UC Berkeley

Abstract

Shattering Dogma: Feminist Debate, Transgression and Mourning

in Selected Works by Gioconda Belli, Diamela Eltit and Cristina Peri Rossi

by

Tanya V. Varela

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Francine Masiello, Chair

This dissertation examines selected works of renowned authors Gioconda Belli, Diamela Eltit and Cristina Peri Rossi, with the objective of identifying the various levels of resistance that emerge from their texts against authoritative and dogmatic discourses -especially feminism-- prevalent in 1980's Latin America. Assessing how these women writers manage to break away from the decade's normative discursive tone, the introductory chapter discusses the cultural and historical factors that contribute to produce the distinctive qualities that define Latin American feminist thought.

An elaborate comparative analysis in the core chapters leads me to examine to what extent Belli, Eltit and Peri Rossi both address and erode the ideological dogmatism and the essentialist tendencies that prevail in feminism. In these chapters, I also study their proposals for alternative representations of gender through innovative aesthetic quests. I argue that through ideological and aesthetic transgression, these writers attempt, with varying degrees of success, to drastically subvert and dismantle notions such as `patriarchy,' `femininity,' `motherhood' and `family'. In doing so, they liberate their respective texts from heavy categorical burdens and allow these politically disputed concepts to be aesthetically produced, reformulated, and modified. I propose that by positing a profoundly self-critical brand of feminism, these novelists rearticulate the theoretical and aesthetic debates in each of their selected works, and establish a healthy distance between the rigidity of militant ideological discourses and their literary production.

In the last chapter, I analyze three recent novels by this trio of authors, seen in light of their contributions -in the 1980's-- to reformulating the dogmatically-oriented feminist discourse and now, at the start of the millennium, under the shadow of a less strident post-feminism that has settled in Latin America. I conclude that, just as the act of transgression was indeed necessary as a means to break away from the rigid symptoms detected in 1980's feminism, these recent texts are framed within an equally forceful imperative of mourning, which stems from the vacuum left by a shattered feminist dogma and the installation of a new global cultural context that has effectively co-opted and neutralized debates on gender. In the end, though this outcome is seemingly ironic, it has nevertheless propelled Belli, Eltit and Peri Rossi to continue their creative quests for contestatory new discursive proposals, while still searching for balance in the never-ending negotiation between aesthetics and ideology.