The Hungry Woman

Borders play an essential role in The Hungry Woman. These borders come in various guises, defining the oppositions between conflicting ideas. The play is set in an imagined future, in which new nations built along ethnic and cultural lines have been created across the southern regions of North America. The white-dominated world is on one side of the border, while new nations have been made for African Americans and Latino, Hispanic, and Indigenous people. The newly constructed borders between these nations symbolize the divergence between cultures. The new nations present themselves as necessary responses to the need for cultural representation among marginalized people, but they imply a desire for racial and cultural purity that does not exist in the real world, where both race and culture exist in a state of constant overlap and flux. In this context, the borders thus symbolize an inherently violent attempt to define who does and does not belong. 

Even within these new nations, symbolic borders are created between the dominant social groups and other marginalized people. In Aztlán, the newly empowered patriarchy enforces an orthodoxy of sexuality. The people within the borders may be aligned in terms of culture or ethnicity, but they must be further divided according to sexuality.