SOURCE: Cochrane, Helena Antolin. “Androgynous Voices in the Novels of Cristina Peri Rossi.” Mosaic 30, no. 3 (September 1997): 97–114.

In the following essay, Cochrane explores Peri Rossi's treatment of sexual identity and gender roles in her novels.

In emphasizing the need for women to construct their own identities and challenge traditional concepts of gender, Anglo-American feminist critics sometimes overlook the adjustments in strategy that are necessary because of differences in social climates and cultures. As Amy Kaminsky has noted in her Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers, in Hispanic cultures there are key points of divergence from mainstream European traditions. If in Hispanic cultures, there is a basic tendency to treat the female as a passive, silent “object,” there is also, as Paul Julian Smith points out, the sense that sexual preference is itself a social construct. Both Smith and Kaminsky highlight the way that Hispanic...