Throwing Like A Girl Analysis

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Rosario Hernández Catalán described Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as “el ejemplo más conmovedor de las ansias de trascender las limitaciones materiales impuestas a las mujeres por medio de la lectura y la imaginación” as she was able to attain “la libertad en la celda llena de libros". I believe this is what literature has offered women for decades: a space of liberty, where they can rid themselves of the veil forced upon them as wives, mothers and daughters. A place where they are boundless, their stories immortal, and their knowledge passed on from generation to generation. As a child, I would reach for my father’s typewriter, punch as many buttons as I could, roll out the paper, and run to him asking if, by any luck, I had been able to put together…show more content…
I wish to study the literature of women writers from the 19th and 20th century, particularly in relation to the ways gender identity shapes their experiences of motherhood, marriage/divorce, orphanhood and loss in a patriarchal society. Feminist theorists such as Iris Marion Young have framed my focus on women’s literature. In Throwing like a Girl: A phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality, she asserts that “the female person who enacts the existence of women in patriarchal society must live [in] contradiction: as human she is a free subject who participates in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that subjectivity and transcendence.” Her argument makes me wonder about the ways in which the attachment of meaning to womanhood has made women experience the world in very different ways than men. These experiences have gone silenced for too long, and it is my belief that by (re)discovering the voices of women in Latin American literature, a part of history that has gone unheard will be discovered as…show more content…
Gaite’s dialogue with an interlocutor of her creation allows her to defy patriarchy, as she is able to escape loneliness through her own imaginings. The author rebels against stereotypical notions of the feminine ideal through the illogical sequences, filled with clutter and disorder; she exorcises herself through her writings, asserting her autonomy and independence. I am interested in how gender stereotypes can limit women’s experiences and how they break free from them. Vital questions for my research interest are: How did women writers subvert dominant narrative conventions of the time? And What does it mean for a woman to create art and literature in a patriarchal society? Using this approach, I would like to study authors such as Juana de Ibarbourou, Rosario Ferré, Alfonsina Storni and Gioconda
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