Naslov
The Grotesque Body and Women's Embodied Ethnography in Denise Chavez's Fiction

Autori
Šesnić, Jelena

Izvornik
Journal of American Studies of Turkey (1300-6606) 23 (2006); 37-48

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Denise Chavez; body; grotesque; embodiment; ethnography

Sažetak
The contemporary US-Chicano author Denise Chavez in her short story cycle _The Last of the Menu Girls_ (1986) and in her novel _Face of an Angel_ (1994), employs strategies comparable to revisionist or "oppositional" ethnography (as defined by Behar and Gordon, for instance), principally through the use of the image of the grotesque female body. Embodiedness is seen as one of the woman's prerogatives, which simultaneously marks her as a tobooed object, and enables her to transgress and transcend more circumscribed conditions of her existence. Using the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque in its proximity to degrading, physical, scatological and folk imagery, the reading attempts to redefine the female body in its habitus and practices as an enabling cultural mark, such that delivers a new semantics of gender through the feminine grotesque as a viable mode of perception, understanding and articulation.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA