Ecofeminist discourse and fluid lyrical sexualities
Julia de Burgos’sRío Grande de Loíza
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3076842 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín (Florida Atlantic University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 155-181 |
| Publication date | 2016-09-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Language and Sexuality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2211-3770 • E-ISSN: 2211-3789 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/jls.5.2.02esq |
| OpenAlex | W2538032987 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
The traditional reading of Julia de Burgos's (1914-1953) poem "Río Grande de Loíza" positions the river as a male lover. An ecofeminist reading yields a very different reading and raises other questions about the gendered and sexual message circulating within the poem. In my reading, the river becomes a fluid, lyrical mirror reflecting the poet's quest for transnational and transsexual freedom unbound by female corporeality. Burgos invokes the river as a non-human Other interlocutor in order to deconstruct both the geographic and political boundaries imposed by US colonial hegemony and the sexual ones foisted by patriarchal-oriented Puerto Rican nationalists who viewed sexuality as heteronormative. By the 1930s, landscapes had been appropriated as symbols of the fatherland and a distinct Puerto Rican identity. Burgos's language establishes instead a fluvial proto-feminist discourse of empowerment by imagining multiple sites of corporeal pleasure that transcend national barriers and offers alternative poetic fluid sexualities
Aesthetics · Art · Essentialism · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Literature · Masculinity · Pleasure · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Transgender · Transsexual · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Psychology
The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Material Feminisms
Ecology without Nature
Queer Ecologies
Toward an Art of Transvestism
Becoming Julia de Burgos
The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move
Entiendes?; Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings
El sujeto nómada en la poesía de Julia de Burgos
I Am the Life, the Strength, the Woman
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |