Dancing on the Sun Stone is a uniquely transdisciplinary work that fuses modern Latin American history and literature to explore women's lives and gendered politics in Mexico. In this important work, scholar Marjorie Becker focuses on the complex Mexican women of rural Michoacán who performed an illicit revolutionary dance and places it in dialogue with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz's signature poem, "Sun Stone"--allowing a new gendered history to emerge.

Through this dialogue, the women reveal intimate and intellectual complexities of Mexican women's gendered voices, their histories, and their intimate and public lives. The work further demonstrates the ways these women, in dialogue with Paz, transformed history itself. Becker's multigenre work reconstructs Mexican history through the temporal experiences of crucial Michoacán females, experiences that culminate in their complex revolutionary dance, which itself emerges as a transformative revolutionary language.

Becker, Marjorie

Marjorie Becker is an associate professor of history and English at the University of Southern California. She is also the author of Body Bach; Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution; Piano Glass / Glass Piano; and The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance.