Against representation: women's writing in contemporary Mexico.

Estrada, Oswaldo

De mis mas antiguos recuerdos, uno muy claro fue haber percibido que el mundo se dividia en dos. El de los hacedores y el de los fabuladores. Los hacedores eran los hombres. A ellos pertenecia el reino de los cielos. Ser hacedor era irse a trabajar todo el dia, era "tu papa es muy responsable y como es muy responsable no esta." Ser hacedor era otra de las formas de llamar al abandono. Mi madre, en cambio, era la fabuladora. A traves de ella conoci el olor y el tacto, mis primeras narraciones sobre el mundo, y poco despues, el sonido de las cosas. Rosa Beltran, "Ars poetica" (11)

ALTHOUGH women have made countless "uses of the word" in Mexico and the rest of Latin America for a while--successfully exploring their position in society through orthodox Catholic mysticism during colonial times, employing sentimentalized romanticism throughout the nineteenth century, or relying on various testimonial, critical and fictional narratives over the course of the twentieth century--, only recently have we developed critical tools for reading women who have historically been excluded from literary canons (Schlau xi-xiii). In recognition of the negative impact that religion, colonialism, nationalism and modernization have had on women, not only as hegemonic narratives but also as symbolic systems that have relegated them to the outskirts of knowledge and power (Franco 12), over the past twenty years the field of women studies has produced new approaches to analyze the presence of women in mexica and colonial societies, their stereotypical representations, and the gradual development of a feminist and postfeminist consciousness. In one way or another, these critical perspectives have contested the fact that Mexican literature has represented women through a series of female archetypes that only solidify their image as an extreme and never as a continuum of conflicting forces, as if they were eternally condemned to play the roles of "the good one" or "the bad one," "the virginal," "the whore," "the old maid," "the unselfish wife," "the untouchable nun," "the school teacher," and "the pious woman" (Leal 241).

The main problem with these representations is that, in any shape or form, they confine women to the state of passiveness and ignorance that Rosario Castellanos denounced in her collection of essays Mujer que sabe latin ... (1973). They depict women as mentally handicapped, as if they were only capable of maintaining certain ideals associated with femininity--loyalty, patience, chastity, impeccable conduct, maternity, submission, humility, abnegation, and sacrifice--for the well-being of societies that privilege men (14-31). Surprisingly, even when it is possible to distinguish different types of sensibility in the creation of female characters such as Nacha Ceniceros in Nellie Campobello's Cartucho (1931), Isabel Moncada in Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), or Jesusa Palancares in Elena Poniatowska's Hasta no verte, Jesus mio (1969)--the portrayal of women through female archetypes continues to be privileged in the commercial writings of Angeles Mastretta (b. 1949) and Laura Esquivel (b. 1950). Some notable exceptions, of course, are marked by Rosa Nissan (b. 1939), Cristina Pacheco (b. 1941), Maria Luisa Puga (b. 1944), Barbara Jacobs (b. 1947), Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954), and Sabina Berman (b. 1955), among other writers whose creative works reshape and redefine the depiction of women in contemporary Mexican literamre. The radical shift, however, not as the exception to the norm but as the trademark of a new generation of women writers, is established by those born in the sixties. Distancing themselves from their predecessors, writers such as Cristina Rivera Garza (1964), Ana Clavel (1961), and Rosa Beltran (1960) challenge our notions of women's literature with transgressions of all types, with controversial explorations of gender and sentimentalism in contemporary societies, and with the problematic construction of identities in globalized or deterritorialized environments. When we approach their narratives, it is clear that this group of writers intentionally problematizes the dichotomy of male and female, in sync with current waves of postmodernism and postfeminism. (1)

