Debra Blake’s Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Quote

“I use ‘‘cultural refiguring’’ to imply agency, a conscious choice to think and act for oneself or in the interests of a community. Cultural refiguring identifies deficiencies and destructive images, ideas, symbols, and practices directed toward women and disenfranchised peoples.” 

This quote is from page 5 of the introduction in Debra Blake’s Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History and Art. The reason I decided to focus on this quote was that I enjoyed reading on how Blake uses a term to give meaning to her arguments. Throughout the rest of the chapters, Blake discusses how her main goal is to refigure gender roles for Chicana and Mexican women. This term of “cultural refiguring” helps support her arguments and gives a different perspective to understanding the misjudgments that have been previously established by a hegemonic society that many individuals have gotten accustomed to living in. Throughout history, it has been seen that gender groups often times are segregated into different groups with different rights and opportunities. This segregation has regularly limited the perspectives of individuals who wish to progress and succeed in whatever professional or semiprofessional carrier they wish to pursue. Blake uses this term as a signal for political and historical awareness of racism, colonialism, and classism. This idea of shifting perspectives is empowering in allowing individuals to create their own positions on a particular matter, in this situation specifically to gender.