Please join Nadia Celis, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, for the celebration of her book, La rebelión de las niñas: El Caribe y la “conciencia corporal” (The Rebellion of Girls: The Caribbean and “Corporeal Consciousness”).

The Tuesday, April 28, event is free and open to the public, and will be held at 4:30 p.m. in Massachusetts Hall’s Faculty Room. Students and colleagues will lead an open conversation about the book, and light refreshments will be served.

A study of the representation of girlhood in the work of Hispanic Caribbean women writers, La rebelión is also a critique of the multifaceted relation of power and gendered bodies in Caribbean cultures.

Combining feminist theory with Caribbean and cultural studies, Celis contextualizes the struggle for “a body of one’s own” engaged by the protagonists of novels from the 1940’s to the turn of the 21st century. Challenging dominant associations of childhood narratives with nostalgia or lost innocence, Celis sets the spotlight on the desire, anger, and the bodily expressions girls deploy to contest the patriarchal appropriation of their sexuality. These girls’ embodied subjectivities inspire the coining of “corporeal consciousness” to name the force at the core of liberatory practices preceding and coexisting with the sanctioned performances of femininity faced by fictional and real girls.

“A powerful and innovative work, Celis selected a precise and persuasive corpus that exposes how patriarchal politics work on girls’ bodies and sexualities both in the ways girls incorporate and reproduce the logics of male desire in their bodies and gestures, and in the ways they subvert these parameters. A magnificent book that makes substantial contributions not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to the study of Latin American gender culture,” writes Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephen of Rice University.

The event is sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and the Program of Latin American Studies.