Your tenderness for truth
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Your Tenderness for Truth examines a spectrum of wounding personal violations in their entwinement with loving companionship and larger histories of colonial and imperial trespasses. With attention to what I term "intimate violations"—gendered transgressions against a person's subjectivity and will accomplished in close emotional and physical proximity—this dissertation grapples with the production of victimhood in relationships marked by familiarity and intimacy, especially when such closeness is contested by the insistent brutalization of the outside world. To accomplish this, I offer readings of four contemporary Latinx texts published between the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first. My study of Junot Díaz's Drown (1996), Justin Torres' We the Animals (2011), Helena María Viramontes' Their Dogs Came with Them (2007), and Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002) tracks how a culture of violation is enabled by being made mundane. With focus on quiet scenes, everyday exchanges, and odd details, I reveal how these four texts effectively bear witness to the micropolitics of daily interactions where power, at its most intimate, is negotiated and certified. Proposing a way to make the quotidian legible, my analysis engages the Lugonesian concept of "faithful witness" as a method of reading against dominant common sense that allows one to interpret behaviors as resistant even when absolute triumph over oppression seems unlikely. I argue that bearing faithful witness by cultivating our attention to the most tender parts of ourselves—those parts that have been most hurt and most silenced—is an urgently necessary endeavor. It is an invaluable method of gaining deeper insight into the nature of our closest-held oppressions. As such, this dissertation intervenes against a particular form of Latinx literary common sense that largely emphasizes forms of agency and resistance that are readily recognizable. Returning to a long-standing body of feminist scholarship concerned with the everyday, I propose rather that we tend to hurt we would otherwise dismiss, cultivating thus the tenderness that makes us free.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Jiménez Ruvalcaba, Luz Minerva |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Degree committee member | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Degree committee member | Saldívar, José David |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Luz Minerva Jiménez Ruvalcaba. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xt860jd3240 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Luz Minerva Jimenez Ruvalcaba
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...