In response to a perennial state of otherness, but also to the increasing number of women's literature that even today explores eroticism, rewritings of history, national identity, the essence of Mexico and its almost mythical sense of mexicanness, or the country's postcolonial condition and historical determinism, this new generation of women writers tends to fictionalize different displacements of identity. Because of its unique focus on gender matters, this type of literature comes across as non-Mexican, non-traditional, unorthodox, unconventional, and unprecedented. These writers, I would argue, have taken up the task of stirring up Mexico's repressed sexuality and homophobia, forbidden desires, and gender boundaries. Their writings contest old habits, morals and values in the new literary spectrum, to the extreme of being considered the "other narrative" of trans-Rulfian undertones (Gonzalez Rodriguez 4). (2) Unlike some of their literary Mexican ancestors whose world view returns Mexico to its roots and endless cycles of oppression, these new writers raise universal questions that speak for the self and the creation of subjectivities, and not necessarily of Mexico. Implicitly, they respond to Castellanos's denouncement of women's marginal state and to the conception of an identity as a trap, "esa carcel en la que nos dejamos encerrar, esa esclavitud contra la que no atinamos sublevarnos" (Mujer 41). More important, however, is the fact that they explicitly create metaphorical rooms of their own, in order to combat any reductive representation not only of themselves as women but of all human beings trapped in intricate labyrinths of social conduct.

PELVIC BONES AND GENDER ROLES

Since the publication of her first collection of short stories, La guerra no importa (1991), Cristina Rivera Garza has distinguished herself for experimenting with the social construction of gender roles. This characteristic is evident throughout her multifaceted works, even when she recreates a fragment of Mexico's history (Nadie me vera llorar, 1999), or when the subject of her fictions is the invention of a new language that successfully combines various genres (Lo anterior, 2004; La muerte me da, 2007). It is in La cresta de Ilion (2002), however, where she truly displays a novelistic example of gender transgression. In this novel, an anonymous male doctor is visited by a young and seductive woman who goes by the name of Amparo Davila and whose most distinctive characteristic is her pronounced hip bone. During the same stormy night, the man's ex-girlfriend, identified as La Traicionada, also shows up at the door. As the novel progresses, these mysterious women develop a close friendship and a mysterious language of their own, making the doctor feel like a prisoner at home. Aside from the intertextual link between his first visitor and the almost forgotten Mexican writer Amparo Davila of the mid twentieth century (Zacatecas, 1928), the readers are left without any clues to solve the enigma of why this woman a priori confronts his masculinity: "I know your secret ... I know that you're a woman" (55, 56). Oscillating between an ambiguous Ciudad del Norte and a vague Ciudad del Sur--one can only assume that the narrator is referring to San Diego and Tijuana, respectively--the novel revolves around the construction of identity traits, based on sexual gender narratives (Castellanos, "Ambiguedad" 111).

From this moment on, we accompany the narrator in his search for the truth or myth behind this blunt accusation in regards to his personal identity. Although he first admits, "Soy un hombre al que se le malentiende con frecuencia" (20), he quickly disippates his gender worries after inspecting himself in front of a mirror: "Tuve que moverme varias veces y ver mi reflejo moverse al unisono conmigo, para convencerme de que se trataba del mismo. Toque mi sexo y, con evidente alivio, comprobe que mi pene y mis testiculos seguian en su sitio. Amparo Davila y la Traicionada me estaban jugando una broma muy pesada" (63). As proof that "gender identities are circumscribed and socially constituted" (Butler, Reader 22), the doctor confirms his now fragile masculinity by having sex with two of his female co-workers. Even when nothing about them truly interests him--"las mujeres no eran hermosas pero tampoco horribles" (67)--, what matters here is that he gains peace of mind, derived from a sexual encounter that defines him as a man and not a woman. Interestingly enough, however, he engages one of them in anal intercourse while the other one introduces an unidentified object, shaped like a candle, into bis rectum. To add more ambiguity to the scene, his co-workers are described in terms of their masculine attributes, and his "aburrimiento ... mayusculo" (67) during his sexual "performance" reiterates his previously stated "poca hombria" (59).

