ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the issue of “voice” and feminine social agency in Chicana literature. In this chapter I address the complementary issue of audience by emphasizing the importance of gaining an “ear” as well as a voice. This issue is key to the reception of Chicana representations of violence against women because the reception of such representations, and especially the interpretation of these representations, depends upon how they are heard. Survivor narratives always risk appropriation by conservative cultural mythologies that seek to naturalize representations of violence in order to reinstate the values that are threatened by the concepts of domestic and sexual violence. To battle such conservative patriarchal mythologies by simply rewriting them is to remain within the domain of mythology-the function of which is to naturalize all threats to the status quo. The authors under discussion include the Mexico-based Chicana Alma Villanueva, Gloria Anzaldúa who grounds her work in the experience of the Texas borderlands, and the U.S.-based writers Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo. This range of work offers a variety of perspectives upon the transnational issue of violence against Mexican-American women. Texts such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “We Call Them Greasers” (1987), Ana Castillo’s novel Sapagonia (1994), Alma Villanueva’s novel Naked Ladies (1994), and Sandra Cisneros’s story “Woman Hollering Creek” (1992), are introduced in the context of recent theorizations of trauma, agency, and voice, in order to argue that it is necessary to shift register from the mythological. In this way we attend to the brutal facts of violence against women and listen to these stories of suffering that we would prefer not to hear.
