ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the complementary issue of audience by emphasizing the importance of gaining an "ear" and 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. The romanticization of domestic violence through descriptive words such as "passion" is what makes this form of violence acceptable in patriarchal discourse, for it enacts a slippage between sexual excitement and violence against women. The violence of colonialism, loss of land, and loss of sovereignty are frequently conceptualized as the loss of masculinity: the Absent Father of machismo. Gloria Anzaldua creates a clear link between the physical reality of violence and the ideology of colonialism to subvert the narrative of manifest destiny, which justifies and legitimates American colonialist ambitions.