In another attempt to restore his broken identity, the doctor decides to look for the real Amparo Davila in Ciudad del Norte. But the aging writer who seems to have been taken out of a horror film also treats him as if he were a woman. In a painful effort to convince himself that his interlocutor is not appropriately reading the physical signs of his manliness, the narrator silently rebels against her interpretation: El tuteo me molesto. Y mas lo hizo el darme cuenta que seguia refiriendose a mi con el uso del femenino. Supuse que su vista no era muy buena ... Cualquiera con vista normal podria darse cuenta que no tenia senos, ni cintura, ni cabello largo, ni unas pintadas. Cualquiera con vista normal se habria fijado en mi pelo facial, la cuadratura de mis hombros, la estrechez de mis caderas, el bulto entre las ingles. Cualquiera, quiero decir, excepto Amparo Davila y su horda de emisarias. Todas estaban ciegas. Fuera de si, es cierto, y ciegas ademas. (85)

This anxious reaffirmation of his gender by what he "is" and what he "has" (Butler, Undoing 42) indirectly reveals Rivera Garza's own postulates on the subject of gender, and how she carries them over to her novelistic practice. As she argues in one of her interviews: gender is, above all, a performance that varies and enacts itself according to specific negotiations within specific contexts (Hind 189). Her assertions on this subject clearly reveal Judith Butler's influence. Gender, would argue the renowned scholar, should be conceived as "the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes" (Undoing 42).

Accordingly, after many hours of confusion concerning his gender change, the unnamed doctor of Rivera Garza's novel realizes: Ante los ojos de la muerte, casi ya dentro de su regazo, habia pocas cosas que diferenciaban a moribundos de moribundas. Los de temperamento lacrimoso lloraban por igual independientemente de la forma interna y externa de sus genitales. Sucios todos, desnutridos de la misma manera, desahuciados, sin esperanza ni expectativa, con un minimo contacto ya con lo que pomposamente se llamaba la realidad, a estos pacientes poco les podia importar si en vida habian sido hombres o mujeres. (99)

This existential crisis allows him to recognize that no gender division can be neatly divided between the masculine and the feminine (Wright 47) and that "not only are we culturally constructed, but in some sense we construct ourselves" (Butler, Reader 23). Still surrounded by the mystery and uncertainty of his situation, and being trapped in a story of bizarre characters and trance-like moments, the doctor finally accepts: "si por alguna casualidad de la desgracia yo era en realidad mujer, nada cambiaria. No tenia por que volverme ni mas dulce ni mas cruel ... Ni mas serena ni mas cercana. Ni mas maternal ni mas autoritaria" (101).

The development of these ideas in La cresta de Ilion situates Rivera Garza's novel within the realm of gender studies. It pulls us away from the matrix of the "masculine" and the "feminine," and it shows that "the reproduction of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary areas much a part of gender as its most normative instance" (Butler, Undoing 42). This particularity of Rivera Garza's works becomes more evident when the anonymous character in La cresta de llion finally accepts this dilemma. "El silencio me dijo mas de mi nueva condicion que cualquier discurso de mi Emisaria," he points out. "Y entonces, sumido en la materia viscosa de las cosas indecibles, retrocedi ... Supongo que las mujeres han entendido. A los hombres, basteles saber que esto ocurre mas frecuentemente de lo que pensamos" (101). Submerged in that state of silence, one that expresses "a mythic project of total liberation" (Sontag 18), he successfully places himself in the middle of the invisible bridge that connects women and men. By acknowledging and accepting his first attractions to other men, he finally reveals his true gender identity in universal terms: as an ambiguous range that has little to do with his physical appearance as a man or with the female shape of his pelvic bone.

GENDERED BODIES AND SOCIAL NORMS

Not every writer of this new generation presents gender transgressions in the same manner, but there are certain similarities that stand out. In one of her works, for example, Ana Clavel insists on reconstructing the identity of an invisible female character (Los deseos y su sombra, 2000), and just recently she explores the incestuous desires of a man who fabncates adolescent dolls to mitigate his sexual infatuation with his own daughter (Las Violetas son flores del deseo, 2007). In Cuerpo naufrago (2005), the issue of gender construction and constriction takes an original mm when 27-year-old Antonia wakes up transformed as a man. Although her transformation surpasses the limits of verisimilitude, her desire to become a man and the sudden consummation of her physical alterations immediately rejuvenate old and current debates regarding male and female in Western philosophy. The changes that appear with her magical and rather unexplainable metamorphosis are evident at once: her round breasts have been replaced by a flat chest; her back is considerably wider; her arras and legs have substantially grown more hair; she now has a very pronounced jaw line, an Adam's apple and a penis, as the undeniable symbol of a male body.

