The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherrie Moraga (Chicana Matters Series) - Tapa dura

"Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano has written the best feminist study to date of Moraga's art in its richest aesthetic, cultural, and political implications. This book, I believe, is a major reading of a major Chicana intellectual. More than that, it is a sweeping reassessment of Chicano/a theater and of Moraga's reclamation of the Chicano/a movement, a model of literary and cultural historicism, and a searching and engaging exploration of the major critical issues in current Chicano/a discourse." - Jose David Saldivar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherrie Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analysing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialised desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialised desire. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano is Professor of Spanish and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.