Alicia Gaspar de Alba presents 20 years of academic and creative work with a new unifying vision. Combining American Studies and Chicana and feminist theory, Gaspar de Alba removes female bodies from their frames as “bad” in discourses of racial, social, cultural, sexual, national, regional, and religious identity. Employing a voice that is alternately academic and personal, she narrates her quest for a common theme in her opus, which she finds in the struggle against the hetero-normative socialization of “good girls” within the framework of Mexican patriarchy and Roman Catholicism. As a Chicana radical lesbian feminist, she seeks to inspire future generations, as Gloria Anzaldúa inspired her. She offers frank observations about graduate school, tenure, and writing, encouraging others that they too can “make the academy [their] home” (xix).
Seven chapters document the evolution of Gaspar de Alba's activist scholarship, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary methodology. Because chapters appear in the order they were written, there is some repetition, but a valuable introduction weaves unpublished pieces, new material, and revisions into a coherent whole. An expressive writer, Gaspar de Alba employs in her prose many a double-entendre (“un-frame”) and pun (“in habit”). Prefixes (“re-member”) signal, and sometimes belabor, the message. The images in the volume are integral to her analysis, and invite further reflection.
In “The Politics of Location of la Décima Musa,” Gaspar de Alba “interviews” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the seventeenth-century nun and the “baddest girl of New Spain” (10). The author's questions, based on feminist theory, are “answered” in curated quotations of Sor Juana that establish her as the “foremother of Chicana feminism”(35). “Malinche's Revenge” critiques the Chicano movement for perpetuating colonialist stereotypes of women as mother/virgin/whore. Gaspar de Alba calls on Chicana feminists, and particularly Chicana lesbian feminists, to elucidate how Malinche's role in Chicana resistance stands against “the brown patriarchy of La Raza” and the “overarching patriarchy of the white father” (78). Malinche's experience should be read as affirming women's freedom to use their mind and body as they choose and to cultivate intellectual skills for survival and empowerment.
In “There's No Place Like Aztlán: Homeland Myths and Embodied Aesthetics,” Gaspar de Alba explores four Chicana artists who go beyond national origin or geographical location to incorporate religion, community, or the body as signifiers of homeland. She praises Chicanas who transcend uncritical patriarchal claims to the land as either virgin (Manifest Destiny ideology) or mother (Aztlán ideology), and instead, deconstruct and reconstruct the “traded, penetrated, and bifurcated body of the land” (117). Coyolxauhqui and Las ‘Maqui-Locas’: Re-Membering the Sacrificed Daughters of Ciudad Juárez” examines cultural, academic, and political discourse about the unsolved murders of women on the border. Refusing to blame the victims of these femicides, Gaspar de Alba explores the ancient myth of Coyoloxuahqui as a discursive root of this misogyny.
Applying her research into the disturbing Juárez femicides, Gaspar de Alba turned to the mystery genre to reach a wider audience. “Mapping the Labyrinth: The Anti-Detective Novel and the Mysterious Missing Brother” describes her process for writing what she calls her “anti-detective novel” (37). Rejecting modernist literary convention, she wrote a novel that “has no center except for the labyrinth of the mystery” (181). “Devil in the Rose Bikini: The Inquisition Continues” explores social responses to an art piece by her wife, Alma López. Gaspar de Alba analyzes protests against the digital collage, Our Lady, at exhibitions in New Mexico, California, and Ireland. She dismantles the criticism of protestors who, she finds, projected their own anxieties and values onto López's digital portrait of a (mortal) woman. In “The Sor Juana Chronicles,” the author discusses three fictional studies that portray Sor Juana as oppressed but leave her true identity “cloistered” (257). Her novel, in contrast, uses a methodology of radical recognition to uncover Sor Juana as “not just a lesbian nun, but a separatist feminist cross-dressing as a nun” as a way to “inhabit” a lesbian identity that did not exist as a discursive reality in seventeenth-century New Spain (256).
In sum, Gaspar de Alba's synergetic approach, the un-framing of “bad women,” is engaging and important, considering the continuing prevalence of the “colonial imaginary” and hetero-normative constructions of knowledge (267). Her work should inspire others to study “transgressive bodies who queer/alter the male-centric history, politics and consciousness of Chicana/o culture” (17). Although she concludes the book with a paean to Gloria Anzaldúa, Gaspar de Alba's own work speaks for itself.
