Locating gender in a native american community: the places occupied by women in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Abstract

This article's aim is to analyze the space, place and gender relations in Native American culture in the novel Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, and the concepts discussed by Doreen Massey, Jody Berland, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose. The novel, whose focus is on the healing process of a Native American young man, a World War II veteran, shows how the space, place and gender relations in the Native American culture differ from the ones we see in the patriarchal family structure common to the western culture. In this way, I intend to discuss this difference between the spaces and places occupied by women and man in both cultures.Keywords: Native American Literature, gender, place, space.In order to discuss gender we have to take into consideration different aspects that influence gender relations such as space and place, as argues Doreen Massey. For Massey (1994), space cannot be regarded as static; it is rather "inherently dynamic", because of its relationship with time and social relations.Massey (1994) states that space should be viewed as "space-time" and that "what is at issue is not social phenomena in space but both social phenomena and space as constituted out of social relations, that the spatial is social relations 'stretched out'" (p. 2). Massey goes on saying that "since social relations are inevitably and