The Female Body

Including both narratives and visual texts by and about Latina women, Amador Gmez-Quintero and Prez Bustillo address the question of how women represent themselves. Utilizing paintings, novels, photographs, memoirs, and diaries this work examines the depiction of the female body in 20th-century creative expression. From writers such as Julia Alvarez and Christina Garcia to artists including Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta, it provides both a broad outline and a finely detailed exploration of how a largely overlooked community of creative women have seen, drawn, photographed, and written about their own experience. The authors discuss women as both agent and subject of artistic representation often comparing both fictional and nonfictional versions of the same woman. Not only do they analyze Elena Poniatowska's Dear Diego, which centers on artist Angelina Beloff, but they also analyze Beloff's own memoirs. Continuing in this style, they make further comparisons between Frida Kahlo's Diary and visual images of her body. Connections such as these are what make their work not merely an articulation of imagery but an explanation of ideas.