Queer Mother For The Nation

Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957),thefirst Latin American to wintheNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate,thenational 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 abouttherelations-and realities-of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time, arethequestions Licia Fiol-Matta pursues in this book, recreatingthestory of a woman whose misrepresentation is at least as intriguing, and as instructive, as her fame. AQueerMother fortheNationweaves a nuanced understanding of how Mistral cooperated with authority and fashioned herself asthefigure of Motherhood in collaboration withthestate. 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 questionsthenotion ofqueerbodies as outlaws, and insists onthemany ways in whichqueersubjects have participated in and sustainedthenormative discoursesthey seem to rebel against