Mestiza Blood
Mestiza Blood

Author: V. Castro

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13: 1787586197

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A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desire and visions centered around the Chicana experience. The stunning, star-reviewed V. Castro weaves urban legend, folklore, life experience and heartache in this intimate anthology of modern horrors. From the lauded author of The Queen of the Cicadas (which picked up starred reviews from PW, Kirkus and Booklist who called her "a dynamic and innovative voice") comes a short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desire and visions focused on the Chicana experience. V.Castro weaves urban legend, folklore, life experience and heartache in this personal journey beginning in south Texas: a bar where a devil dances the night away; a street fight in a neighborhood that may not have been a fight after all; a vengeful chola at the beginning of the apocalypse; mind swapping in the not so far future; satan who falls and finds herself in a brothel in Amsterdam; the keys to Mictlan given to a woman after she dies during a pandemic. The collection finishes with two longer tales: The Final Porn Star is a twist on the final girl trope and slasher, with a creature from Mexican folklore; and Truck Stop is an erotic horror romance with two hearts: a video store and a truck stop. FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing Independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

Body Talk
Body Talk

Author: Jacquelyn N. Zita

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780231105439

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In this book, Jacquelyn N. Zita questions the assumptions of heterosexual society, queer theory, postmodernism, and lesbian feminism in order to investigate the relationship between power, knowledge, identity formation, and the body.

Imagining Identity in New Spain
Imagining Identity in New Spain

Author: Magali M. Carrera

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0292782756

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Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. Winner, Book Award, Association of Latin American Art, 2004 Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians. Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia
Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia

Author: Marcia Stephenson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-05

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0292786980

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In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

The Haunting of Alejandra
The Haunting of Alejandra

Author: V. Castro

Publisher: Del Rey

Published: 2023-04-18

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0593499700

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A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona in this “utterly terrifying and wholly immersive . . . story about generational trauma, colonization, systemic oppression, and the horror at the heart of motherhood” (Library Journal, starred review). “Castro is one of the most exciting genre authors on the scene right now, and this might be her most powerful book yet.”—Paste A POPSUGAR AND CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her. Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown. When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors. Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness. But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.

Women of Horror and Speculative Fiction in Their Own Words
Women of Horror and Speculative Fiction in Their Own Words

Author: Sébastien Doubinsky

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-01-25

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1501384473

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What makes science fiction genres better than others at challenging social conventions, especially gender? Are speculative works structured differently when addressed to traditionally under-portrayed individuals or communities? This collection of interviews elicits truly honest and thought-provoking responses that focus on the biographical dimension in speculative fiction, questions of intersectionality, genre (re)definitions and the politicization of fiction. It gives voice to women of different races, nations, classes and sexual orientations who write and edit speculative fiction – such as Ellen Datlow, Kathe Koja, Angela Mi Young Hur, Eugen Bacon, and Cat Rambo. The interviews clarify how the junction of genre and gender is a key element to understanding this literary field, while simultaneously contextualizing and theorizing the interview itself, as a literary genre and a research tool.

Borderland Films
Borderland Films

Author: Dominique Brégent-Heald

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-11

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 0803278845

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The concept of North American borderlands in the cultural imagination fluctuated greatly during the Progressive Era as it was affected by similarly changing concepts of identity and geopolitical issues influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the First World War. Such shifts became especially evident in films set along the Mexican and Canadian borders as filmmakers explored how these changes simultaneously represented and influenced views of society at large. Borderland Films examines the intersection of North American borderlands and culture as portrayed through early twentieth-century cinema. Drawing on hundreds of films, Dominique Brégent-Heald investigates the significance of national borders; the ever-changing concepts of race, gender, and enforced boundaries; the racialized ideas of criminality that painted the borderlands as unsafe and in need of control; and the wars that showed how international conflict significantly influenced the United States' relations with its immediate neighbors. Borderland Films provides a fresh perspective on American cinematic, cultural, and political history and on how cinema contributed to the establishment of societal narratives in the early twentieth century.

Performing La Mestiza
Performing La Mestiza

Author: Ellen M. Gil-Gomez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-06

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1351819453

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This book, first published in 2000, explores the intersections of race, gender and gay identities in writings by contemporary American lesbians of colour in order to show how this subject is sometimes ignored, sometimes brutalised and is very rarely able to survive on her own terms by constructing her own identity acts of cultural revision. The author places the lesbian of colour in the context of current identity theories showing the ever-present blind spots within current theoretical paradigms, she then reads a variety of writings by lesbians of colour describing the possibilities that exist for these subjects in textual and social realities. The author shows the varied communities that threaten the existence of this subject, as well as the limits that dictate the subject's ability to create her self. By bridging Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Gloria Anzaldua's New Mestiza she describes how lesbians of colour can survive numerous sites of hostility by constructing a positive identity within her home community through revising cultural traditions and history. After considering the power of these acts of revision, the author calls for the empowered performance of the mestiza state - the state of contradiction wherein the lesbian of colour finds herself. This book is the first to analyse creative and theoretical works by African American, Asian American, Latina and Native American communities and writers through the lens of lesbian studies. Authors include recognised figures such as Audre Lorde, Ana Castillo and Paula Gunn Allen, as well as lesser known authors like Best Brant, Natashia Lopez and Willyce Kim. It provides a corrective to Butler's empowering but essentially white vision of performing identity, so that lesbians of colour can claim their identities and remain tied to their own cultural traditions. Ultimately, the author asks for a reconsideration of the value of identity studies that articulate monolithic identities and whose analyses perpetuate what they seek to disrupt.

Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing
Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing

Author: D. Baca

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-05-26

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0230612571

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Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how recorded information is expressed across cultures, but also speak to emerging studies on "visual/multimodal" education. Baca-Espinosa argues that Mestiz@ literacies advance "new" ways of reading and writing, applicable to diverse classrooms of the twenty-first century.