Dancing on the Sun Stone

Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz

Marjorie Becker

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780826364180
• eBook ISBN: 9780826364197
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

Dancing on the Sun Stone is a uniquely transdisciplinary work that fuses modern Latin American history and literature to explore women's lives and gendered politics in Mexico. In this important work, scholar Marjorie Becker focuses on the complex Mexican women of rural Michoacán who performed an illicit revolutionary dance and places it in dialogue with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz's signature poem, "Sun Stone"—allowing a new gendered history to emerge. Through this dialogue, the women reveal intimate and intellectual complexities of Mexican women's gendered voices, their histories, and their intimate and public lives. The work further demonstrates the ways these women, in dialogue with Paz, transformed history itself. Becker's multigenre work reconstructs Mexican history through the temporal experiences of crucial Michoacán females, experiences that culminate in their complex revolutionary dance, which itself emerges as a transformative revolutionary language.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Walking Into History: When Women Made Tortillas, Danced, and Reconfigured Time
• Chapter 2. From Killing Stone to Gendered Time-Scape: Octavio Paz and the Making of the “Sun Stone”
• Chapter 3. Dancing on the Sun Stone
• Chapter 4. The Dance of Paz’s Legacy
• Coda. Dancing with the Dancers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index