Genre Matters: Transgression, Innovation, and Transformation in the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherríe Moraga

This dissertation explores the early and influential works of Chicana feminist authors Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherríe Moraga through the lens of modern genre theory. Despite the tendency of these authors to write in multiple genres and hybrid forms, much of the scholarly response has focused on the new perspectives and experiences present in the texts rather than on their formal innovation. I contend innovative content should be considered inextricable from innovative form. These authors do not merely offer new perspectives but offer new ways of presenting ideas. Socially constructed and culturally embedded, genre operates at the level of meaning-making, purveys dominant ideology, and shapes interpretation. Given the subtle yet influential role of genre, the resistance to traditional genre in Chicana writings must be understood as challenging both literary and social norms. Because no text performs or transgresses genre in the exactly same way, there is no single theory or methodology which applies. Rather, an attentiveness to genre in texts and scholarship exposes the influence of genre in our understanding of texts. This dissertation traces genre history and its frequent borrowing of racial metaphors to illustrate logics of genre purity and reads Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and its refusal to perform traditional genre as resistance essential to Anzaldúa’s theorizing of mestiza consciousness, a framework based on embracing racial miscegenation. Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street provides the opportunity to explore genre indeterminacy and to examine Bildungsroman as a genre case study where the origins and centuries-long debates make the constructedness of genre visible. In Moraga’s Loving in the War Years and the co-edited anthology This Bridge Called My Back, I examine the innovation to the autobiography and anthology genres as well as the genre-related trends in scholarship, considering the consistently significant, if not always obvious, role of genre in shaping interpretation and analysis. The writings of Anzaldúa, Cisneros, and Moraga have changed the literary landscape, but only when genre is part of the analysis can the fullness of their innovation and literary legacy be glimpsed