English, Spanish, Transborder Studies

Mourning Gabriela Mistral’s death was a climactic moment in the transformation of the poet into a national symbol.  Posthumous representations of Gabriela Mistral in postage stamps and monetary currency evoke nationalist sentiment in dynastic and religious configurations, depicting her as santa maestra; absent, regal, Nobel Queen; and, to a lesser extent, loyal citizen-campesina.  These representations create the impression of a timeless, mythic, noble past for the nation as an imagined fraternal community.  Recognizing the political circumstances of her portraiture, including her own ambiguous, often contradictory identifications opens the way to understanding how women have been used as symbols of nationhood.

Superficially a war between women, the Todd-Dickinson feud began and ended in property battles. 2 The feud was fueled by the interests of the book trade: publishers, critics, and lawyers who cared less about the provenance of manuscripts than about how to organize and ...

All mothers are queer, or seeming makes it so. A Queer Mother reminds us that queemess is always on display, that the spectator need never come face to face with the perceived object, and that massification of the visual image ensures that the encounter will still be staged. ...