<p> HISPANIC SUMMER PROGRAM / XXIII SESSION JUNE 25 – JULY 8, 2011 UNIVERSITY OF ST. MARY OF THE LAKE / MUNDELEIN SEMINARY Mundelein, Illinois</p><p>‘Contemporary Latin@ Religious, Literary, and Visual Marian Representations’</p><p>Laura E. Perez, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley</p><p>Class Session: 2:15 – 5:35 p.m.</p><p>COURSE DESCRIPTION </p><p>The course is an exploration of the Virgin Mary/Guadalupe as a gendered and/or gender-bending symbol of spiritual power and social justice whose theological significance is a site of discursive struggle and who spiritually functions, interestingly, as an enigmatic signifier. Through cultural studies and historical scholarship, feminist religious studies and theology, and post-sixties literary and visual depictions the course will provide an overview of the ideological work of various and changing images, symbolisms, and theological interpretations of the Virgin Mary/Guadalupe. We will pay particular attention to how literary and visual discourses narrating and interpreting the Mother of God as symbol inscribe and/or reimagine social and culturally gendered, sexed, and racialized identities. In week one, our course will selectively survey the history of Marian Western representations and theological debates. We will read highlights from the work of feminist scholars who have carefully traced the emergence of a hegemonic (dominant cultural) patriarchal Mariology that claims a sacred or divine rationale for patriarchal social gender values and inequities, and thereby justifies the subordinated condition of women under patriarchal culture into special spiritual attributes of Mary of Nazareth (most prominently: female virginity and maternity in the service of the patriarchal family/church; and more generally, femaleness as the site of humility, meekness, abnegation, and suffering). With the growth of popular cults around the Mother of God, her figure is used to galvanize and authorize political struggles, both by those above and those below. We will focus on one such case in the emergence of the cult of Mary as Guadalupe, in New Spain (i.e., Mexico, after Independence), as Empress of the Americas, which will first be central to the justification of colonialism, then to that of nationalist anti-colonialist struggles. In week two, we will examine early seventies through ninetees Chicana and other U.S. Latina feminist work in various media that challenge the patriarchal and culturally colonizing gender and heteronormative ideological work of Roman Laura E. Perez, HTI Summer 2011 Syllabus 2</p><p>Catholic definitions of sacred and profane womanhood. We will look at the pioneering 1970s Chicana feminist critiques of Mariology, gender, and the patriarchal family as Eurocentric colonial impositions upon the religions and social world of Indigenous peoples of the Americas; visual art (from the 1970s-90s) that reimagines the sacred and its social uses; and creative literature (from the 1980s and 1990s) that furthers the reclamation of the sacred on behalf of the most socially marginalized in the United States, among these, women and queers of color, particularly the poor, who suffer multiple, and simultaneous oppressions. What we see in these works, is a struggle not only for social justice, but over religion, spirituality, and the sacred, most specifically, who gets to interpret and lay claim to these as spiritual goods and who gets to belong as fully loved or enfranchised beings. These works join the work on the ground of Latina Church activists, including members of religious orders, and of Latina theologians and religious studies scholars, two of whom we will conclude our course with. Jeanette Rodriguez’s study of the meaning and uses of Guadalupe for Catholic women in the U.S. and Ada Isasi-Diaz’s Latina emancipatory mujerista theology of “lo cotidiano,” the quotidian. Precisely because of their experiences as socially “humble,” politically “meek” women of color, the U.S. Latina women whose work we will study, offer through their work acts of meditation and prayer. Their works invite us to reflect upon the relationship between spiritual humility and meekness as pathways to humaneness, wisdom, and power in service to goodness, on the one hand, and social humility and meekness as man-made conditions of injustice, on the other. Their work is prayer to the extent that it enacts and encourages love, including of the self, and struggles, as spiritual and ideological act, against the errors of social injustice.