A Queer Mother For The Nation: The State And Gabriela Mistral

by Licia Fiol-Matta

Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to win theNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate, the national schoolteacher-mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth came to occupy this role, and what Mistral’s image, poetry, and life have to say about the relations-and realities-of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time, are the questions Licia Fiol-Matta pursues in this book, recreating the story of a woman whose misrepresentation is at least as intriguing, and as instructive, as her fame. A Queer Mother for the Nation weaves a nuanced understanding of how Mistral cooperated with authority and fashioned herself as the figure of Motherhood in collaboration with the state. Drawing on Mistral’s little-known political and social essays, her correspondence and photographs, Fiol-Matta reconstructs Mistral’s relationship to state politics. Her work questions the notion of queer bodies as outlaws, and insists on the many ways in which queer subjects have participated in and sustained the normative discourses they seem to rebel against

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Licia Fiol-Matta teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is the author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral.

Reviews

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Licia Fiol-Matta offers an insightful and original reading of one of the most interesting Latin American writers of the 20th century.

My favourite thing about Queer Mother is how unflinching it is: Fiol-Matta is not afraid to really deconstruct the myth of Mistral’s poetic persona. Mistral is a woman of many contradictions, and each of these is explored in detail in order to draw up a portrait of Mistral as a deeply complex figure. I would have loved to have seen Fiol-Matta utilise some of Mistral’s poetry in addressing Mistral’s gender politics and self-portrayal - but I definitely think the focus on Mistral’s personal correspondence, as well as her essays and speeches, allowed for Fiol-Matta’s assertion that Mistral ‘queered’ the nation to be understood via its real-world implications.

This text was extremely helpful to me in researching my dissertation. It’s often challenging narrative enables its reader to really see Mistral in a new, and not always flattering, light - one that many other critics tend to shy away from. I cannot commend Fiol-Matta enough for asserting that Mistral be addressed in her ever-contradictory entirety, rather than pigeonholed into literary trends (feminism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism) that she doesn’t quite fit.

I’d recommend Queer Mother as an excellent read for anyone wishing to widen their perspective on lesser-known figures of world history, and world literature.