This dissertation offers a comprehensive study of the fiction of bestselling Chilean writer Marcela Serrano, in order to interrogate her discursive feminist praxis, and to analyze its efficacy in terms of its reception among a sample of women readers by means of a reader-response survey. It is my contention that Serrano’s texts may be described and analyzed as a praxis of consciousness-raising sought through the articulation of a bond of reading between writer and women readers, and among women readers themselves.
In order to discern the praxis of awareness allowed for in Serrano’s works, as well as the connections it may generate, mainstream reader-response theories, including those of Wolfgang Iser and Norman Holland, are first outlined, with the intersubjective reading model found in David Bleich serving as a pivot, shifting focus then to specifically feminist reading criticism, as developed by Judith Fetterley, Anne Berggren, Janice Radway, and Patrocinio Schweickart.
The conceptual tools of Italian feminism of sexual difference, in particular the practice of female genealogy, as discussed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Luisa Muraro, and Adriana Cavarero, are presented to inform Serrano’s discursive praxis, as it is articulated in terms of the dynamics of how her female characters’ life stories are narrated, offering women readers models for women-affirming-women interactions, enabling readers to connect with these female characters and their life stories through the deployment of narrative voice, and making visible for them the constraining effects of patriarchal gender roles via instances of intertextuality and genre re-elaboration.
As an empirical counterbalance to the more overtly theoretical treatment of Serrano’s fiction, reflections from a sample of women readers of her works are gathered through a survey questionnaire and examined, in order to tap the degree to which such reading can encourage women to construct standpoints of self-definition on the basis of reading bonds, including felt connections with woman writer and female characters, and interactions with other women readers. In light of Serrano’s works and responses to my survey, I derive a critical appraisal of the potential limitations of this discursive praxis in connection with issues of female identity and marginal female subjectivities which are present in Serrano’s writing.