Crossing Over: Assimilation, Utopia and the Bildungsroman on Stage and Screen in Real Women Have Curves
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Patricia Cardoso's Real Women Have Curves (2002) opened to widespread critical acclaim and moderate commercial success, garnering two awards at the Sundance film festival for its starring actors América Ferrara and Lupe Ontiveros for their roles as Ana, the film's protagonist and Carmen, her mother.Based on Josefina López's play of the same name, the cinematic adaptation directed by Patricia Cardoso, and written by López in collaboration with producer George Lavoo, the film was the first theatrical release from HBO films.As it is one of the first Hollywood films with Latinas in prominent roles behind and in front of the cameras, questions of representation and self-representation are particularly germane. 1 Kevin Thomas, in a review for the Los Angeles Times describes the film's "crossover appeal for anyone who either pulled himself or herself up by the bootstraps or dealt with weight issuesor both" (Thomas).It is precisely this crossover appeal, and the tensions of crossing over (of nation, culture, class, and genre) that this essay examines.Utopia and the bildungsroman are major tropes in the western literary tradition, and form the lenses through which we can view the articulation of Chicana subjectivity in Cardoso's film and López's play, while illuminating some of the tensions and costs of "crossing over."Utopian fiction explores possibilities; it puts the question of what might be in an idealized space.Key to the political imaginary, it links literature and politics, fiction and action.Indeed, Chicana/o cultural politics have, since el movimiento, been shaped by a utopian ideal, that of Aztlán. 2 The bildungsroman, or the novel of development, has become in the 20 th century one of the most viable literary forms for
Author: Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2148360591