Deliberating Queerly Aged Religious Femininity in Chicana/o the Kunstlerroman, Face of an Angel by Denise Chávez

“Daily, we feel the pull and tug,” Cherríe Moraga declares in 1981, “of having to choose between which parts of our mothers’ heritages we want to claim and wear and which parts have served to cloak us from the... [ view full abstract ]

“Daily, we feel the pull and tug,” Cherríe Moraga declares in 1981, “of having to choose between which parts of our mothers’ heritages we want to claim and wear and which parts have served to cloak us from the knowledge of ourselves” (Moraga, 23). Chicana/o literary production and criticism repeatedly position older religious maternal figures in opposition to notions of progress, development, and futurity that privilege youth, and yet coming of age in Chicana/o fiction means contending with these maternal figures who advocate religion both as a patriarchal and class-oppressive institution, and also as a source for political engagement, social imagination, and aesthetic production. This religious complexity remains under-theorized in prevailing discourses about religion in Chicana/o literary studies. If, in 2014, the conference call could be answered by imagining a future literary study of Chicana/o religion, then in 2016 the question has transformed into an imperative to re-member the voices elided by an emphasis on futurity.

To this end, I propose a paper titled, “Deliberating Queerly Aged Religious Femininity in the Chicana/o Kunstlerroman.” In this paper, I employ a non-ideological reparative reading of the facsimiles and experimental passages that appear in Denise Chávez’ Face of an Angel in order to ask how age and religion operate queerly in Chicana/o fiction. Moreover, I ask how this queerly
aged femininity is articulated beyond the bounds of the novel as facsimiles of other genres: etiquette manuals, ethnographic term papers, personal essays, and diatribes. How do these genres re-member a Chicana/o literary process that pivots around maternal religious characters as the origins of vectors of Chicana/o radical political possibility? I contend that these older characters use the language, rituals, and genres of syncretic indigenous and Afro-Latino Catholicisms as a source of formal literary experimentation, social imagination, and political resistance. Syncretic religious rituals address the histories of how women’s and indigenous people’s voices have been elided, examines the intersections of narrative and formal experimentation, and ultimately advances the theory of queer temporality of transubstantiation to query how the times and places of an alternative body politic might be imagined. This is a very flexible paper, as well-suited to a panel about deliberating religion in Latina/o Studies as it is to a panel deliberating methodologies of reading practices in Latina/o Studies. The paper joins a burgeoning field interested in not only religion but also age as a queer analytic.

I value your work for the Latina/o Studies Association. Thank you so much for your labor, and I look forward to collaborating in Pasadena