La mutagenesis de las escritoras chilenas a principios del siglo XX

Abstract

In Chile during the first twenty years of the XX century, multiple dynamics of social, political, and economical nature affect the various subjects' cultural products, and their relationship to the concept of nation. I discuss three collections of stories published by Wilfrida Buxton (Viditas, 1911), Clarisa Polanco de Hoffman (Hojas al viento, 1917), and Ines Echeverria de Larrain (La hora de Queda , 1918). These were women whose different politics of representation demonstrate an appropriation of the written word as a means for gender representation, and increasing awareness of class and gender power relations. I adopt a cultural studies approach to pose a re-reading of this historical juncture as one of contact zones. Here the female subjects are forced to re-position themselves in relation to modernity, and the fragmentary effect it has on previously fixed-gender and class constructions. I expand the concept of contact zones by highlighting that these encompass a process of integration which can be delineated by the nature of the texts produced within these spaces. I study each text in light of the authors' politics of representation and its placement in the process of integration. Wilfrida Buxton's stories belong in the first sub-zone. The text represents a group of subjects marginalized due to a prediscursive notion of an individual's valid contribution to the construction of nation. Polanco de Hoffman's, on the other hand, demonstrates a lack of class consciousness coupled with an acute awareness of women's unequal representation under the law. Her pro-divorce argument places her in the second sub-zone, where texts may propose alternatives to deficient social structures. EcheverrIa de Certain's text straddles the second and third sub-zone by displacing the traditional notion of "woman". Her representation of multiple female subjectivities underline this writer's sensitivity to class and gender relations. Her text re-defines gender relations, as well as provides an alternative female subject who is free of the tensions of gender relations. With the study of these texts and the process of integration, I aim to contribute to the understanding of women's participation in the relationship between text, subject and nation.