Shortcomings and Limitations of Identity Politics and Intersectionality in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Abstract

The article offers a systematic critique of identity politics and intersectionality that today dominate Western mainstream literary theory and Anglo-Saxon literary production by bringing to the fore a much overlooked critical intervention on the part of materialist (literary) system theorists and Western Marxist feminists. It then dissects the ways in which the trappings of identity politics and its upgraded version of intersectionality are manifested in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, with the class in the triad of class, race and gender eventually weakened and removed from view.

Keywords

• class, race, gender, identity politics, intersectionality, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros