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Notes
[1] See García Pinto (1991, p. 69), for Ángel's comments on the significance of Wittig in the genesis of Las andariegas.
[2] This appears under the title of Las nuevas cartas portuguesas in the text.
[3] In Wittig's original French this phrase reads, ‘les références à Amaterasu ou à Cihuacoatl ne sont plus de mise’ (Wittig Citation1969, p. 38).
[4] This quotation appears in the original and reads, ‘Guerreiros, nós, mulheres de corpo inteiro e segura mão’ (Barreno et al. 1974, p. 43).
[5] It is significant that Ángel chooses as her epigraph the only indigenous tribe of Colombia, according to anthropologist Laura Lee Crumley, whose creation myth is depicted through solely female creative forces (cited in Uribe Citation2000, p. 215).
[6] In naming the Kogui mythology as premodern I do not in any way mean to deny the writings of Néstor García Canclini and others who have been at pains to point out the hybridity of cultural forms; rather I aim to contrast the citation of leading figures of the predominantly European, modern, and globalized projects of feminism with that of a tribe living in virtual isolation.
[7] As John Beverley reminds us, ‘one of the things—along with Christianity, smallpox, and the encomienda system of enforced labor—Columbus and his successors brought with them to the New World was the institution of literature’ and that literature is therefore a ‘colonial institution, one of the basic institutions of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas’ (Beverley Citation1993, p. 2).
[8] Historians have frequently remarked on the supernatural powers that indigenous peoples attributed to the conquistadores on horseback; Beatriz Pastor comments that, in Cortés's writings, the horse was the symbol of the Spaniards' military supremacy, and that the Aztecs believed horses to possess ‘magical powers’ (Pastor Citation1993, p. 93); Peter Bakewell similarly notes that ‘the Mexicans, lacking large domestic animals, were particularly awed by these [horses], and tended to regard them as touched by the divine’ (Bakewell Citation1997, p. 97).
[9] The Amazonian myth is one that is recurrent in Greek mythology, with these women appearing in the mythical tales which deal with the feats of Herakles, Theseus, and Achilles. They are mentioned in such texts as Homer's Iliad, and Virgil's Aeneid, in addition to their representation in numerous visual artefacts. These women were said to rule over a matriarchal society, in which men were used solely for the purposes of procreation and male infants were mutilated at birth, whilst the women assumed the role of warriors.
[10] Both of these terms are glossed in footnotes in the text, with chinchorros, a relatively common term, being translated as ‘hammocks’, and t'arkas as ‘Indian flute’ (p. 130, n.1; p. 131, n.1).
[11] Critics have frequently noted the use of the term ‘Amazons’ as a European imposition; for CitationMary Louise Pratt the Amazon was ‘the combative woman warrior that Europeans had created to symbolize America to themselves’ (1992, p. 23), whilst CitationLuis Fernando Restrepo notes that the two key figures used to denote the Amerindians were the cannibal and the Amazon, and that ‘these figures were read as signs that marked Amerindians as savages’ (2003, p. 53).
[12] These issues are raised by Wittig in several of her essays published in the collection The Straight Mind and Other Essays, including ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, in which she argues that ‘the advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex’ (Wittig Citation1992, p. 20).
[13] It must be noted that Wittig herself did not accept the concept of écriture féminine, and indeed rejected the notion of the feminine as a whole, striving as she did to eliminate the entire category of femme (see for instance, ‘The Category of Sex’, ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, and ‘The Mark of Gender’ in Wittig Citation1992). Nevertheless, Wittig's practice in her fictional works of destroying gender in language through the proliferation of the ‘elles’ in Les Guérillères, or the reworking of the ‘j/e’ in Le Corps lesbien (Wittig Citation1973) bears at least a superficial resemblance to the project of écriture féminine. As Susan Rubin Suleiman comments, although Wittig's intellectual allegiances place her in strong opposition to Cixous and Irigaray, ‘her imaginative works manifest a number of similar preoccupations, both formal and thematic’ (Suleiman Citation1990, p. 130).
[14] ‘The women say, the language you speak is made of signs which, rightly speaking, designate what they have appropriated…. This is shown just in the break which the masters have not been able to fill with their words of owners and possessors, this can be looked for in the gap, in everything which is not the continuity of their discourse, in the zero, the O, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to conquer them.'
[15] ‘The women say it may be that the feminaries have now fulfilled their function—and this one too.'