Liberating Serpentine Goddesses on the Borderlands: Cherrie Moraga’s Feminist Architecture in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea takes place in a future dystopia in which the protagonist Medea is exiled from her homeland Aztlán due to her love affair with another woman. She lives with her girlfriend, son and mother in Phoenix—a wasteland populated by the people unwanted by the patriarchal authorities of Aztlán. In order to prevent her son’s attempt to get back to Aztlán to live with the corrupted patriarchs and thereby to protect his purity, Medea kills her son and is sent to a prison psychiatric ward tormented by the memory of her infanticide. In this reinterpretation of Euripides’ Medea, Moraga refers to several mythical, folkloric and literary female figures to touch upon the exclusion of the queer subject. Among them, there are female deities such as Cihuatateo and Coatlicue that have been recuperated as prominent cultural symbols to question the female consciousness in contemporary Chicana feminism. This paper examines how Moraga reappropriates and discerns these archetypal goddesses in the context of Chicana indigenous feminism