Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Chapters 2 & 3

In Chapters 2 and 3, Blake analyzes how Chicana writers and artists and working-class and semiprofessional women of Mexican descent use indigenous and Mexican cultural figures for political and personal strength. She writes, "The refigurings of indigenous goddesses and the Virgen de Guadalupe reject Western patriarchal discourses aimed at controlling brown and female bodies and diverge from second wave U.S. feminist discourse intent on positing undifferentiated gender oppression. The oppositional and transformative ideology represented in Chicana writers' and artists' refigurings differs significantly from that of the working-class and semiprofessional women's refigurings, which maintain allegiance to church and state and work within institutions rather than attempting to dismantle them" (101). She elaborates on the “oppositional and transformative ideology” of the Chicanas throughout the chapters by describing how they have found a connection between spirituality and political activism by reclaiming indigenous goddesses. They also reclaim the Virgen de Guadalupe as a feminist symbol and a sexual being, rather than a symbol of Catholic submission. The working class and semiprofessional women Blake interviewed also use the Virgen de Guadalupe as a symbol of female agency, but do not deviate as much from the teachings of the Catholic church in doing so. While the Chicana intelligentsia and working classes approach refiguring of cultural icons differently, their praxes both serve the goal of Chicana/Mexicana empowerment.