“Watercolor Women”: Configuring the Chicana Female Subject

Abstract

Second wave feminism in the United States has brought about new voices of minority communities in
the framework of literary studies. Drawing on distinctions among concepts regarding the female experience and
on the standpoints of Chicana feminism as both integrative and integral part of postcolonialism, the proposed
paper aims at configuring a typology of the female subject in the borderlands. By appealing to a number of
literary works by Chicanas, as well as tracing some of the performative aspects of writing “as a Chicana”, the
paper formulates a number of instances in which the Chicana female subject is invariably conceptualized (such
as la Virgen, la Malinche, la victima, la soldadera, etc.), as well as more abstruse ones such as the threatening
woman or the incestuous mistress. Furthermore, the analysis shall shed a light on the recurrence of these
conceptualized female subjects within the Chicana literary environment by reasoning that the later justifies both
the writers’ intentionality and their commitment to the feminist views of the movement.