Voices of the Opression and Solace: Contemporary Guatemalan Feminist Poetry in the Works of Ana María Rodas and Luz Méndez de la Vega

Guatemala, a country with a long patriarchal history, has always been a place of marginalization for its women. Nowadays, the works of the female writers are still being underestimated and rarely appear next to their male colleagues in the national anthologies. There are two principal aims of the present work. The first one is to analyse the poems of the two most prominent female representatives of the Guatemalan feminist poetry: Ana María Rodas and Luz Méndez de la Vega, in order to reclaim their legitimate place in the canon of the Guatemalan literature. The second one it to expose a difficult situation of the contemporary Guatemalan women, and their literary struggle for the right to have their own voice, to reexpress themselves and to break with the traditional roles imposed by the patriarchal society.

Key words: Ana María Rodas, Luz Méndez de la Vega, feminism, Guatemala, poetry.

Alda Merini: The Choice of Madness, the Rescue of the Word

Alda Merini’s early vocation to poetry produced a twofold clash with society: as a woman and as a poet. Madness was for her both a choice of otherness (as the choice of living homeless) and diagnosis: a sentence by society to her disadvantage. Through and notwithstanding the experience of mental illness, of imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital, and of the consequent stigma, Alda Merini was able to build up her identity. Against the power mechanisms of psychiatry and against social exclusion, she grabbed the sword of writing. Thanks to writing (which is therapy and singing) Alda Merini did not let the hell experience of the psychiatric hospital and the stigma of illness overcome her. She was able, in this way, to realize her vocation as woman and poet.

Key words: poetry, madness, woman, vocation, identity.

The Women’s Models and Alternative Sexuality in the Novels of Lucía Etxebarria Love, Curiosity, Prozac and Doubts and Beatrice and the Heavenly Bodies

The main aim of this article is to present ways in which a controversial Spanish novelist, Lucía Etxebarria, expresses and subverts traditional social models and sexual identity of Spanish women at the end of the twentieth century by creation of female protagonists such as a promiscuouos girl, a workaholic executive or a housewife that tend to deconstruct socially normative conceptualizations of their roles and sexuality and they search for alternative constructions of feminine identity, both social and sexual one. It seems that a lesbian model of relationship is alternative to a monogamous compulsory heterosexuality.

Key words: Spanish feminine literature, women’s sexual identity, lesbian model, Lucía Etxebarria.

Discursive Practices in Women’s Writing. Observations on Contemporary Spanish Fiction

On the basis of contemporary Spanish women writers’ fiction we propose to investigate whether besides a series of specific themes there exist any “traits of femininity” inscribed in the literary discourse itself and what are their categories and characteristics. The category of gender is apparent in various aesthetic, narrative and formal examples such as psychological realism, firstperson narrative, fragmentarism, incoherent and disordered structures, or multi-perspectivism. Although it has assimilated some elements of the postmodern episteme and aesthetics such as the use of metanarrative references, the combination of different refined and popular literary genres or the technique of autofiction, the feminine discourse inclines towards narrative models deriving from the sentimental fiction, with its rhetoric of the extreme and exaggeration.

Key words: contemporary Spanish fiction, womens’ literature, discursive practice, gender studies, postmodern narrative.

The feminine world, the world of words. The linguistic expression of the feminine condition in Tutto su mia nonna by Silvia Ballestra

The novel Tutto su mia nonna by Silvia Ballestra is the excellent example of language, writing and sensibility straightforwardly feminine. The main characters of the narration that is the three generations of woman, become the vivid and active subjects of the narration, who form the reality, non only filtering the world which is being narrated in their personal emotional way, but also structuring their world in relationship to the social existence as though their activity does not refer only to their private and personal zone.

The definition of femininity passes through the language as it is not only the way to comunicate but it assumes three different manners: conative, magical and sensual. The sensual and tangible aspect values, by the use of marchigiano dialect, the material, concrete meaning that refers to the body and its physical expression. The magical and commemorative function is proper of the everyday language and it pushes the main character, the narrator to immerge in the recollections of the past that is rituals and old habits of the family. The most important function though is the conative one, which focuses on the interpersonal contact assuming the real communicative function that brings the family together.In this way the language becomes a treasure, a connection and a relationship.

As for the formal level of writing, the interlocutory discourse is maintained by the use of the pronoun tu that refers to the reader who participates in the narration that touches more subjects in the narrative passages and in those of the philosophical and the metanovelistic kind as well.

