Abstract:

Informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, this article proposes an interpretative framework of hopeful reading to locate resistant forms of hope in South Korean writer Han Kang’s award-winning novel The Vegetarian, which is permeated with violence. Unlike mainstream positive thinking promoted by positive psychology that keeps the status quo intact, hopeful reading is rebellious, generative, and transformative in nature. Hopeful reading shifts the analytical focus from what disables one from acting in a hopeless situation to how one can be enabled to remain active in the very same situation. Applying this lens to analyze The Vegetarian, this article argues that hope is not ignited through suppressed women characters’ successful changes to continue what life used to be before violence. Instead, failing to properly resist or act turns out to facilitate the women characters to imagine and experiment with what their lives could have been or could become, which sparks the light of hope in the darkness of the novel.

Abstract:

This article adopts a decolonial lens to explore leading Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s aesthetics as an attempt to de-other and expand the field of Chicana literature, which receives less academic attention in Taiwan than other minority discourses. The article argues that the strangeness in Anzaldúa’s writings, which resist straightforward attempts to decipher them, results from the double nature of her endeavor. On the one hand, Anzaldúa decolonizes aesthetics by liberating non-rational sensibilities suppressed by the rational mind to broaden the scope of what counts as reality. On the other hand, she aestheticizes decoloniality by deploying experimental storytelling strategies to offer new languages for those residing in the cracks of the normative to narrate their subjectivities. Through this double movement, Anzaldúa’s decolonial aesthetics de-others those considered to be outcast, lesser, or alien, so we might recognize their ontological co-existence with us and the pluriversal world we live in. For Anzaldúa, the praxis of de-othering is not about familiarizing those marked as the other within an existing frame of meaning. Instead, as this article will show, to de-other is to desire an otherwise realm that opens up an alternative space-time where the multiplicity that the marginalized preserve and embody can be affirmed and appreciated.

Abstract:

Since 1993, more than a thousand women have been murdered in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. To overcome the collective helplessness of their society, as evidenced by the Mexican government’s failure to stop the killing or to guarantee safety to its citizens, cultural producers began to carve out political space to respond to the Ciudad Juárez feminicide in their arts. This article looks into the feminist and coalitional politics manifested in Mexican playwright Humberto Robles’s unpublished documentary theater play “Women of Sand: Testimonies of Women in Ciudad Juárez,” reading the play as a theatrical altar in order to grasp both the subversive representation of Ciudad Juárez feminicide victims and the healing potential Robles hints at. Active remembering, the coalescence of heterogeneous voices, and spiritual activism are key strategies the play adopts to enact an altar arrayed with oppositional consciousness in the space of theater. Robles’s theatrical altar adheres to an “altar economics”to contest the patriarchal and neoliberal discourse of expendability that subjects women to violence. In this altar economics, the intrinsic value of feminicide victims takes priority over the external moral values imposed on them.