• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.115-138
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• 2016

The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009) is a Peruvian-Spanish film by a young, female Peruvian director, Claudia Llosa (1976 - ). By applying the theories that feminist and subaltern scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents in "Feminism and Critical Theory", the present work questions the ironic term, "Feminism in the Third World" by considering the Latin American context. Would the term refer to the feminism of Native Indian women or white creole women? The present work raises this question via Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow, in which a white creole woman, Aída, takes advantage of a quechua woman, Fausta. Through analysis of this film, this work demonstrates that in the Latin American context, even in a single country, there should be various types of feminism, since what Native Indian women fight against is different from what white creole women fight against. Thus, it insists that feminism in the Third World should develop in a deconstructionist manner, in which each woman has the ability to interpret her own social and political stance. Furthermore, it can be said that cultural appropriation is taking place in the "real" world as well as on the screen: a white creole director, Llosa, is taking advantage of a hot-button issue in our postmodern era, the violation of the human rights of minorities, especially those of Latin American Native Indian women, since Llosa became a success and won many prizes in international film festivals for her work.