DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Theorizing Beyond Metaphor to Survival Narrative: Chicana Discourses of Rape and Sexual Violence in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God

Adrianna M. Santos

 

My research is a contribution to the study of sexual violence against all women of color, but most specifically Chicanas [1] and to the Anti-Violence Movement in general. In this interdisciplinary study, I explore what I denominate as “Chicana rape discourse” in Ana Castillo’s politically charged novel, So Far From God.  I undertake this study through various theoretical frameworks including poststructuralist and Chicana feminist theory. I also engage with a formal textual analysis based on contemporary Chicana literary criticism that identifies the incorporation of genre and style as a subversive act of resistance against patriarchal oppression. My aim in this research project is to investigate Chicana rape discourse and identify potentials for resistance through representation in literature. I examine So Far From God as a case study as an example of the application of Chicana and other feminist and new formalist theories to the hermeneutics of cultural production.

 

As my analysis focuses on representations of sexual violence, primarily using Chicana theoretical paradigms, I posit that the novel, So Far From God encompasses articulations of sexual violence through the lens of border identity and the multiplicity of lived experience by Chicanas. I examine Castillo’s use of ambiguity both as a literary device as well as a theoretical framework for examining brown female subjecthood. I locate the empowered subject, or Chicana voice, in literature through the genre of the novel as a narrative space dedicated to a Chicana feminist critique of systemic violence against brown women. While the novel itself is composed as metaphor, Chicana literature has the potential to intervene in the discourse and create culturally specific representations of sexual assault that speak directly to Mexican American communities and uncover the hidden atrocities that brown women face living in the intersections of oppression including, but not limited to gender, race, class, sex, sexuality and religion.

 

Moreover, I argue that Chicana cultural production and theory particularly may serve to shape the language of sexual violence and create new methods of reading and understanding rape through subversive and unconventional methods. I argue that Chicana literary production itself has the potential to represent a multidimensional reality. I posit that cultural & literary tradition can be understood and redirected so that it does not continue to perpetuate a discursive violence against women. Chicanas have the potential through multiple identity theory and ambiguity to create a new rape discourse and document their own experiences of sexual assault and subordination. Chicana writers have the opportunity to create our own “survival narratives.”


[1] The term Chicana is differentiated from Chicana/o or Chicano as the gender specific representation of female subjectivity in the Chicana/o community. Chicano, on the other hand, is often used as an umbrella term to encompass both males and females.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.