55 pages • 1-hour read
The Hungry Woman
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Themes
The Harms of Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death and antigay bias.
Medea, Luna, and Chac-Mool live in a small community defined by the shared experience of sexual oppression. Following the political upheaval that took place before the start of the play, nations were formed around cultural and ethnic identities. In Aztlán, a community carved out for Latino, Hispanic, and Mesoamerican cultures, a new orthodoxy emerged. While ostensibly founded on cultural and ethnic solidarity, this new nation developed an even more pronounced antagonism against queerness and non-normative sexualities. As such, people like Medea and Luna were sent into exile. The play approaches the idea of sexuality from the perspective of those who have been physically dislocated from their homes (both old and new) because they do not fit into dominant expectations of sexuality. In the newly formed Aztlán, the ruling men expect everyone to conform to the identity around which they have built their community. As Medea, Luna, Mama Sol, and Savannah prove, this identity is not a monolith. These women do not conform to the expectations of the society, so the society responds by exiling them to the periphery. A newly formed community exiles nonconformists, who must then form their own new community around shared identities. In the play, sexuality-based oppression divides communities and creates new ones, as those who have been excluded from the larger community find in their shared exile the basis for a new solidarity.
Even within this small community, however, the legacy of oppression and exclusion continues to damage relationships. Chac-Mool may have been raised by queer women in a society of non-conforming people, but he recognizes that he is a heterosexual young man and has no similar men around him on whom to base his identity. This creates tension within him, pulling him toward his father even though he recognizes the many ways in which his father betrayed his mother. Because the heterosexual men of Aztlán have refused to share their community with LGBTQ+ people, Chac-Mool must leave his community to find others whose sexual and gender identity matches his own, and Medea justly fears that he will begin to adopt Aztlán’s patriarchal, exclusionary ideology.
Notably, Medea is not a lesbian like many of the women around her. She is bisexual, having been attracted to both men and women in the past. As such, she serves as a bridge between the two communities, and she considers returning to Aztlán to save her relationship with Chac-Mool. For Luna, a lesbian, Medea’s bisexual identity introduces an inherent tension into their relationship: Luna fears that Medea’s bisexuality means she can choose to betray the community and return to the oppressors, living as a heterosexual woman in Aztlán. Medea does not talk about the nuances of her bisexuality, often dismissing Luna’s concerns, leaving Luna stranded in unfamiliarity. When Jasón returns, Luna is concerned not only because of his threat to Chac-Mool but also because she struggles to comprehend Medea’s sexuality, as Medea has never explained or reckoned with this complex part of her identity. The complexity of Medea’s sexuality, particularly in contrast to the women around her, causes tension and difficulties in the relationships she struggles to maintain.
Medea’s queer sexuality causes tension between herself and her partners (both Luna and Jasón) and threatens to separate her from the one person she loves most—her son. Despite Luna’s fears, Medea cannot return to Aztlán and live under its oppressive, patriarchal power structure. Instead, she kills Chac-Mool to prevent him from becoming part of that oppressive structure. Her experience of oppression drives her into an even deeper exile—one in which she has no community around her, as even Luna ultimately stops visiting her in the psychiatric ward. A woman whose love has caused her immense pain, marginalization, and discrimination finds herself separated even from her fellow exiles, and from the only person she loves more than anyone else.
The Universality of Female Suffering in Patriarchal Cultures
The novel presents a world in which cultures and ethnic groups have retreated into their own enclaves. In opposition to white supremacy, they build communities for themselves based on their shared cultural identities. The establishment of these communities is inherently a demonstration of cultural separatism, with each culture seeking shared stories on which to build a common identity. As different as these communities may be, however, the commonalities across seemingly disparate folk stories highlight fundamental truths about humanity. The play is based on Euripides’s tragedy Medea, a play first performed over 2,000 years ago and rooted in myths that go back much further. These ideas are imposed on a not-so-distant future, blended with other folk stories from other cultures. The myth of La Llorona, for example, bears many similarities to the story of Medea. These parallels highlight universal motifs of love, betrayal, revenge, and maternal despair.