In search of a logical explanation to this dramatic sex change, Antonia takes us to her almost forgotten childhood, when she wished to become a man. "Cierto que desde pequena habia deseado ser hombre," explains the narrator, "no porque se creyera varon atrapado en el cuerpo de una mujer, sino porque la intrigaba la naturaleza de esos seres que, suponia, eran mas completos y mas libres que ella" (13). Almost immediately, her physical change forces Antonia to think of the potential advantages of being perceived as a man in a patriarchal society such as Mexico's. Even though much research has been done to demonstrate that gender is a cultural idea rather than a biological fact, today we can still find the dichotomy between male as rational and capable of universally valid thought and female as emotional and anchored to the particularity of her body and situation (Alsop et al. 17; Jehlen 264). In Clavel's narrative, the protagonist confronts this idea with a difficult question that remains unanswered: " habia dejado de ser Antonia por el hecho de haber cambiado de sexo de la noche a la manana?" (14).

This inquiry raises a new set of variables to determine the validity of a theoretical postulate that proposes that "natural" women and men act in very distinctive ways due to biological factors, as opposed to the gender argument that identity is a role, and "character traits are not autonomous qualities but functions and ways of relating" (Jehlen 265). Although Antonia has the body of a man, she really has no clue of how to act like one. In support of Butler's argument that we become subjects from our performances and the performances of others towards us, the novel indicates that Antonia needs a role model to internalize her new gender. In the absence of a father who is already dead and two brothers who live abroad, she finds a script on how to act like a man in Amadis de Gaula (first published in 1508), the most famous medieval book of chivalry that managed to cross the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World in the heart of every Spanish conquistador. The occurrence entertains us for its obvious anachronism, exaggeration and intentional comic break within the narrative. At the same time, however, Antonia's excursion through those pages of what we can certainly classify as enhanced masculinity, reveals the secondary and/or passive role that a patriarchy typically assigns to women: Vaya, de modo que en vez de ser rescatada he de ser yo la que rescate. Sera posible que los hombres crean que tienen el deber de salvar a alguien? Se mordio el pensamiento--por no decir la lengua--pues pronto reconocio que, aunque ella misma gozaba de cierta autonomia, todas sus relaciones amorosas habian fracasado porque, de alguna forma, siempre habia esperado ser salvada, elegida, rescatada, vista, apreciada, descubierta, en un uso irracional y desmesurado de la voz pasiva (17).

The social distinction between male and female roles becomes more palpable during Antonia's first outing to the city as a man. It is there that the protagonist finally notices that because she is a man (or because people perceive her as a man), she is treated with much more respect. Throughout the novel, Antonia continues to experience the effects of gender differentiation as she goes to bars, bath houses, strip joints, and men's restrooms, where, at least momentarily, men take off their masks, reveal their insecurities, their fears and failures. Her physical excursions into the male world and her almost awkward obsession with the shape of urinals, as well as the problematic association of these objects with mouths or female genitalia, speak to Antonia's inner conflicts. The change has been external: she looks like a man, has learned how to behave like a man, and people treat her like a man. Internally, however, Antonia, also known as Anton, feels exactly the same as before her sex transformation. Even then, what surprises us about these passages is how quickly the main character learns to enact certain roles to his/her advantage. When Anton starts a relationship with Claudia, for example, and is unable to "perform" as a man, instead of blaming himself, his new body, his transformation, his ambiguity of internal conflict as a woman trapped in a man's body, he chooses the easy way out and holds her responsible for his unsuccessful sexual experience. Little does he know that his claim: "Es que tu no me excitas lo suficiente" (68) will encounter the voice of an empowered Claudia who protests: " De modo que a ti no se te para y yo soy la culpable?" (68). The confrontation of these statements in the book forms a composite discourse, a body of knowledge in Foucaultian terms, one that overflows the pages of Amadis de Gaula. It reveals the symbolic script that Antonia was trying to find since the beginning of her transformation, precisely because "it provides us with ideals of masculinity and femininity which render certain behavior appropriate and others not" (Alsop et al. 99).

