TY - JOUR TI - Gabriela Mistral DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3N29X25 PY - 2010 AB - Chilean writer and educator Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is widely known across Latin America for being a poet laureate who wrote children’s rhymes and poems to lost lovers. The present doctoral dissertation, will permit a broad readership to think about Gabriela Mistral as a major intellectual, who not only reflected on Latin America and its relations with the world but who had an active role in political and transnational debates of the first half of the twentieth century. By tracing Mistral’s trajectory from being a woman born in a poor and rural area to achieving unique creative and professional goals, I have questioned the notion that her poetry is the decisive factor of her becoming an influential public figure in order to assert the central role of her essays in the press, her visual representations and her public performance in her construction as a Latin American woman intellectual. My theoretical approach draws on gender and visual theory as well as on theory and history of the intellectual. Working from ideas on the modern intellectual in Latin America, its relationship with the state, the cultural industries and discourses on modernity, nationalism and Latinoamericanism, I critically address gender performance and representation in the public sphere, paying particular attention to the intersections between the lettered, the popular and the mass media. This project is ultimately about how Gabriela Mistral became a modern and transnational intellectual by activating a set of identifiable and previously unrecognized strategies and negotiations with regard to the cultural and political establishment. Those negotiations led, in turn, to the contradictory facets of her public image, enabling a very wide range of political, intellectual and social sectors to read and re-write her work and figure. KW - Spanish KW - Women in literature KW - Sex role in literature KW - Authors, Chilean--20th century--Biography KW - Intellectuals--Chile--Biography LA - spa ER -