TRANSOCEANIC StUDIES Ileana Rodríguez, Series Editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Neoliberal Bonds Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature Fernando A. Blanco THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • C OLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blanco, Fernando A., author. Neoliberal bonds : undoing memory in Chilean art and literature / Fernando A. Blanco. pages cm — (Transoceanic studies) Inlcudes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1285-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Chilean literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Neoliberalism—Chile—20th century. 3. Arts, Chilean—20th century. 4. Memory in literature. 5. Memory in art. 6. Sexual minorities—Chile. 7. Homosexuality in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Transoceanic studies. PQ7953.B57 2015 860.9'983—dc23 2015009749 Cover design by Thao Thai Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 The History of a State of Things 13 CHAPTER 2 Perversion and Subjectivity: The Possible Worlds 39 CHAPTER 3 Chilean Visual Arts: From the Perversion of History to the Hysteria of Childhood 67 CHAPTER 4 Literature and Homoscapes: Changes in the Status of Subjectivity 130 CSONCLU ION 165 Works Cited 171 Index 177 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Illustrations FIGURE 1 Tierra del Fuego, 2006 (Bernardo Oyarzún) 81 FIGURE 2 Bajo Sospecha, 1998 (Bernardo Oyarzún) 85 FIGURE 3 Soma (detail), 2006 (Voluspa Jarpa) 100 FIGURE 4 Plaga 1, 2008 (Voluspa Jarpa) 101 FIGURE 5 Plaga 2, 2008 (Voluspa Jarpa) 102 FIGURE 6 Orgía 1, 2009 (José Pedro Godoy) 120 FIGURE 7 Comestible, 2007 (José Pedro Godoy) 123 FIGURE 8 Orgía 2, 2009 (José Pedro Godoy) 127 vi All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Illustrations Acknowledgments THEO W RK that I present here is indebted to many people and institutions. First, I would also like to acknowledge each and every one of my professors, both at The Ohio State University and at the University of Chile, especially Maureen Ahern, Francisco Aguilera, Carmen Foxley, Gloria María Martínez, and Luis Vaisman. Each of them shares the passion for teaching that I hope to have inherited. To Kathya Araujo, a lucid companion on the journey of knowledge and unconditional friend in the troubles that life brings with it, my special thanks. Her work underpins my own reflection. To Javier Bello, Soledad Concha, Dia- mela Eltit, Juan Gelpí, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Pedro Lemebel, Carlos Monsiváis, and Eliana Ortega, many thanks for having helped to cross the borders that brought me to the United States. I send my gratitude to Jorge Rufinelli for his sincere friendship and indis- pensable help in acquiring some of the visual materials. To Flavia Berger, my assistant and dear friend, my appreciation for her dedication and commit- ment to this project. For Esther Rincón, a special mention because without her the materialization of this project would have been impossible. I cannot forget to recognize the work of Andrés Valera and Cherly Johnson, the first for his virtual inquiries, and the second for her characteristic generosity and faithful support for my technological innocence. To Voluspa Jarpa, indispensable in many aspects, always my thanks; to vii All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. viii | Acknowledgments Bernardo Oyarzún and José Pedro Godoy, I thank them for their time and for the permission to use their images in the book. I would also like to recognize the assistance of the Center for Latin American Studies at The Ohio State University and the Tinker Foundation for the grants given to carry out the first part of my investigation. To the College of Humanities and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese I am indebted for the financial assistance that allowed me to present initial aspects of chapters 1 and 2 in international conferences. Also I want to acknowl- edge the support of Wittenberg University through its professional enrich- ment grant that helped me to complete the translation process. My gratitude to Bucknell University for the support received to complete the translation and editing process. Also, I would like to recognize the outstanding support received from the library staff at Bucknell University, especially Jason Sny- der and Dan Heuer. I would additionally like to express my gratitude to my copyeditor Rebecca Bender and to my managing editor Tara Cyphers. Their advice and guidance has been invaluable To Bradley Hilgert, John Fricks, Tom Beasley, my student Craig Oster- brock, and Rebecca Willoughby, my sincere thanks for having played a key role in preparing the final version of this work in English. To my family and friends, my deepest thanks for their constant support. Especially to the guardian of our family memory, my brother, Gonzalo; my two sisters, Elena and Cristina; and my three nieces, Josefa, Aranzazú, and Pía, in whom I always find a bit of Virginia, my mother. For Bernardita and Federico, my extreme love and affection for the tran- quility of knowing that they are at the turn of every day. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Introduction WHEN I BEGAN this investigation of the dissolution and reconfiguration of the social fabric in the Chile of the past twenty years, the tone of my interest was marked by two themes that had caught my attention. One of these was memory narratives—their historical politicization and later legal exhumation; the other was the change in individual and collective subjectivity, expressed in a state of media exaltation of the intimate. It was curious that the most notable events, those that appeared in the press and that are the object of debate for Chileans, kept a relation with these two topics, seen through the prism of the moral-sexual behavior of Chile’s citizens. I use the term moral- sexual to emphasize that a part of the Chilean societal paradigm is the regu- lation of practices and pleasures linked to the exercise of sexuality. I also say that it is that of the normalizing sanction and judicialization of the memory of the collective state violence. All of these facts, observed in the context of a peculiar strategy of exhibition of the intimate propelled by the media, made me suspect that a new domestication of “impulses” was taking place. The two vital energies through which it was possible to arrange the modern state found themselves in a moment of regulation. Some of the examples that illustrate these cases of violation in the moral- sexual modern state do not carry the mark of genocide of opponents of the prior regime. Rather, they represent the judgment of individuals (pedophiles, rapists, pederasts, abusers) belonging to the ruling strata (businessmen, poli- ticians, military, religious) whose behavior damages the restoration of insti- 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 | Introduction tutionalism, since they are perceived by the social imaginary as a threat to the recovery of these traditionally hegemonic classes in Chile. This work begins with the contributions of queer theory to the discussion and redefinition of the dominant understandings of culture, subject, sexual- ity, and social relations in the West. This political response to the hetero- sexual hegemonic cultural template can be applied to the Latin American political and cultural context. In particular I work with Foucault’s idea of examining in the present the circumstantial and provisional cultural narra- tive available to form certain specific forms of subjectivity. These discursive formations would influence the way in which a subject is constructed and made accountable for a specific discipline of institution. For instance, in the Chilean case, we find the impact of transnational neoliberal narratives on the formation of the individual while interacting with the newly democratic political cultures of memory in Chile. Over the past twenty years, social the- ory and change have occurred in the notion of the social framework, prefig- uring the multicultural and globalized scene in which the ideas of subject and its ways of connecting, and therefore of being articulated in the whole of the society and in intellectual reflection, have been redefined. The instability of the modes of production and organization that individuals have devel- oped in recent times is explained in this work as a result of the change in the cultural offers available for the elaboration and construction of the subject. Grouped around a liberal postmodernity, distinguished for an unblemished index of individuation, these offers enter the scene to combine with other factors present in the period in question. This time is known as “the Transi- tion,” and it was ruled by the Coalition of Political Parties for Democracy, known as the Concertación, from 1990 to 2010. The dissolution of the his- torical narratives (socialism as utopia), the change in the statute of memory (judicialization and mediatization of human rights memory accounts1), the media coverage of the public sphere (confluence of the political and media spheres), the alteration of the symbolic consistency of the point of subjectiva- tion, and the loss of consistency of the imaginary institutionalization of the state and its institutions translate into the weakening of the social bond, with the ensuing risk of social anomie.