The Grotesque Body and Women’s Embodied Ethnography in Denise Chávez’s Fiction
Keywords:
Denise Chávez, situated knowledge, oppositional ethnography, body, Chicana literatureAbstract
This article analyzes Denise Chávez’s fiction, specifically The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Face of an Angel (1994), to explore how the grotesque body functions as a site of contestatory politics. The paper argues that Chávez’s texts disrupt standard conceptualizations of space and gender normativity through the material living conditions and practices of female characters. Employing theories such as Donna Haraway’s 'situated knowledge' and Angie Chabram’s 'oppositional ethnography,' the author contends that Chávez’s work challenges canonical formations by emphasizing the grotesque as a source of new knowledge production. The study examines how protagonists like Rocío Esquibel and Soveida Dosamantes navigate their environments, embodying both familiar and unsettling aspects of their surroundings. This work investigates the epistemological investment in the grotesque body, highlighting its role in disrupting dominant representational codes and asserting a female-centric narrative authority.
(The abstract and keywords were prepared retrospectively for indexing purposes using AI-assisted tools and editorial review, based on the original article. They did not appear in the original publication.)
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