies since time immemorial. Nearly without exception, those disparities have created a hierarchy of male over female. Languages reflect that. For example, in the English language, the word for the "fe/male" sex is based on the word "male;" "man" is the root for wo/man; and indeed "man" is generally considered the generic for all members of the species. Spanish, on the other hand, does differentiate "hombre" from "mujer," but the masculine is still considered the root and the generic. For the purposes of S/HE: Sex & Gender in Hispanic Worlds, sex refers to biological differences, i.e. reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics, which are perceived as oppositional yet collaborative, in the propagation of the species. Gender, on the other hand, refers to culturally-specific expectations and/or stereotypes in terms of an individual's or group's self (re)presentation and/or behaviors. The title, S/HE, is a nod to the arguably gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun from the 1960s inclusive English-language movement in the United States, which was concurrent with equal rights movements in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. This book focuses on sex, and gender issues in the Hispanic world, paying homage to all who do not fit within the strict parameters of previous definitions by including broadened descriptions of identity, both biological and social, and by highlighting aspects of traditional and non-traditional lifestyles as portrayed in art and literature. Subject: Gender Studies, Hispanic Studies, LGBTIQ, Sociology, Cultural Studies]

It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has been woven into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts – from her first appearance in eighteenth-century translations of Hamlet, through depictions by seminal authors such as Espronceda, Bécquer and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what both male and female artists need her to be – is she invisible, a victim, mad, controlled by the masculine gaze, or is she an agent of her own identity? This well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia, whose poets, novelists and dramatists writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, as well as painters and photographers, have brought Shakespeare’s heroine to life in new guises. Ophelia performs as an authoritative female author, as new perspectives reflect and authorise the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López. Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

DIVAnalyzes Latin American and Caribbean folk art from a feminist perspective, considering the issue of gender in the production and circulation of popular art produced by women./div

The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of "local," "hemispheric," and "globalized" power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies. Contributors include Norma AlarcÃ3n, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Alejandra Elenes, RamÃ3n Garcia, MarÃa Herrera-Sobek, Patricia Penn Hilden, Gaye T. M. Johnson, Alberto Ledesma, Pancho McFarland, Amelia MarÃa de la Luz Montes, Laura Elisa Pérez, Naomi Quiñonez, Sarah Ramirez, Rolando J. Romero, Delberto Dario Ruiz, Vicki Ruiz, José David SaldÃvar, Anna Sandoval, and Jonathan Xavier Inda.