After spending endless hours analyzing men's behaviors in public restrooms and showers or other places where most women are not allowed, Antonia (or Anton) concludes: Tal vez el asunto de los sexos no sea mas que la impostura de trajes estrechos [...] a pesar de los tiempos que corren el cuerpo soy-mujer sigue siendo un vestido con corse, lo mismo que el cuerpo soy-hombre es una armadura. Nos preocupamos y ocupamos de las diferencias (incluso en el cuerpo soy-gay) pero hay bocanadas de pez fuera del agua y desgarraduras mas profundas: el deseo boquiabierto, la angustia de estar vivos, la soledad, la tristeza, en fin, de que vamos a morirnos, sin remedio, sin sentido. (164)

To finally remove any traces of difference between the sexes, Clavel lets Antonia's best friend, Raimundo, pronounce a statement at the end of the novel that winds up her thoughts on gender: "Mas que en los cuerpos, es en el corazon donde reside el secreto y la diferencia. El verdadero sexo y la autentica identidad se abren camino desde ahi. Lo demas, son solo ropajes, vestiduras, disfraces. Cuesta mucho trabajo ir desnudos, el corazon expuesto" (175). This is how the author of Cuerpo naufrago imprints for her readers that "the sexed nature of both women and men is not natural but cultural" (Jehlen 265). At the end of Cuerpo naufrago, Antonia or Anton is described as an androgynous person: "el o ella" (he or she) remains neutral "porque cabia la duda sobre su genero aunque poco importara para aquellos que podian percibir su belleza" (181).

FEMALE BODIES AND MASCULINE CONCERNS

The narrators of these gender arguments employ different strategies in the works of Rosa Beltran, who is best known in Mexico for her writings about love and madness and for exploring men and women's repressed desires (Seydel 197). This characteristic is especially true in her collection of short stories Amores que matan (1996) but also in her novels La corte de los ilusos (1995) and El paraiso que fuimos (2002). In the case of Alta infidelidad (2006), the author lets us internalize the story of Julian, an unproductive professor of philosophy, on the verge of turning fifty, who plays the predictable role of a mature divorced man undergoing a midlife crisis. To make up for his lack of academic enthusiasm and his inability to write and publish a single article, he becomes sexually and emotionally involved with three different women: Marcela, a thirty-three-year-old scholar of gender studies; Silvina, a successful cultural attache, two years younger than Marcela; and Sabine, an experimental anesthesiologist who is only twenty-four. Although the novel first comes off as an intertwined love drama with a protagonist who is made up with the cultural baggage of a typical Don Juan and three women who try to please him at all times, even when they are well-aware of his infidelities, we soon realize that the plot is an excuse to deconstruct topics related to love and jealousy, gender roles and body politics (Pettersson 35). As we move from one scene to the next, the three female protagonists rebel against the "eternal feminine" described by Simone de Beauvoir as "an ideological construction of women as passive, domestic, narcissistic, and unwilling to take on the responsibility of subjectivity" (Marso 8).

