Christopher Conway

Sisters at War: Mexican Women's Poetry and the U.S.-Mexican War

During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), Mexican women published poems that tested the boundaries of conventional definitions of female subjectivity and domesticity. Central to the construction of female authorship was the idea of a collective women’s voice, a “lyrical sisterhood” that situated the individual poetic voice within a broader historical tradition and a contemporaneous coalition of women writers. In speaking out about the war, women poets foregrounded their symbolic authority to exalt Mexican resistance to the invader, to decry Mexico’s political and military failures, or to measure the horrors of war. In doing so, they self-consciously used gender to blur the distinction between the public and domestic spheres.

Troubled Selves: Gender, Spiritualism and Psychopathology in the Fiction of Amado Nervo

Difícilmente puede sintetizarse con más claridad y más nobleza el valor de la muerte. Yo que la amo como a una mujer misteriosa, llena de seducción, cuyos besos se han anhelado muchos años; yo que vivo esperándola con el temblor romántico del que por la noche, en el jardín, aguarda una cita, puedo afirmar la gallarda verdad de esas palabras. (Amado Nervo, Las ideas de Tello Téllez [1919])