Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation, desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

Abstract

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.

Keywords:

• Chican@ nationalism
• Chican@ studies
• Moraga, Cherríe L
• queer aesthetics
• queer of color critique
• theater
• utopia and dystopia

Notes on contributor

Michelle R. Martin-Baron is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She received her doctorate in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on public mourning, citizenship, and belonging appears in Queer Necropolitics (Routledge) and Quarterly Horse.

Notes

1 Throughout this essay, I predominantly use the traditional spelling of “Chicana” and “Chicano.” I do this largely because I allude to social movements that have framed themselves in this way, and because I want to recognize that the mythologies underlying Chicana/o are different from those that underlie Xicana/o. I do, however, on occasion use the second spelling, prompted by Moraga who makes a switch in her own writing. I have attempted to mirror that transition within my discussion of her work.

2 Monte, Scott, and Brogan (2012) discuss how Milton's use of enjambment led the romantics to think of the strategy as liberating from neo-classical rules.

3 In Loving in the War Years (2000), Moraga’s essay “Looking for the Insatiable Woman,” explains that a mother killing her own child is a type of suicide, for “a mother never completely separates from her child. She always remains a part of her children,” (146). The power of motherhood and its cultural expectations is a theme that runs through much of Moraga’s work, from her relationship with her own mother to her journey of motherhood. Moraga’s use of mythical enjambment to unpack la llorona suggests that this myth may already be enjambed with its own internal resistance. We might also consider la llorona as an enjambment of the myth of motherhood’s “naturalness,” or as an enjambment of the story of la Malinche, who, as legend has it, simultaneously created and betrayed the mestiza/o race.

4 Since the Spanish word for moon is “luna,” calling the character Luna is a direct reference to the Coyolxauqui myth.