Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English Composition

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

Dr. Miriam Fernandez

Abstract

This thesis argues that Chicana theatre functions as survival pedagogy—a rhetorical practice that teaches communities to name structural violence, transform bodily trauma into collective power, and rehearse liberation as a precondition for enacting it. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s concept of literature as “equipment for living,” Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and Cynthia M. Sheard’s reconceptualization of epideictic rhetoric as community formation, I analyze three plays that exemplify this pedagogy: Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) and The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), and Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves (1990).

These works address distinct but interlocking forms of structural violence against the Chicanx community—environmental racism, assimilationist pressure, and exile from patriarchal nationalism—while constructing hope not as an emotional state but as a set of teachable rhetorical practices. Grounded in the embodied border epistemologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and Moraga’s own theatrical theory, and situated within the field of embodied rhetorics as theorized by Knoblauch and Moeller, this study demonstrates that Chicana playwrights deploy epideictic strategies of naming, transforming, and rehearsing to constitute communities oriented toward futures that existing structures refuse.

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