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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Sublimity and Identity: Portrayals of the Female Body By Latin American Women Poets in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Kathryn Mendez Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1052 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SUBLIMITY AND IDENTITY: PORTRAYALS OF THE FEMALE BODY BY LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN POETS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES by Kathryn J. Mendez A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Hispanic and Luso- Brazilian Literatures and Languages to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Araceli Tinajero: Chair of Examining Committe Signature: _______________________________________ Date: ____________________________________ José Del Valle: Executive Officer Signature: ______________________________________ Date: ____________________________________ Elena Martínez: Supervisory Committee Member Malva Filer: Supervisory Committee Member THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ii Abstract SUBLIMITY AND IDENTITY: PORTRAYALS OF THE FEMALE BODY BY LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES by Kathryn J. Mendez Adviser: Professor Araceli Tinajero This work explores the different portrayals of the female body and its relationship to transmodernity, sublimity and identity in the latter part of the 20th century up to the first decade of the 21st century. The poets cited in the following chapters are Gioconda Belli, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ana Istarú, Elvia Ardalani, Nancy Morejón, Eliane Potiguara, and Natalie Diaz. The selected poets reflect a diverse sampling of writers from the last fifty years who regularly reference the female body as part of their work, particularly in the context of violence and testimony, motherhood and authorship, the search for home and cultural roots and as a source of sublime beauty that is capable of provoking both fear and awe. Many of these writers also employ techniques that blend the female body and elements of the grotesque while at the same time recognizing that these earthy interpretations are not necessarily a negative thing, but that they are actually complementary to the concept of the sublime when addressing how the female body is viewed both culturally and artistically. While many of these poems were written at a time where postmodernist theory was dominant, it makes sense to tap into the more recent theories of transmodernity in order to provide a more complete analysis of these poets and their works. This work chronologically traces the development of a new approach to the female body through poetry and contrasts it with previous attempts to understand and label women and their role in art and culture. Starting very far back with eighteenth century philosophers such as iii Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke and moving into the twentieth century by citing psychoanalytic and postmodernist theory, this work finally breaks through to the most recent and comprehensive literary theories up to date, most of which aim to reject and/or reshape the ideas that preceded them. iv Acknowledgements My sincere appreciation goes out to Professor Araceli Tinajero for her guidance and patience. Many thanks to my dissertation committee, Professor Elena Martínez and Professor Malva Filer as well as to Professor José Del Valle as the Executive Officer in the Department of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages. Thank you to Professor Miguel Perdomo for encouraging my love of poetry. I am especially grateful to my family for the endless love and support needed to complete this project. v To Mom vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Transmodernity and the Sublime Danger of Female Sexuality……………….14 Chapter 2: The Poetics of Violence: Testimony, Memory and the Grotesque in the Works of Gioconda Belli and Alejandra Pizarnik and Their Legacy in 20th Century Mexican Art. ……………………………………………………………….48 Chapter 3: Motherhood and Matricide in the Poetry of Ana Istarú and Elvia Ardalani ………………………………………………………………………………….84 Chapter 4: Going Home: The Search for Individual and Collective Voices of Black and Indigenous Women in Nancy Morejón, Natalie Diaz and Eliane Potiguara …………………………………………………………………………...122 Epilogue ……………………………………………………………………………………163 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….169 vii viii Introduction: For centuries, the female body has been a source of preoccupation in western literary consciousness. In the last century, writers, scientists and philosophers alike have approached female subjectivity in a variety of ways as it has transformed in cultural imagination through religion, science and art, yet after so many attempts to pinpoint its exact nature, most of these attempts have come up as misguided interpretations or simply as empty-handed, open-ended questions. These same interpreters of femininity have systematically sewn doubts about the intellectual capacities of women while at the same time inquiring as to whether or not women possess souls, but even beyond this, there has been an unending and at times brutal fixation on the bodies of women that is so common and so readily available in all areas of the arts, social sciences and media, that it has become practically unconscious and reflexive for the average individual in Western society, even into modern times. In Latin America, myths and legends have been created over the dead bodies of women both real and fictional; in Argentina, for example, the myths and stories surrounding the disappearance of Eva Perón’s body after her death in 19521 has inspired a novel as well as conspiracy theories and general curiosity. There also exists the cult of “La difunta correa,” the patron saint of truckers, who died in search of her husband with a baby at her breast in the mid-nineteenth century2. Mexico also has several mythical female figures that embody both femininity and death in popular culture, including “La llorona”3 and “La catrina”4, and in Colombian folklore there exists the figure of “La patasola” or 1 The novel Santa Evita (1995) by Tomás Eloy Martínez is an example of a literary work 2 See Balderston and Guy. 3 A folktale about a woman who drowns her children in a Jealous rage over her husband, then drowns herself, and is seen walking by night crying out for her children. 1 “La tunda,” a one-legged, blood sucking man hunter who originally appears beautiful but who shows her real, hideous self to her prey once she has him under her control. Most of these cultural images carry a supposed “moral lesson” regarding the dangerous powers of women, encouraging men not to trust them or stray too far from the established cultural norms of heterosexual unions, or in other words, “man’s struggle against nature expressed itself first and foremost in his struggle against the sexual woman” (Dijkstra 43). In the last part of the 20th century and moving into the 21st century, there has been a movement to reclaim women and their bodies, both alive and dead. Just as Roberto Fernández Retamar took steps to reclaim Latin American identity in his essay Calibán (1971), poets in the last half of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st have begun to take back the image of the woman by presenting the female body from a different angle as a sublimely beautiful and powerful being in the face of political violence, racial struggles and in the reshaping of the world around us by means of transmodernity5. In some cases, this means both “giving birth” to a new concept of the female body and its role in art and other realms; it can also mean “committing matricide” by killing off the antiquated perceptions of women in order to make space for new conceptions. In either case, it is important to explore the roots of the Western obsession with the female body in order to understand the current placement of these concepts within the lens of transmodernity and an ever-evolving Latin American identity. This work is meant to explore the different portrayals of the female body and its relationship to transmodernity, sublimity and identity in the latter part of the 20th century up to 4 An image in popular Mexican culture, often associated with the Day of the Dead. The image is often a skeleton dressed up in elegant women’s clothing. 5 See Rodríguez Magda’s book Transmodernidad (2004) or her follow up article, “Transmodernidad: un Nuevo paradigma” (2011) in which she sites her original work and follows up with further discussion of the topic of transmodernity. 2 the first decade of the 21st century. The poets cited in the following chapters are Gioconda Belli, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ana Istarú, Elvia Ardalani, Nancy Morejón, Eliane Potiguara, and Natalie Diaz. The selected poets reflect a diverse sampling of writers from the last fifty years who regularly reference the female body as part of their work, particularly in the context of violence and testimony, motherhood and authorship, the search for home and cultural roots and as a source of sublime beauty that is capable of provoking both fear and awe. Many of these writers also employ techniques that blend the female body and elements of the grotesque or the carnivalesque6 while at the same time recognizing that these earthy interpretations are not necessarily a negative thing, but that they are actually complementary to the concept of the sublime when addressing how the female body is viewed both culturally and artistically.

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