Key words: Silvia Ballestra, feminine writing, dialect, conative value, dialogue.

Body Image as the Way to Express Femminity Acciaio by Silvia Avallone

The analyzed text puts a great emphasis on the human as physical beings in a physical world, in which body image is a meaningful and conscious way to express identity. The female identity includes concepts of self-esteem, self-perception, sexuality and social role and it can be challenging for a number of reasons. Body image can be a powerful way to fulfill the social expectations but it can also be very vulnerable because appearances change so much and cultural messages that fuel dissatisfaction can be very strong. Having a beautiful body can easily be linked to the concepts of success, sexuality, great expectations. Having ugly body can lead to emargination and struggling against the world that from the ancient times promotes the value of beauty in female.

Key words: body-conscious, identity, evolution, postmodernism.

Ancient Greek Origins of the Construction of Femininity in Spanish Proverbs

This paper intends to trace, in Ancient Greek philosophy and oral literature (particularly in Hesiod, Homer and Aristotle), possible roots of the image of women transmitted through Spanish proverbs. In this paper, proverbs are conceived as cultural products which reflect the worldview of the community that once coined them and, at the same time, they are understood as a power tool which guides the interpretation of reality and influences human behavior. The article states that the image of femininity was built from the masculine perspective, which defined it through a process of estrangement emerged from considering women as “the other” and from projecting on that image men’s point of view on how women are and how they should be.

Key words: femininity, verbal art, folk literature, Spanish proverbs, Ancient Greek literature and philosophy.

The Deconstruction of Male Figures in the “Young Writers”’ Fiction of the End of Twentieth Century

The aim of the article is to present the image of male protagonists in the literature written by some of so-called “young writers” of the 80s and 90s in Italy. These authors deprive the male figure of his traditional attributes of authority and power. They achieve this aim by realizing textual strategies such as a metaphorical attempt on the patriarch or an attack on other’s male authority, by a visualization of the masculinity as uncompleted or prosthetic, and by a victimization of the male protagonist.

Key words: Italian literature of the 80s and 90s, male protagonist, crisis.

Gender politics in The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig

The objective of the present work is to study the constructions of sexual identities that are found in The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. In order to clarify this concept, it is important to contextualize the book in its period, its area of political conflicts that were present in Argentina in the 70s, as well as in the significantly phallic-centered society. Subsequently, through the use of dichotomies, the text will analyze the problem of the rigidity of the binary logic and, at the same time, will present new forms of gender-sexual constructions. Finally, this article will investigate the notion of homosexuality as a transgressive practice that questions the hegemonic discourse of heterosexuality seen and understood as the only legitimate orientation.

Key words: Manuel Puig, gender, sexuality, heterosexual hegemony, politics.

The Latin American Homo Sexualis of High Modernity. Jaime Bayly’s Narrative Fiction

Jaime Bayly is one of the most controversial Hispanic-American writers of recent times. Both his provocative media image and his writings — which supposedly reffer to his personal experience — focus on gay themes. The aim of the present article is to show, by way of the work of literary scholars who engage in queer theory and sociologists who examine questions of sexuality, how certain changes in the sexual dimension of human life typical of societies of so-called high modernity (although with marked influences from Latin American culture), are reflected in th Peruvian’s writings. Situating Bayly’s novels in a broader literary and social context, the article attempts to shed light on the cultural construction of gender and sexuality.

Key words: (homo)sexuality, hypermasculinity, hegemony, identity.

Selected Representations of Homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia

Since its very beginning, ‘the Queer’ as a cognitive construction in academic studies has been characterised by a certain degree of resistance to definition. The reluctance to have its traits encompassed by precise borders mirrors the very theoretical perspective ‘the Queer’ moves from, that is, one from which every strict classification appears to be hermeneutically reductive. Nonetheless, literature as a means of expression undoubtedly presents identification benchmarks for ‘the Queer.’ That is true for Italian literature as well, in which homosexuality, for instance, has been (re)presented since Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. The analysis of three Cantos performed here is aimed at providing a starting point for future diachronical studies whose purpose is to compare the approach to the theme in the Italian literature of the Middle Ages to the benchmarks emerging from the 20th century’s production, in whose mainframe an evolution in representation of ‘the Queer’ is made patent in the passage from Pasolini’s prose of the Sixties to the works by later authors such as Franco Buffoni and Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

Key words: homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia.