Marjorie’s new book, Dancing on the Sun Stone, forthcoming Fall 2022

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Dancing on the Sun Stone excavates gender, fashion, and the poetry of Octavio Paz

Los Angeles, August 2021 — Marjorie R. Becker’s new book, Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women, Time, and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz, will be published in the Fall of 2022.

This four chapter monograph enters the gendered realms both of Octavio Paz, most particularly in his signature poem, "Sun Stone," and those of the Mexican women dancers Marjorie discovered in her grassroots historical research. The monograph enables the women both respond to Paz's own complex assessment of Mexican gender relations — and to reveal the fashions in which their own expansive gendered behavior defined and reconstructed Mexican historical practices.

Research and writing

Marjorie’s body of research explores Mexican women's perspectives on revolutionary and post-revolutionary social orders denying them equality before the law. With Octavio Paz's ground-breaking Poem "Sun Stone," Marjorie immersed herself in a body of historical research that questions how gendered subjectivities operated in a specifically intriguing post-revolutionary setting. She also explores the fashions in which certain bodies of poetry render the architecture of gendered subjectivities. This research enables Marjorie to question the fashions in which two highly complex and divergent fields themselves can communicate with one another.

Women and empowerment

One of Marjorie’s central, long-standing research projects has focused on the architecture of emotional life experienced by impoverished, frequently illiterate, ethnically divided Mexican women. In particular, her recent articles challenge assumptions about revolutionary approaches to race and ethnic relations. They also ponder the ways in which Mexican women, denied equality before the law, nonetheless challenged both historical and historiographic efforts to silence them.

Keep in touch!

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