‘Get Yourself Some Power’: Materialist Feminist Struggles in the Apocalyptic Present of José Rivera’s Marisol

Abstract

In Marisol, José Rivera introduces us to an apocalyptic New York City—gangs of skinheads roam the city setting homeless people on fire, MasterCard holders who surpass their credit limit are tortured by covert government agencies, and the moon has disappeared from the sky, among other unfathomable circumstances. The protagonist and heroine—a successful young professional Puerto Rican woman—attempts to navigate this world with a fierceness inherent to native Bronxites like herself, and fails. Over and over again, as Marisol ferociously clings to the institutions that have supposedly empowered her to date, she drifts increasingly further from gaining control of her fate, until at last she recognizes her systematic marginalization and chooses to rebel. Marisol is a feminist parable that exposes the capitalist, cultural, and religious hegemony’s insidious capacity to drain the contemporary Latina’s agency and self-determination. However, the alternative world that the play suggests as a salve to this social oppression problematically retains roots in the hegemonic structures it seeks to overturn. In this essay, I will call upon the feminist and materialist writings of Christine Delphy, Rosaura Sánchez, Irene Blea, Jill Dolan, and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Denys Turner’s analysis of Marxist views on religion to engage with both the play’s critique of Latina social oppression, as well as its proposed solution to this conundrum.