En Clave de Mujer:La construcción de la Subjetividad femenina en el Caribe

This dissertation proposes a study of female Caribbean subjectivity based on corporeality. By establishing relationships that break racial, geopolitical, linguistic and cultural barriers that have historically separated the subjects from the region, this methodology allows for the construction of the subject from a less limiting spectrum. This study explores the construction of female subjectivity—and the mechanisms women use to subvert structures of power—through the analysis of the images and voices of girls and women represented in five novels and a short story written by six Caribbean female authors. My dissertation takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that female subjectivity emerges from the tension between the “lived body” and the “objectified body,” which is produced socially by the inscription of its materiality through relationships of power. For this reason, I analyze the place of bodies in society and the inscription of what is social in them, since bodies are a vehicle for social discipline par excellence. At the same time, they are the locus where the reinvention of identities becomes possible. What more, bodies are spaces or places where society can see its starkest reflection. In other words, bodies constitute social canvasses with agency for change. This dissertation argues that the symbolic appropriation of bodies by means of religious, political, legal, and medical discourses is the thread that holds together the patchwork quilt that constitutes the Caribbean region. Female authors such as Maryse Condé and Mayra Santos Febres are important for this study because of their approach to history, their re-writing of the black body in official history, and their attention to the racialization of the Caribbean woman. Rosario Ferré and Marvel Moreno exemplify in their fictional worlds the ways in which the female body is harmed through medical and religious discourses, and Rita Indiana Hernández and Zoé Valdés illustrate the ravages that ideologies and political discourses infringe on the bodies and the capital cities of the Dominican Republic and Cuba