Jana Koehler, doctoral alumna of ALS and current Scholar in Residence at UNM’s Feminist Research Institute, recently presented, \u201cLucha Corpi: Chicana Detective Fiction Weirds the (South) West.\u201d Her talk focused on Chicana\/o detective fiction, specifically Lucha Corpi\u2019s Black Widow\u2019s Wardrobe (1999). Corpi\u2019s Chicana detective, Gloria Damasco, uses her \u201cdark gift\u201d to solve complex murder cases and in the process makes the Chicana feminist argument for the validity of Mexican and Mexican American folklore. Corpi disrupts hegemonic conceptions of the detective genre, but the genre-mixing that characterizes her works also points to alternative Southwestern histories often neglected or appropriated in mainstream narratives about the Southwest. Following Gloria Anzald\u00faa, Koehler argue that Corpi\u2019s detective novels are \u201cmestiza\u201d detective narratives that are part fiction, part history, part logic, part supernatural. As Anzald\u00faa explains of the mestiza, \u201cNot only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.\u201d Ultimately, Corpi creates more politically-aware and culturally-based mysteries by weirding the detective genre expectations and foregrounding issues of Chicana identity, Chicana feminism, and representations of the Southwest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jana Koehler, doctoral alumna of ALS and current Scholar in Residence at UNM’s Feminist Research Institute, recently presented, \u201cLucha Corpi: Chicana Detective Fiction Weirds the (South) West.\u201d Her talk focused on Chicana\/o detective fiction, specifically Lucha Corpi\u2019s Black Widow\u2019s Wardrobe (1999). Corpi\u2019s Chicana detective, Gloria Damasco, uses her \u201cdark gift\u201d to solve complex murder cases […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2059,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements","category-presentations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}