Dr. Alicia Gaspar De Alba

“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror” 

 

As Gaspar de Alba looks back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists,

Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses.

 

“[Un]Framing the "Bad Woman" analyzes how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. She offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.