</p><p>LEARNING OUTCOMES </p><p>The course should enable students:</p><p>1) To understand the influence of Greek thought in early and medieval Church Fathers, from a feminist perspective; 2) To understand the changing stakes in the interpretation of the Virgin Mary’s significance at different historical moments; 3) To understand the changing, gendered, and racialized discourse around purity-chastity-virginity; 4) To have some understanding of the political uses of Marianism/marianismo and Christianity in patriarchal, nationalist, culturally homogenizing culture(s); 5) To understand the unique role of guadalupanismo, a religious-political discourse of difference, in Mexican nationalism; the Chicana/o civil rights movement; and in U.S. Chicana and Latina feminism(s); 6) To understand the theologically and culturally pioneering and radical decolonizing feminist critique of marianismo in 1970s-90s Chicana and Latina Laura E. Perez, HTI Summer 2011 Syllabus 3</p><p> feminist thought in various media (interdisciplinary academia, literary, visual, and performance arts, theology); 7) To begin to examine the spiritual significance and power of humility, meekness, and non-violence, as these are embodied and represented in the figure of Mary/Guadalupe as a the culturally hybrid figure of the Mother of God, and how they can structure the struggle for social justice, given their overtly gendered and racialized character in patriarchal, institutional Roman Catholicism.</p><p>GRADING CRITIERIA</p><p>1) Daily one-page meditation (typed, DS) upon one theme in each of the assigned readings (25%). 2) Active participation in the seminar through discussion (25%). 3) A final essay reflecting upon an aspect of the tension between spiritual and power and social (dis)empowerment, through discussion of U.S. Latina Marian narratives or visual representations. Approximately 20-25 pages in length, excluding bibliography and endnotes (50%). Due July 24.</p><p>REQUIRED TEXTS</p><p>Brading, D. A. Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (UK: Cambridge University Press: 2001). (Online used $16 + s/h)</p><p>Castillo, Ana, ed. Goddess of the Americas. La Diosa de las Americas (NY: Riverhead Books, 1996). (Online used $2 +s/h)</p><p>Garcia, Alma, ed., Chicana Feminism. The Early Writings (Routledge 1997 (Online used $12 + s/h)</p><p>Moraga, Cherrie. Heroes & Saints and Other Plays (West End Press 1994) (Online used $3.89 + s/h)</p><p>Perez, Laura E. Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (NC: Duke University Press, 2007). (Online used $9 + s/h)</p><p>Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex. The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (NY: Vintage Books, 1976). (Online used $6 + s/h)</p><p>COURSE SCHEDULE Laura E. Perez, HTI Summer 2011 Syllabus 4</p><p>FIRST WEEK</p><p>Monday 6/27: </p><p>Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (NY: Vintage Books 1976). Read chs. 1 and 2: “Mary in the Gospels” and “Mary in the Apocrypha,” pp. 3-24; 25-33. (29 pages)</p><p>Tuesday 6/28: </p><p>Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (NY: Vintage Books 1976). Read chs. 3 and 4: “Virgin Birth,” and “Second Eve,” pp. 34-49; 50-67. (32 pages)</p><p>Wednesday 6/29: </p><p>Warner, Part Four: Mother, chs. 12 and 13, “Let it Be” and “The Milk of Paradise,” 177-191, 192-205. (27 pages)</p><p>Thursday 6/30: </p><p>Warner, Part Four: Mother, chs. 14 and 15, “Mater Dolorosa” and “The Penitent Whore,” 206-223, 224-235. (28 pages)</p><p>Friday 7/01: </p><p>D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge University Press, date), chs. 14 and 15, “Nican Mopua” and “Epiphany and Revelation,” pp. 342-360, 361-368. (25 pages)</p><p>SECOND WEEK</p><p>Monday 7/04: </p><p>In Alma Garcia, ed., Chicana Feminism. The Early Writings (Routledge 1997). (Total 9 pages):</p><p>Elizabeth Martinez, “La Chicana” [1972], pp. 32-34; Anna NietoGomez, “La Chicana: Legacy of Suffering and Self Denial” pp. 48-49, and “Chicana Feminism” [1976], pp. 52-57; Adelaida del Castillo, “Malintzen Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into an Old Perspective” [1974], pp. 122-126. Laura E. Perez, HTI Summer 2011 Syllabus 5</p><p>Tuesday 7/05: </p><p>Laura E. Perez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), ch. 6, “Face, Heart,” pp. 257-296. (39 pages)</p><p>Wednesday 7/06:</p><p>In Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Americas / La Diosa de las Americas (NY: Riverhead Books, 1996) (23 pages): </p><p>Jeannette Rodriguez, “Guadalupe: The Feminine Face of God” (pp. 25-31); Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “Guadalupe: The Path of the Broken Heart” (pp. 34-45); Sandra Cisneros, Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” (pp. 46-51). Gloria Anzaldua, “Coatlalopeuh: She Who Has Dominion Over Snakes,” (pp. 52-55). </p><p>Thursday 7/07: </p><p>Cherrie Moraga, “Heroes and Saints,” in Heroes & Saints and Other Plays (West End Press 1994), pp. 85-149. (64 pages).</p><p>Friday 7/08: </p><p>Spiritual power and Social (dis)empowerment: Reflecting together on the legacy of patriarchal and heteronormative Eurocentric colonialism in Roman Catholicism and U.S. Latina women’s responses. Specifically, what have we learned about the challenges, but also the promise, of pursuing and enacting the spiritual power of humility, meekness, prayer, and non-violence and the struggle for social justice as an embodied, personal and social spiritual practice of love and justice?</p>