Tantalizing The Border: Re-Mapping Mothers’ Identity in Cherríe Moraga’s "The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea"

Joy Shihyi Huang

doi:10.18172/jes.5987

Authors

Joy Shihyi Huang National Tsing Hua University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9936-2938

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.5987

Keywords:

Cherrie Moraga, The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea, globalization, queer, borders

Abstract

This paper discusses the correlation between the body and the land in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea. Moraga constructs a dystopian world exposing a presumed queer essence within the global market. This reframing sees “queer” as a symptomatic identity shaped by cultural interplays, particularly in ethnicity and economics. Medea’s existence straddles geographical, sexual, and sensory borders, prompting a critical examination of loyalty/betrayal as an epistemological concern. Through the transformation of Mothers via Latin American legends, Moraga advocates for an environmental ethics, challenging the moral nihilism often associated with the Christian interpretation of a child murderer.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Adam, Barry, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Andre Krouw. Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement. Temple University Press, 1999.

Altman, Dennis. “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities.” Social Text, no. 48, Autumn 1996, pp. 77-94.

Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2004.

Cruz-Malave, Arnaldo, and Martin F. Manalansan, editors. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York University Press, 2002.

Duggan, Lisa. “Making it Perfectly Queer.” Socialist Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 1992, pp. 11-31.

Gonzalez, Tanya. Murders, Madness, Monsters: Latino/a Gothic in the USA. 2004. Dissertation, University of Riverside.

Hernández, Daisy, et al., editors. Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Seal Press, 2002.

hooks, bell. “Black Women Shaping Feminist Theory”: Feminist Theory: From the Margin to Center, Boston: South End Press, 1984, pp. 1-16.

Koç, Evrim Ersöz. "Liberating Serpentine Goddesses on the Borderlands: Cherrie Moraga’s Feminist Architecture in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea." Kadın Çalışmaları Özel Sayısı, vol. 42, 18 Sept. 2018, pp. 149-162.

Lakey. “More than Theatre: Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman and the Feminist Phenomenology of Excess.” Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 200-213. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316422007.015

Lopez, Tiffany Ana. “Performing Aztlán: The Female Body as Cultural Critique in the Teatro of Cherríe Moraga.” Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, edited by Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, University of Michigan Press, 2009, pp. 160-177.

Marks, Melinda. Three Faces of Destiny: An Analysis of the Modern Medea Figure on the American Stage. 2013. Master’s thesis, San José State University.

Moraga, Cherríe. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010. Duke University Press, 2011.

Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years: And Other Writings, 1978-1999. Haymarket Books, 2023.

Moraga, Cherríe. “Queer Aztlan: The Reformation of Chicano Tribe.” Latino/a Thought: Culture, Politics, and Society, edited by F. H. Vázquez and F. H. Vazquez, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009, pp. 258-273.

Moraga, Cherríe. The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. West End, 2001.

Moraga, Cherríe. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. South End Press, 1993.

Moraga, Cherríe. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. 25th anniversary ed., Haymarket Books, 2022.

Puri, Jyoti. “Gay Sexualities and Complicities: Rethinking the Global Gay.” Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, pp. 60-75.

Rand, Erin J. Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance. The University of Alabama Press, 2014.

Slagle, R. Anthony. “In Defense of Queer Nation: From ‘Identity Politics’ to a ‘Politics of Difference.’” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 59, no. 2, 1995, pp. 85-102.

Smith, Cherry. “What is this Thing Called Queer?” The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Donald Morton. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, pp. 277-285.

Stryker, Susan. “Queer Nation.” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, 2004, http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/queer_nation.html. Accessed 3 Feb. 2021.

Wesling, Meg. “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review, vol. 90, 2008, pp. 30-47. http://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.35

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. University of Texas Press, 2001.