A Queer Mother For The Nation: The State And Gabriela Mistral
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
A Queer Mother For The Nation: The State And Gabriela Mistral
By (Author) Licia Fiol-Matta
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
11th February 2002
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Gender studies, gender groups
861.62
Physical Properties
Paperback
304
Width 149mm, Height 229mm, Spine 18mm
Description
Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957),thefirst Latin American to wintheNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate,thenational schoolteacher-mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth came to occupy this role, and what Mistrals image, poetry, and life have to say abouttherelations-and realities-of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time, arethequestions Licia Fiol-Matta pursues in this book, recreatingthestory of a woman whose misrepresentation is at least as intriguing, and as instructive, as her fame.
AQueerMother fortheNationweaves a nuanced understanding of how Mistral cooperated with authority and fashioned herself asthefigure of Motherhood in collaboration withthestate. Drawing on Mistrals little-known political and social essays, her correspondence and photographs, Fiol-Matta reconstructs Mistrals relationship to state politics. Her work questionsthenotion ofqueerbodies as outlaws, and insists onthemany ways in whichqueersubjects have participated in and sustainedthenormative discoursesthey seem to rebel against
