So looking at some of today's resources, I began to think about prescriptiveness, both in the sense of some authority making laws or declamations, and in the sense of having a social script given to you about how to behave. Las ofrendas seem to offer the latter without the former for Chicana feminists, a way to express gratitude and create spiritual change without having to bow to external, often discriminatory authority. My questions are below.
A lot of institutionalized religions, like Catholicism, have a number of hierarchies and rules built into them that, for instance, perpetuate homophobia. Perez points to that as one of the reasons why "a more general . . . spirituality was reclaimed as a healing force" (3) for Chicana artists. She also calls spirituality a "contested social terrain" (8) though, and certainly plenty of women, like Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, have managed to create subversive art in the context of institutionalized religion. So do you think that institutionalized religion is antithetical to Chicana feminist art?
Someone else mentioned this as well, but I also noticed that there seemed to be a big gender divide in La Ofrenda. Are women usually the altar-keepers?
At around 14:45 in La Ofrenda, the narrator says that she is "I carry inside of me the strength and weight of the brilliant and terrible past." Because we have been reading the works of women, I cannot tell if this emphasis on mujeres as the embodiment of resilience and the keepers of the past is reflective of reality. Is this a strength and a burden that Chicanos share? And if not, how did it come to be that women were the ones given the role of inheritor?
- Haleh Mawson
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