ABSTRACT
In the above epigraph Bell Hooks suggests that we must consider power relations when we evaluate the writing produced by any oppressed or colonized group. When we begin our analysis in this way, we recognize that ‘minority’ creative expression generally functions as kind of creative resistance, a ‘challenge to the politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless’. To understand how Chicana literary production represents a challenge to the dominant system of representation, we must inform ourselves about who or what it is Chicanas are resisting. One way to begin then, would be by examining the social conditions responsible for cultivating and nourishing the writers’ desire to speak out. We should, in short, be aware of the external social forces and cultural parameters of the historical moment in question, because it is these outside forces which contributed to a Chicana sense of alienation and estrangement within American society, thereby creating the inspiration for their artistic production. By pursuing this method of interrogation we are in fact placing the emergence of a Chicana antiaesthetic in its proper historical context, tracing backwards over the dialectical struggles that made this shift in oppositional consciousness possible.
