Introduction 1. All Translations in This Book Are Mine, and All Translations of Titles Are Literal, Unless Otherwise Indicated
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Notes Introduction 1. All translations in this book are mine, and all translations of titles are literal, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Noakes’s historical review is titled “On the Superficiality of Women.” 3. I borrow the phrase “man-made world” from Landay. 4. Gustavo Pellón has already noted the potential irrelevance of theory written in a language and culture distinct from the text to be analyzed (“The Canon, the Boom,” 81). Probably because of my U.S. citizen- ship, I am bothered not so much by the cultural disconnect between a given theorist and a given text, as by the relative homogeneity of the theoretical angles. 5. The epigraph cites Estelle B. Freedman’s No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (2002), pages 3 and 5. 6. Even the watershed year 1968 would recede from view. Long before 1968, Mexican women writers evince interest in historical themes, and so they defy Sefchovich’s and Domínguez Michael’s classificatory efforts that describe post-1968 Mexican literature as more insistently historical (México, país, 194; Antología Vol. II, 500). Williams’s the- ory that the “hyper-experimentation” popular before 1968 becomes less complex after that date ignores a variety of difficult texts authored by women. See Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s Morada interior (written 1969, pub. 1972) (Interior dwelling); María Luisa Mendoza’s 1968- themed novel, Con él, conmigo, con nosotros tres (1971) (With him, with me, with us three); Luisa Josefina Hernández’s Apocalipsis cum figuris (1982); Esther Seligson’s La morada en el tiempo (1981) (The dwelling in time); and Carmen Boullosa’s Mejor desaparece (1980) (Better disappear). 7. In an e-mail to me regarding this topic of spectral feminism, John Waldron provided an interesting comment: When Derrida talks about the specter of Marx, he takes a lot of heat from “leftist” intellectuals, but I think he is misunderstood. That is to say, there is something beneficial in a critical structure that “never arrives.” The problem with the soul searching that went on after the fall of The Wall is that it mistook the Soviet Union as a point in time, a place, where communism had arrived and become present. By never becoming present, by creating a 228 NOTES critical paradigm or philosophical structure where presence is al- ways absent, you create a structure that is malleable, nomadic and that changes strategically in order to combat or avoid whatever is going on at the time. Progress (with its upward, erectile tra- jectory), like presence and the phallus, is an illusion created in order to produce a discursive practice of power, a node around which power is created. They are illusions, spectral presences in themselves. 8. Following Butler’s Gender Trouble, I say “performance” because the acts are deliberate and routine. 9. Joshua Dienstag writes, “While pessimists may posit a decline, it is the denial of progress, not an insistence on some eventual doom, that marks out modern pessimism. Pessimism, to put it precisely, is the negation, and not the opposite, of theories of progress” (18). Your Maternity or Your Mind: False Choices for Mexican Woman Intellectuals 1. Slavoj Žižek studies this impossible choice in Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2003). 2. The canonization in July 2002 of La Virgen de Guadalupe’s interlocu- tor, Juan Diego, lent greater official support to the story of the appari- tion. For more on La Virgen de Guadalupe, see Goizueta, Poole, and William Taylor. 3. Miller examines thought on La Malinche from José Vaconcelos’s “cos- mic race,” to Octavio Paz’s concept of the raped mother, and Anzaldúa’s and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with Chicano/a identities. 4. See see Romero and Harris for a variety of analyses of Chicano/a thought regarding La Malinche. 5. La Malinche also had a child with the Spaniard selected by Cortés for her husband once the Conquista gave way to the Colonia. 6. Of course, some believers may not take much interest in virginity. In a study of Chilean women’s identity, one scholar comments that María’s virginity has been stressed more in official church discourse than by mestizo believers (Montecino 90). 7. Cisneros solves this problem as an adult by converting Guadalupe into “the sex goddess,” an unorthodox solution to be sure (49). 8. Carrera’s script was no twenty-first-century novelty. He based his film on Vicente Leñero’s screenplay, which in turn takes inspiration from a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel by Eça de Queirós. 