Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects

Book excerpt: The present volume explores through cultural and literary representations the contributions of women to the construction of knowledge in an ever changing, global world as migrant subjects. The essays contained in this book also focus on the female body as a site of physical violence and abuse, fighting prevalent stereotypes about women’s representations and identities. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. Women’s strategies for building possible identities are seen to be based on their own experiences, seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body within the western male imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal identities. The different articles contained in this volume examine issues of gender and boundaries, the realities of women as colonial and postcolonial subjects, and darker realities such as alienation and discrimination as a result of migration, racism, and colonization analysed through a variety of critical perspectives. The gendered, raced, classed dimensions and mixed heritages not only of white women but also of women of the African Diaspora; these are important issues for the construction of knowledge and identity in our present multicultural societies, and can potentially change the ways we conceptualize, situate and engage the humanities in our scholarly work and in our social and cultural policies. These women, their presumed sexuality and their capacity to produce hybrid subjects, as well as their supposed irrationality make them a singularly disruptive figure in our contemporary world; this interpretation has its roots in the treatment of women in colonial times, especially when they were out of the margins of respectable society. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholarly and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies, marked by the intercultural exchanges of migratory subjects from a gender perspective.