Transcultural performativities : travel literature by Mexican women writers

This thesis examines travel literature by Mexican women in relation to transcultural performativities, which refers to a feminist critique of how writers capture their normative performativity and their agency as they interact with different cultural contexts. My analysis considers texts from the end of the nineteenth century, taking into consideration the first Mexican women who published travel literature, through to contemporary writers from the early twenty-first century. The major focus of this thesis will be to show how Mexican women writers repeat political and poetic performativities in their literature, based on their trips to foreign places. This thesis is composed of four parts: a theoretical analysis of transcultural performativities and three close, comparative readings of travel writing and the context of their production. In the first chapter, I propose a conceptual model named transcultural performativities to analyse travel literature. This model takes into consideration the contributions of Judith Butler, Fernando Ortiz, Walter Mignolo, Julio Ortega, Eyda Merediz, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha and Édouard Glissant. This analytical model has a tripartite structure: occidental Atlanticism, post-occidental border thinking, and the Philosophy of Relation in worldliness (globalisation). The second chapter is a comparative analysis of the works of Laura Méndez de Cuenca and Elena Garro to exemplify the Atlanticist relations among Europe, the United States, Latin America and, in particular Mexico. The third chapter examines the works of Rosario Castellanos and María Luisa Puga to grasp the cultural negotiations of the intermediate social experience between Mexico and other foreign countries. The final chapter explores the works of Esther Seligson and Myriam Moscona to analyse the positionality of Mexican Jews in relation to World Literatures. Overall, this thesis suggests that we can understand the complexities of the fluidity and non-fixity of subjectivity in Mexican women’s travel writing by dwelling on the constantly changing nature of sex/gender, social classes, racialization, nationalism, and religiosity.