9. The opening weekend alone attracted 862,969 audience mem- bers—more than double the audience size for Y tu mamá también (Lazcano 1) (And your mother too). The film also set a record for domestic earnings and in the first month earned 130,000,000 pesos, more than USD$13,000,000 in the exchange rate of that time (Cabrera). NOTES 229 10. For a detailed review of the scandal as it was covered in the Mexican press, see Monsiváis, El estado laico, pp. 222–233. 11. Another recent reworking of Paz’s notion of La Malinche appears in Brett Levinson’s view of La Malinche as the scapegoat that represents Mexico’s cultural and racial “division and finitude,” which is to say absence of “wholeness or purity” (92). 12. See Arenal and Martínez-San Miguel for a brief historical review of the three biographies in question. 13. In possible proof of Sor Juana’s antipathy toward Guadalupe, Kennett cites Marie Cécile Bénassy-Berling’s book on Sor Juana to the effect that the poet’s devotional Letras de San Bernardo (Lyrics of Saint Bernard) “was supposedly never sung at the dedication of another Conceptionist chapel because the Letras lacked any reference to the Virgen of Guadalupe, focusing entirely on Sor Juana’s own version of a Wisdom/Mary figure” (316). 14. Like Luis Leal, also mentioned in Cypess’s study, Castellanos under- stands Guadalupe as an entirely positive symbol and the diametrical opposite of La Malinche. Much as Castellanos suggested decades before her, Tuñón Pablos retains the three categories: La Malinche “monopolizes” sexuality; Sor Juana, the intellect; and Guadalupe, unselfish motherhood. 15. For photo stills, see http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/cuaderno/ holyterrorsweb/jesusa/nav.html. 16. As regards de Erauso’s virginity, Merrim retraces the historical testa- ments and observes that “virginity . , forms the cornerstone of a Catholic tradition of transvestite female saints that dates from the fifth century” (18). 17. As Jane Lavery points out, alongside the “revolutionary implications” of Mastretta’s themes, her novels support conservative postures (224). 18. See, for example, Alicia del Campo’s study of Sefchovich’s Demasiado amor, and Victoria Martínez’s analysis of Como agua para chocolate. Stuart Day also uses neoliberalism to write about Sabina Berman’s theater. 19. The domestic workers Josefina and Nacha suspect that “la señora Laurita se aburría oyendo hablar siempre del señor presidente [López Mateos] y de las visitas oficiales” (16). (Mrs. Laurita was bored hear- ing so much talk about Mr. President [López Mateos] and the official visits.) The diminutive “Laurita” marks the employees’ admiration of Laura and that character’s youth and likeability in contrast with her mother-in-law, Margarita. 2 Asexuality and the Woman Writer: Queering a Compliant Castellanos 1. Luis Villoro’s 1995 review of twentieth-century Mexican thinkers discusses 13 men and no women. 230 NOTES 2. The article was originally published in 1979 in Novedades. 3. The interview was originally published in La palabra y el hombre 19 (1976): 3–18. 4. Victoria de Grazia summarizes the tendency to femininize the realm of consumption as a result of the early stages of capitalism with the “identification of wage labor with male labor” (15). This division upheld a binary between consumption and production that imagined women as promoting superfluous and impassioned needs that opposed the rational measures needed in the political realm. De Grazia sug- gests that women gained the right to consume at the expense of their political representation. 5. Qtd from: Castro, Dolores. “Rosario Castellanos: recuerdo de una vida.” Revista SEP. Mexico, Oct. 1974. p. 48 6. Castellanos is not always as accepting of male homosexuality as it might seem, and the narrator of Rito de iniciación calls Sergio’s taste for women’s clothing a defectito (tiny defect) (345). 7. A description of Sor Juana from “Asedio a Sor Juana” in Juicios sumar- ios (1966) could double as a self-portrait of Castellanos: “No se acepta con una complacencia fácil ni menos pretende imponerse a los otros. Su juicio es insobornable y el ideal de perfección con el que se compara el muy alto. [. .] Por esto Sor Juana es áspera consigo y afable con los demás” (465). (She does not accept herself with facile complacency nor does she try to impose herself on others. Her judgment is incor- ruptible and the idea of perfection against which she compares herself very high. [. .] For this reason, Sor Juana is hard on herself and kind to everyone else.) 8. In 1951, Castellanos assures Guerra, “Estoy bajando un poco de peso, lo que era necesario” (184). (I am losing a little bit of weight, which was necessary.) In 1966 she writes to him, “Ya no tengo esa ansia compulsiva de comer. Lo que como es poco y muy nutritivo. Ya puedo usar mucha ropa que en México no me venía. Si sigo así voy a llegar muy esbelta” (202). (I do not have that compulsive desire to eat anymore. What I eat is not much and very nutritious. I can already use a lot of the clothes that did not fit me in Mexico.