Abstract
The authors of chapters in S/He: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures, edited by Debra D. Andrist, offer parallel readings of Latina lives as active participants in the creation of cultural products, challenging monolithic readings (and writings) of their lives and contributions. For Latinas, their intersectional lives are informed by their positionality, defined by their gender, sexuality, class, and racial identities, and the multiple spaces they come to occupy. As Latinas, at times, their reaction to their limited statuses has been constrained within the very spaces and institutions that frame their participation, such as the home, family, church, and even the pages of literary texts. From the 16th century to today, their lives are still framed within notions and ideologies attributed or prescribed to their bodies that do little to speak of their actual experiences but instead perpetuate outdated and circumscribed notions of womanhood and motherhood.
Much of what has been written about women historically, both as literary figures and as neighbors we know from our own communities, stems from the ideologies, socialization, and perceptions of men, who often center on women’s bodies as sites of consumption and negotiation. In literature, we see clearly how women have been useful to men as they frame nationalistic views and ideologies, despite ignoring the actual words and acts of women. In the collection of chapters presented here, we see the ways in which the work of and about Latina or Hispanic women (terms that are not interchangeable) speak to how their positions or positionality can be used to inform a broader audience about the nuances of women’s lives.
S/He: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures illuminates ways in which Latina and Hispanic women’s roles and relationships help either sustain or challenge the class, gendered, and racialized status of women. Michelle M. Sharp’s work on cookbook discourses is a perfect example of how women’s written contributions are not always “recognized by a patriarchal literary establishment” (p. 6). The cookbooks of feminist women, such as Carmen de Burgos and Emilia Pardo Bazán, can be seen as merely reinforcing a limiting view of women’s roles within the domestic sphere. However, far more than that, these writings in cookbooks become “subversive acts” (p. 18) in themselves as they come to do more than simply fill the bellies of consumers but also frame and influence nationalism across Spain. In many ways, Latina and Hispanic women have utilized and mixed material and cultural “ingredients,” a process which has allowed them to survive within and challenge patriarchal, heteronormative, and religious ideologies and structures that work to subordinate them.
Through Kimberly A. Habegger’s chapter, “Tradition and the New Mexican Santeras,” we see the importance of remembering or recovering the works of women artists, or santeras, that have influenced the visual representation of faith and history. For these artists, their work both challenges the very gendered art movement dominated by men and also serves a religious institution functioning through and centered on masculinity. It is very important and telling that these santeras focused their artistry to represent female religious figures, which in many ways has been representative of their own need to be seen as prominent or valued whether as artistic or historical figures. As artists and writers, Latinas use their art, trade, or profession to highlight the centrality of women’s lives and the substantive contributions of their work, thereby allowing us to move beyond the constraints of misogyny. Feminist Latina and Hispanic women writers, artists, and cooks move women closer to the center of culture and society from the margins.
The book is divided into four themes that map out the gendered identities of Latinas, Chicanas, and/or Hispanic women in art and literature. One thing I valued in the collection is the diverse voices of the women represented, both in terms of their ethnic identities and also in terms of relation to their class and geographic locales. Because of the title and its emphasis on “Hispanic cultures,” I was surprised by this diversity of voices.
What I would have enjoyed from this text is a more critical conversation on the nuanced identities represented here, so as to not assume that such identities are interchangeable. For example, while “Hispanic” has been a label employed to speak to populations from Spain and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and America, it erases the indigenous and African influences and existence across the Caribbean and the Americas. Second, it would have been beneficial if one of the chapters spoke to power relationships and intersectionality, especially to help the reader understand how, although groups of women do share gendered identities, there is much more that needs to be discussed in order to shed light on the differential consequences attached to age, social class, immigration status, educational background, and skin color. Unpacking, at the very least, social class, sexuality, and race as central to distinctions within Latina and Hispanic women’s identities would have been illuminating. Nonetheless, the text would be a welcome addition to courses on “Hispanic culture” or “women in global perspectives.”