Norma Alarcón

Contributions and Distinctions

Norma Alcaron is a noted Chicana theorist and scholar whose essays have shaped Chicana Studies and paved the way for contemporary theories of Chicana subjectivity. She founded Third Woman Press, a pioneering queer and woman of color publisher in efforts to bypass mainstream marginalization and publish works that bridge activism and third-world community perspectives. Highly successful writers such as Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo were first published in Third Woman Press. 

Biographical Sketch  

Norma Alcaron was born in Villa Frontera, Coahuila, Mexico in 1943 prior to her family's immigration to San Antonio, Texas. Following her graduation from St. Thomas the Apostle in 1961, she began her studies at De Paul University, and later graduated from the University of Indiana Bloomington (1973) with a degree in Spanish literature and minor in comparative literature. Thereafter she entered the Ph.D. program in Spanish literature at Indiana University. Despite the combined pressures of going through her first divorce, raising a son, making a living, and working on her PhD program, Alarcón founded Third Woman Press in 1979 and completed her dissertation, Ninfomanía: El Discurso feminista en la obra de Rosario Castellanos, a theoretical study of Mexican feminist literary criticism, in 1983. Alcaron taught in the Foreign Language department at Purdue University in Indiana until she received the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley (1986) and got hired by the Ethnic Studies department in 1987. She received tenure from the university in 1993. As a professor in the Ethnic Studies department until her retirement in 2004 and founder of Third Woman Press, devoted herself to challenging the notion that Chicanas and other women of color lacked intellectual, theoretical, or political agency within feminism. Her scholarship worked to make visible the voices of the marginalized.