Norma Alarcón

Norma Alarcón (born November 30, 1943) is a Chicana author and publisher in the United States. She is the founder of Third Woman Press and a major figure in Chicana feminism. She is Professor Emerita of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Quotes

• I question whether feminism can be defined without saying that it harbors an idealist political philosophy that calls for a thorough transformation of our society, that seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct the world so that it is habitable for girls, women, and our queer futurity.
  • "Conjugations: The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges and Exclusionary Practices," Chicana/Latina Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring 2014

• My feminist idealism will not yield to pragmatism because it feels like giving up on the future we want to have and in which we want to live.
  • "Conjugations: The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges and Exclusionary Practices," Chicana/Latina Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring 2014

• To Freud's confusion on what do women want, I would say we want to dismantle a racist and misogynist heteronormative patriarchy that sucks the life out of women.
  • "Conjugations: The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges and Exclusionary Practices," Chicana/Latina Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring 2014

Quotes about Norma Alarcón

• The (Chicano) movement to me is now like a mosaic with all these little pieces. The little pieces are the ones that are now being activated so that a poet like Lorna Dee Cervantes is her own little miniature movement. Francisco Alarcón, Norma Alarcón, José Limón, all the people who are writing are carrying out the struggle against domination and subordination in the kinds of things they focus on-language, folklore, just anything.
  • Gloria E. Anzaldúa 1990 interview in Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers edited by Hector A. Torres (2007)

• Poet and critic Norma Aiarcón tells us that "poetry has been the single most important genre employed by Chicanas in order to grasp and give shape to their experience and desire."
  • Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)

• as Norma Alarcón has argued in another context, in uncritically accepting the terms of the film's logic, critics like Limón continue "to recodify a family romance, an oedipal drama in which the woman of color of the Americas has no 'designated' place" (1995, 42).
  • Rosa Linda Fregoso in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (2003)

• If autobiographical fictions by women in general have been seen to disrupt the lifelines of male Bildungsromane in the European tradition, these Chicana stories do double duty, contesting both traditional European models and male Chicano models of lifetelling. Taken as a whole, their narratives contest unified or essentialist concepts of Chicana identity as they construct what Norma Alarcón calls "subjects-in-process" through the textual narrative (1996, 135). Their individual stories delineate a complex map of an ever-changing imagined community, no less real in fiction, that is differentiated by gender, generation, sexual preference, class, race, and regional distinctions.
  • Norma Klahn in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (2003)

• My first collection: Una puertorriqueña en Penna came out of those years and the racism I experienced while being a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College. Some of the poems are also a defense of my Puerto Rican culture and language. It is sad to say that the poems were not accepted by a Latino publishing house at the time because I did not write "like a woman." In other words, I was supposed to write about flowers, gardening and domestic chores. This first anthology was amplified to be the final book, En el país de las maravillas, which my dearest Chicana sister, Norma Alarcón, agreed to publish as the first book from her established press: Third Woman. Third Woman Press gave me a platform from which to publish without pressure from the establishment on thematics. They also published my next two books: ...Y otras desgracias and The Margarita Poems
  • Luz María Umpierre I'm Still Standing: Treinta años de poesía/Thirty Years of Poetry (2011)