Resistance, Gender, and Postcolonial Identities in Somebody’s Daughter and Meaning of Consuelo

about Consuelo, a Puerto Rican girl who must learn to cope with her schizophrenic sister and dysfunctional family. Consuelo leaves Puerto Rico for New York near the end of the novel to escape the negative influences of her family. Both novels are worthy of examination for their portrayal of adolescent girls’ telling struggle to define their identities among cultural and gender boundaries imposed on them by colonized versions of patriarchy. We suggest that an examination of how post-colonialism constructs gender, culture, and religion may provide students and teachers with a more worldly and holistic approach to understanding gender and identity in adolescent novels. Before turning to a discussion of the novels, we describe the implications for analyzing gender and religion in Somebody’s Daughter and Meaning of Consuelo through a post-colonial lens. Using the language of the colonists, the authors of these novels create narratives that engage in what Terdiman (1985) describes as “counter-discourse.” Counter-discourse, language that “writes back” to the colonists, becomes evident in the ways the characters narrate their identities (Tiffin, 1995, p. 96). Resistance through language and, as we argue here, symbolic gender rebellion must exist to move the characters forward in developing adult identities. Post-colonial theories are frequently used to critique Western historicism and culture, specifically as an imposition on those cultures that demonstrate rebellion against Westernization (Ashcroft, 2000; C haracters are involved in complex processes of identity and gender development in adolescent novels. A typical coming-of-age narrative will contain an “underlying premise of an essential self that will emerge to be discovered” (Mallan, 2009, p. 7). Our analysis of two novels about adolescent girls whose search for identities lead them in and out of mainland United States includes a consideration of post-colonial theories through which US patriarchy and colonialism are exposed through the characters’ identity development. By the end of Somebody’s Daughter (Lee, 2005) and Meaning of Consuelo (Cofer, 2005), the US becomes a symbol for patriarchal religion and culture. Reading these novels through a post-colonial lens may help readers to appreciate the adolescent girls’ rejection of the patriarchy in their countries of birth and perhaps appreciate the complexities of adolescent immigrant identity. These two young adult novels were selected for their underlying critique of patriarchy in Korea, Puerto Rico, and the US, and for the strong female characters who were born in places other than the US mainland. Somebody’s Daughter is a novel about Sarah, a Korean American who was adopted by a US family as an infant. As a young adult, Sarah leaves the US for Korea in search of information about her birth mother. The novel is also about Kyong-Sook, Sarah’s Korean birth mother, who narrates her own life and the circumstances surrounding Sarah’s birth. Meaning of Consuelo is a coming-of-age novel