Feminism and Coming-of-Age

"A Woman of Silent Power:
A Feminist Approach to Voice and Identity in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God."

The influence of Third Wave feminism from the 1990s continues to impact contemporary literary critics’ analyses of women writers of color and their work, casting light upon certain personal and social issues, such as incorporating race into the feminist conversation. Castillo illustrates the necessity for this inclusion in many of her texts by establishing Chicana identity as complex and multi-faceted. Thus, through the lens of feminism, this paper explores women of color’s voice and identity through the matriarch, Sofia, in Ana Castillo’s novel So Far From God. Castillo uses the character, Sofia, to shed light upon the difficulties of being a mother, a wife, and a Chicana within a society that generally disregards and silences women. First, as a mother, Sofia directs her power and voice to guide, encourage, and protect her daughters. Second, her liminal status as a wife symbolizes her shift from a voiceless shadow to an illuminated, vocal woman which frees her from the shadows of the patriarchy. Lastly, her identity as a Chicana is cast in the shadows of society and is only acknowledged and appreciated when she becomes active in her community by pursuing mayoral status, establishing a business enterprise, and founding an organization in remembrance of her deceased daughters.

Read Chloe Johnson's essay below.

"From Poisoned Apples to Magic Water:
Traditional Ideology and Feminist Rebellion in Disney Princess Films
from 1937-1959 and from 2012-2016."

The Walt Disney Company has a hand in every aspect of popular culture and entertainment. One of their most popular areas of entertainment production is their animation studios and the movies that are celebrated both by the company and by the general public. Disney Animation Studios is best known for its Disney Princess films; these films bring female characters to life on the screen as well as in the parks and other Disney properties. These characters are often highly celebrated as strong representations of ideological role models for young children. However, one must take into account that, above all, Disney is an international conglomerate corporation that has a dominating role as both a contributor to culture and a controller of culture. By focusing on the Disney Company’s role as a contributor in capitalist culture, one can understand what the Disney Company is trying to sell in order to maintain its status as a controller of the educational Ideological State Apparatus and how that control feeds into the company’s popular culture image. This paper analyzes how Disney Princesses, specifically Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), Aurora (1959), Merida (2012), Anna (2013), and Moana (2016), are portrayed as reflections of popular culture, discusses the authenticity of these portrayals while they are being produced as part of Disney’s popular culture imagery, and how Disney inevitably uses these portrayals as heavily calculated additions to the Disney brand.

Read Lauren Littler's essay below.

“'Powdered Green and Smelling of Must':
Exploring Interpersonal Relations in Brenda Peynado’s “Yaiza” Through the Lens of Idealism."

Brenda Peynado’s “Yaiza follows a Hispanic eleven-year-old girl in Florida who comes from a well-to-do family and takes tennis lessons at an academy not too far from her neighborhood. Her world is turned upside down when Yaiza, a new girl from a less privileged economic class who lives in the same neighborhood, joins her tennis academy and outplays every child there. This essay utilizes an idealist philosophy of dialectical progress through the efforts of the individual to examine the unnamed narrator’s relationship with both tennis and Yaiza. I choose to do so because G.F.W. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) aptly describes the narrator’s need to be seen by Yaiza and to beat her in a match of tennis, effectively “staking her life” in game (543). Even as the narrator trains furiously to improve at tennis, she eventually finds that humanism cannot solve all problems, as Yaiza moves away due to events beyond the narrator’s control. Furthermore, I show that the story demonstrates Immanuel Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative through apparently random acts of kindness (Stevens 108). Finally, I elucidate the idealist’s sublime and its significance to this story.

Read Lillian Snyder's essay below.