In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure.
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano has written the best feminist study to date of Moraga’s art in its richest aesthetic, cultural, and political implications. This book, I believe, is a major reading of a major Chicana intellectual. More than that, it is a sweeping reassessment of Chicano/a theater and of Moraga’s reclamation of the Chicano/a movement, a model of literary and cultural historicism, and a searching and engaging exploration of the major critical issues in current Chicano/a discourse.
- Acknowledgments
- Title Abbreviations
- Introduction: Chicana Lesbian Writing and the Intersection of Cultural and Critical Practices
- Part I: The Body
- 1. (De)constructing the Lesbian Body
- Part II: The Plays
- 2. Giving Up the Ghost: Feminist Theory and the Staging of Mestiza Desire
- 3. Shadow of a Man: Touching the Wound in Order to Heal
- 4. "The Miracle People": Heroes and Saints and Contemporary Chicano Theater
- Part III: The Written Identity
- 5. "I Long to Enter You Like a Temple": Sex, Salvation, and Shamanism
- 6. Whiteness in The Last Generation: The Nation, the "Half-breed," and the Queer
- 7. Writing the Lesbian Mother: "Waiting in the Wings"
- Appendix: A Chronology of Major Works by Cherríe Moraga
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
