Introduction 1. Paul De Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2Nd Rev
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Notes Introduction 1. Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. ed., intro. by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3. 2. For an excellent overview of the complexity and promiscuity of the con- cept of “performance” as it pertains to theater, performativity, and cultural politics, see Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” Performance and Cultural Politics (New York:Routledge, 1996), 1–12. 3. For a nuanced analysis of the film’s cultural, sexual, aesthetic, and political “conservatism,” see José Quiroga’s reading in his Tropics of Desire: Interven- tions from a Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 131–144. 4. Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1981), 106. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 5. I use the term “homosexual” deliberately, and am cautious not to use “gay” so readily, since it is a term which has a particularly powerful history of social, cultural, and political struggle in the context of the United States. For a discussion of a wide-range taxonomy of terms to identify male-male sex- ual practices and social relations in Latin America, as well as the social and political identifications that stem from these relations, see Matthew Gut- mann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1996); Roger Lancaster, Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1992); Stephen O. Murray,ed. Latin American Male Homosexual- ities (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); and Rafael Ramírez, What It Means to Be a Man: Reflections on Puerto Rican Masculinity, trans. by Rosa E. Casper (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 194 Notes 6. García Márquez, Crónica, 107. 7. Judith Butler’s and Eve K. Sedgwick’s work has been enormously influential in the theoretical scaffolding of this project. I agree strongly with both crit- ics’ theoretical discussions on performativity and how it relates to gender figuration. I insist on talking about the body in what verges on being essen- tialist ways because I hypothesize that the place and awareness of the body in Latin American culture, as well as in narrative, emerges in rather impos- ing ways. I would even argue that the making of a gendered identity hap- pens through bodily writing. The mechanics of this identity construction are as follows: the Self recognizes a body as one’s own and then it is trans- formed, rewritten, and recycled. The simplicity of this practice is almost too obvious and may seem reductive; however, it is a cultural practice that appears over and over again in Latin American writing. For example, I am thinking about bodily representations such as José Ingenieros’s psychologi- cal treatises; Puig’s initial gender stereotyping that becomes “contaminated” by other gender stereotypes; Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz looking at his shrivel- ing body and imagining it healthy again; García Márquez’s re-presentation of Bolívar’s body,and the debate that broke out among traditional historians for whom Bolívar was more like a “spirit.”Then there is Molloy’s narrator in En breve cárcel (Certificate of Absence), who seeks “words that have skin”; Clarice Lispector’s masochistic bodies in A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star); Rulfo’s ghosts and Pedro Páramo becoming a bunch of stones; and Azuela’s Demetrio Macías, who starts off as a bodiless “white shadow,” becomes a “decorated General,”and finally,is a mythical figure of the Rev- olution. I am also thinking about Vasconcelos’s body becoming a body politic or the body of the Nation; in addition there is Jesusa Palancares’s ascetic body, not to mention Delmira Agustini’s poetic violence on the body, or Alfonina Storni’s disappearing body [“tu me quieres blanca”], and Sor Juana’s magnificent body. Also, the body in Paz’s essays is one that undergoes castration and violence. In Latin American writing, a body is always sought after and claimed as one’s own: this act of possession and incorporation is quite powerfully displayed in many literary texts. What fol- lows is a complex process of bodily transformations. Although I understand that these bodily transformations are of different registers, what is again important to underscore is that the very physicality of the body becomes the materia prima for sexual and gender representation. Prior to a philosoph- ical engagement with the body, there is an attachment and possession between body and subjectivity. The prior moment or prior bodily cogni- tion and claim is what I am stressing here. I don’t want to discard performa- tive gender constitution, but rather I want to understand the prevalence of this model that establishes subjectivity prior to bodily attachment and recognition. The theoretical works that I cite to understand gender perfor- mativity are the following: Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Notes 195 Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Per- forming Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theater, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–282; Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:Routledge, 1990); Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:Routledge, 1993); also, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:Columbia University Press, 1985); Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1990); and, Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, 1 (1993): 1–16. 8. I discuss these Paz and Molloy texts in fuller detail in chapter 1. 9. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests:Cross-Dressing and American Cultural Anxiety (New York:Routledge, 1990), 10. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. Molloy,unpublished manuscript. 12. Israel Zeitlin [Clara Beter, pseud.],“Versos de una ...,”in Poesías completas de César Tiempo (Buenos Aires: Stillman Editores, 1979), 1–41. Chapter 1 1. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,“En reconocimiento a la inimitables plumas de la Europa,” Obras completas, Vol. I, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951), 158–161. 2. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech:A Politics of the Performative (New York:Rout- ledge, 1997), 47. 3. The date of the dance was Sunday, November 17, 1901; however, newspa- per reports of the event, as well as José Guadalupe Posada’s prints, suggest November 20th as the date. 4. Shoshana Felman proposes that “[t]he scandal consists in the fact that the act cannot know what it is doing, that the act (of language) subverts both con- sciousness and knowledge (of language).”See Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 96. In other words, the scandalous act is not aware of its beginning; it can only be known (retroactively) as such by the other. 5. Daniel Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna de México,Vol.IV,La vida social (Mex- ico: Editorial Hermes, 1955), 409–410. 6. Ibid., 410. 7. On the ways in which “posing” gets refigured in Latin American culture as a political gesture that exceeds “mere imitation,” see Sylvia Molloy, “Too Wilde for Comfort: Desire and Ideology in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Amer- ica,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 187–201; and also her later elaboration in 196 Notes “The Politics of Posing,” Hispanisms and Homosexualities, eds. Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 141–160. 8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Vintage Books, 1979), 170–171. 9. For a general commentary on how national and homosexual identities inform one another in the articulation of the Latin American subject, see my essay “National Fantasies: Peeking into the Latin American Closet,” Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin B. Duber- man (New York:New York University Press, 1997), 290–301. 10. Francisco L. Urquizo, Símbolos y números (Mexico: B. Costa-Amic, 1965), 67. 11. Carlos Monsiváis,“El mundo soslayado,”introduction to La estatua de sal, by Salvador Novo (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998), 15. 12. Urquizo, Símbolos y números, 67; italics mine. 13. Molloy,“Politics of Posing,”147; italics mine. 14. It is important to keep in mind that transvestism does not always necessarily mean “crossing the divide” of gender difference. In some cases, transvestism is about “affirming” gender by performing one’s own; in the case of beauty queens and fearless machos, for instance, these types take the act of trans- vestism in the “other” direction, so to speak. I discuss this phenomenon in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5. 15. In How to Do Things with Words (2nd ed., edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975]), Austin goes to great pains to describe a whole series of performative speech acts. For a discussion of Austin’s categorizations and Benvéniste’s modifications of Austin’s theory (esp., the exclusion of illocutionary forces), see chapter I,“Between Linguis- tics and Philosophy of Language,” of Felman, Literary Speech Act, 11–22. Sedgwick and Parker note that “[a] variety of critiques of agency ...have begun to put interpretative pressure on the relations between the individual and the group as those are embodied, negotiated, or even ruptured by potent acts of speech or silence. Viewed through the lenses of a postmodern decon- struction of agency,Austin can be seen to have tacitly performed two radical condensations: of the complex producing and underwriting relations on the ‘hither’ side of the utterance, and of the no-less-constitutive negotiations that comprise its uptake” (6–7).