Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

Feminism as Expressed Through Chicana Literature College

Feminism often takes many forms depending mainly upon intersectionality. Being a straight white woman and being a gay black woman means two entirely different things. Thus is the case with Chicana women. They have had experiences unique to them, which makes their form of feminism different than all others. They simply didn’t “fit in” to the movements which they wanted to be a part of. During the Chicano movement, many were told to suppress their feelings of gender discrimination and oppression because only one issue could be tackled at a time, and this movement was centered around racial inequality. During the Anglo feminist movement, the Chicanas did not participate because many others involved in the movement refused to acknowledge the racial inequality which was glaringly present. This is where the issue of intersectionality explicitly comes into to play. These Chicana women did not think that they belonged in either one of these movements because a piece of their identity is suppressed in both cases. This caused the Chicana feminists to take a different approach: literature. There are numerous, beautiful pieces of literature that are both explicitly and implicitly feminist. This literature is their movement, their...

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