Shifting Climates: Challenging Gender and Authority in Times of War

To frame the ways in which residual impacts of institutionalized colonial and patriarchal structures are rendered across time, the panel turns to "Shifting Climates: Challenging Gender and Authority in Times of War" engages... [ view full abstract ]

To frame the ways in which residual impacts of institutionalized colonial and patriarchal structures are rendered across time, the panel turns to "Shifting Climates: Challenging Gender and Authority in Times of War" engages how historical narratives of the Battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto (1836) serve as enduring symbols of heroism and key historical moments predicated on a history of colonization and domination. This paper considers two alternative narratives that shift social and political climates as they render a new reading of the impacts of gender on this historical event: Augusta Evans’ 1855 novel Inez: A Tale of the Alamo, and Emma Pérez’s 2009 novel, Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory. Written over 150 years apart, the novels are developed from divergent points of view – one is written by a Southern American writer who critiques the hostilities of the Mexican attack on the Alamo; the other written by a Texas native and Chicana who addresses sexuality, violence, and allegiance. However disparate their accounts read, this paper examines the narratives as a bridge between the South and the Southwest, and the nineteenth century and contemporary moment, that reveals how the protagonists and the authors themselves use the Battles to challenge discriminating gendered climates designed to constrain their protagonists.