Debra Blake's Chicana Sexuality and Gender

In her book Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art, Debra Blake explores the manners by which U.S.-Mexican women conceptualize and, more importantly,  re-conceptualize popular cultural motifs to form a narrative of their experiences, and analyzes how these re-conceptions fit into a larger U.S. Mexicana cultural movement. For instance, Blake examines the representations of indigenous Mexican goddesses and La Virgen de Guadalupe both from the perspectives of working-class U.S. Mexicanas and their professional intellectual counterparts, and places these representations within a larger feminist framework. “Chicana feminists,” Blake argues, “reorient the issues by making use of various strategies and theories to accomplish their aims … They apply diverse strategies and [feminist] theories simultaneously and provisionally to outmaneuver various adversaries.” By invoking indigenous Mexican goddesses, then, Blake maintains that Chicana feminists form a historical tie to their Mexican identity while simultaneously differentiating themselves from white or Mexican feminists by embracing a feminism that also recognizes oppression sourcing from race or class.