Stephanie Malak | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Stephanie Malak

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article ex... more Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article examines groups of women who use social media to enact resistance against street harassment, derogatory expressions against women, piropos, and "locker room talk." The analysis focuses on the projects "#Ropasucia" by writers/artist Maricela Guerrero, Paula Abramo, and Xitlali Rodríguez Mendoza, and "No me llamo mamacita; arte vs. acoso callejero" where it explores how illocutionary forces combat verbal violence/harassment in public and semipublic spaces.

Academia Letters, 2021

The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, esp... more The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, especially evident in mid-century Latin American literature. To understand the way in which this mystical application is suffused with secularities, I turn to poetry, and specifically, a new notion I term "mysticality." And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano's principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that was broader than reason itself, a concept that "slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing oil, a drop of happiness" (Filosofía 15). This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one's intuition. Zambrano's philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred concepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet's inner sanctum); the function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy. Here, I offer Zambrano's definition of poiesis itself: It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation-poetry into its different species, and philosophy (61).[i] The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order explore such limits. As such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning[ii]: the ability to allow for the unsaid, "the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm's orbit lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence" (El sueño 102). The poet neither renounces nor searches, because he has" (Filosofía 17).[iii] The poet is responsible for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility (18). Their creation is an ongoing process of "poetic being" approaching full self-consciousness. There is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article ex... more Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article examines groups of women who use social media to enact resistance against street harassment, derogatory expressions against women, piropos, and "locker room talk." The analysis focuses on the projects "#Ropasucia" by writers/artist Maricela Guerrero, Paula Abramo, and Xitlali Rodríguez Mendoza, and "No me llamo mamacita; arte vs. acoso callejero" where it explores how illocutionary forces combat verbal violence/harassment in public and semipublic spaces.

Academia Letters, 2021

The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, esp... more The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, especially evident in mid-century Latin American literature. To understand the way in which this mystical application is suffused with secularities, I turn to poetry, and specifically, a new notion I term "mysticality." And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano's principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that was broader than reason itself, a concept that "slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing oil, a drop of happiness" (Filosofía 15). This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one's intuition. Zambrano's philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred concepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet's inner sanctum); the function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy. Here, I offer Zambrano's definition of poiesis itself: It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation-poetry into its different species, and philosophy (61).[i] The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order explore such limits. As such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning[ii]: the ability to allow for the unsaid, "the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm's orbit lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence" (El sueño 102). The poet neither renounces nor searches, because he has" (Filosofía 17).[iii] The poet is responsible for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility (18). Their creation is an ongoing process of "poetic being" approaching full self-consciousness. There is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen