Trastornos de género : identidad y fronteras en la narrativa de Cristina Rivera Garza

Abstract

One of the most prolific and recognized young Mexican writers is Cristina Rivera-Garza. Carlos Fuentes described her novel Nadie me verá llorar, as one of the most notable literary works in this century. Born in Matamoros, Tamps., México, 1964, she completed her B.A. in Sociology at the UNAM in Mexico City (1987), an M.A. (1993) and Ph.D. in Latin-American History at the University of Houston (1995). She worked as an Associate Professor at San Diego State University where she taught Mexican History (1997-2000). She has won several Literary Awards and received the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2000. The purpose of this research is to study the genre and gender borders evident in her works. a) In the literary genre aspect, the author’s works show an interrelation between the documented Historical narrative and the stories at the margin of that narrative. b) In the generic-sex aspect, the identities borders between the different sexualities (hetero and homo sexual), are blurred in the characters of this author. We study the author’s handling of concepts like gender, literary and sexual, and the ways she crosses boundaries to give shape to a body: a physical body that inhabits an unstable identity, and shows a performance that adapts itself in certain contexts; a historic body that dialogues with the official History and reclaims those stories that stayed at the margin of it. In the Introduction we will focus on the author’s bio-bibliography and elaborate, using existing theoretical concepts, on the literary genre and the theory of sexual orientation that will help explain her work. Chapter one is a general review of Rivera-Garza’s work and the context in which it takes place. Chapter two studies two of her short stories books, La guerra no importa (1991), and Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2001); Chapter three studies the sexual orientation and its relationship with gender identity in two novels, La cresta de Ilión (2002), and Lo anterior (2004). The final chapter is the conclusion.