In both stories, the protagonists are women who commit the unthinkable act of killing their children. La Llorona, the weeping woman, is often depicted as having drowned her children in a fit of rage or despair after being betrayed by her lover. Medea is a sorceress who murders her children to punish her husband, Jason, for his infidelity and betrayal. The actions of both La Llorona and Medea are catalyzed by betrayal. In many versions of La Llorona, her lover abandons her for another woman, leaving her heartbroken and enraged. In Medea, Jason leaves Medea to marry another woman, seeking power and status, despite Medea’s sacrifices to help him succeed. At the same time, both acts of filicide are framed as acts of revenge against the unfaithful partner: By killing her children, La Llorona takes away what was most important to her lover, just as Medea kills her children to cause Jason immense suffering and to leave him with nothing. Both women suffer eternal consequences for their actions. La Llorona is condemned to roam the earth as a wailing ghost, searching for her children and lamenting her deeds, and though Medea escapes immediate punishment in Euripides’s version of the play, she is often depicted as tormented by the weight of her actions in later interpretations. These stories, though starkly different, both function as explorations of maternal identity. This idea of maternal identity and male betrayal transcends cultural borders. As in The Hungry Woman, the story is reiterated in a new context because these old ideas and themes do not die over time.
The folklore presented in The Hungry Woman is a deliberate attempt to connect seemingly disparate cultures into a more unified story of female suffering. The Hungry Woman, Medea, and the story of La Llorona are all predicated on the idea of female suffering in a patriarchal context, but The Hungry Woman brings these disparate stories together as a repudiation of patriarchal ideas. Female suffering is not new, the play acknowledges, nor is it benign. The play portrays the intensity of female suffering and indicates that—through the example of cross-cultural reiteration of similar ideas—it is a near-universal aspect of patriarchal societies. Medea may suffer, but the play is very explicit in condemning the power structures that cause this. The Hungry Woman ties together strands of different folk stories in a condemnation of universal patriarchy, encompassing the past, present, and future to reinvent the story of female suffering.
The Persistence of Social Injustice
The Hungry Woman is set in a post-revolutionary world. The exact details of the uprising are not clearly defined, but many individuals are identified as revolutionaries for their part in rising up against white supremacy and establishing culturally cohesive communities across the former territory of the United States. These include communities of African Americans and Latino and Indigenous peoples. The play’s post-revolutionary world is defined along ethnic and cultural lines, as each community seeks to cohesive sense of ethnic and national identity. In the case of the Aztlán, the Latino communities purposefully engage with the cultural history of Mesoamerica. References to Aztec, Maya, and Olmec systems of spirituality serve to create a new culture from a reimagined past.
To the people of Aztlán, the real aftermath of the revolution is the attempt to forge a cohesive Latino identity from a wide range of histories and experiences. This effort to build a collective identity is most clearly demonstrated in the blending of folklores. The story of La Llorona, for example, is a modern Mexican folktale, but the inhabitants of the post-revolutionary world blend this with other cultures and stories to create something new and old at the same time. A similar effect is achieved with language, with the characters shifting easily between English and Spanish while peppering their sentences with Mesoamerican words. The play’s imagined version of the aftermath of a revolution is a world in which a new culture must be hastily assembled to create a coherent cultural identity in opposition to the previous orthodoxy.
This attempt to define the parameters of belonging inevitably gives rise to exclusions. The characters in the play are mostly lesbian and bisexual women who have been exiled from Aztlán due to their sexuality. Medea, Luna, and Mama Sal criticize the post-revolutionary world created by the men of Aztlán: In breaking away from the racism of the pre-revolutionary US, they have reproduced that culture’s misogyny and antigay bias, and their new community ostracizes and marginalizes queer women. The real aftermath of the revolution, then, is one in which any idea of solidarity or intersectionality is ignored.
Jasón’s actions reveal the inherent hypocrisy of this new culture. He is more concerned with taking over custody of his son due to strict property rights (which operate in accordance with parentage and ethnicity) than he is about his duties as a father. He is more concerned with marrying a younger woman, even though she is from a different ethnicity and culture, than he is with repairing his marriage with Medea. Jasón is the play’s villain, a man whose villainy exposes the hypocrisy of the post-revolutionary world. Any utopian dreams of a safe new world for Latino people are undermined by the hypocrisy and self-interest of revolutionaries such as Jasón, as well as the concerted campaign of discrimination and exile of queer women like Medea, Luna, and Savannah. Jasón represents the revolutionaries and their bastardization of traditional culture as an attempt to preserve their power. Jasón makes Chac-Mool perform a sundance to reintegrate into the society, but only for Jasón’s benefit. These cultural artifacts are stripped of meaning and repurposed to allow for the consolidation of power among the same powerful, discriminatory elites as before. The real aftermath of the revolution is to recreate the same problems with a slightly different veneer.
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