Marcela, for instance, is writing a doctoral dissertation on "Illustrious women" and sees her world through the eyes of Sor Juana, Isabel I, Marie Curie, and Juana de Arco, among others. She is obsessive. She devours books but eats minuscule portions of food. She loves to have sex with Julian but wants him to love her not for her exquisite body but for her ideas: Le dio por hablarle a su amante de su superficialidad al amarla por su cuerpo. Ella lo amaba a el por algo especial, le decia. No podia imaginarse con otro hombre que no fuera el mismo. Ni siquiera un hombre mas guapo o menor. O que se dedicara a algo mas: un hombre mas rico. O con mejor caracter. Lo amaba por ser como era. El negaba moviendo la cabeza a un lado y otro. No estaba de acuerdo. Porque el, le decia, la amaria igual si tuviera otras ideas o hiciera otras cosas con tal de que tuviera ese mismo cuerpo. Y esto le clavaba el dardo de nuevo. La hacia sospechar que tal vez no estaba enamorado de ella, sino de alguien mas. Y volvia a la carga: debia amarla por lo que hacia, los seres humanos somos lo que hacemos. (13-14)

Marcela is the type of intelectual who wonders " A quien vemos cuando pensamos en un nombre o en un cuerpo?" (35). Like a good scholar of gender, she overanalyzes every contact that she has with other bodies: "Y es que le ha dado por pensar que cuando estamos con alguien no vemos un cuerpo sino una imagen. La imagen de otro cuerpo" (35). Julian sees her external beauty but fails to imagine that she is also a sick or defeated body. And instead of responding to his ever-present sexual urges, she wonders again: " es el alma o el cuerpo lo que hace de nosotros lo que somos?" (36).

These thoughtful interventions throughout the novel reflect enduring questions of identity, the construction of subjectivities as a fluid process, and the essence of humanity beyond gender boundaries. In numerous episodes, Marcela rebels against the fact that her lover only cares about her body, perhaps in response to one of Rosario Castellanos's essays, where she denounces that women are exalted for their beauty because the entire ideal of beauty has been composed and imposed by men (Mujer 10). "Si Julian la veia fisicamente atractiva," she concludes, "era porque la necesitaba fisicamente atractiva. Y ese era su problema. Una cosa era que las mujeres no tuvieran mas remedio que adaptarse a las expectativas creadas por sus amantes, y otra que no fueran (o no pudieran ser) su propio Frankenstein" (43). To prove her point, she tries to cover her body from head to toes, with clothes that hide her breasts and any other curves associated with her external female attributes, "todo para resaltar mas las cualidades de su espiritu. Y mas le valia que otros pudieran percibirlo porque no habria nada mas que ver ahi" (43). She is disappointed to find out that Julian uses with her the exact same tricks and tactics that he has employed when making love to other women, but instead of falling in a trap of jealousy, Marcela quickly understands that society has taught her lover to give more importance to "performance" than to his own feelings (68).

The other two women do not share Marcela's philosophical edge, but they also rebel against the passive role that society commonly assigns to them and manage to reverse conventional gender roles. Even though Silvina lets Julian believe that she can be his sexual slave, that she can perform whatever role he wants without any opposition, we soon find out that she is mostly using him to become pregnant. Sabine, the youngest and most sexually active of all, gives him high doses of Viagra just so that he can keep up with her sexual needs. Instead of assuming his conventional aggressive persona, Julian is now forced to become submissive and compliant. He has to listen and is obliged to follow instructions: Y todo iba bien, muy bien, la verdad, salvo que hacer el amor se habia vuelto una mision tremenda, como si el en vez de ser el fuera Magallanes, de pronto, y se viera obligado a cruzar un estrecho de seiscientos kilometros con una anchura media de treinta, sofocando revueltas de la tripulacion, sorteando corrientes contrarias, debiendo tocar en las Islas de los Ladrones, en la Isla Cebu, en las Filipinas, todo para ser bien recibido por el rey indigena y poco despues morir a manos suyas. (114)

As the tables are turned and Julian faces new challenges in bed, the novel becomes an attractive exploration of masculinity issues. (3) In the background of this novelistic stage, we observe how these three women display different aspects of themselves, reactivating on the printed page the lives of their illustrious female ancestors as they more from a passive to an active state, from a hidden room in the attic to a public sphere of influence, from various intellectual environments to a prolific practical ground where they can openly explore their sexuality and traditionally forbidden desires. In the center of the stage, though, we find a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown who is genuinely afraid of his fast-approaching expiration date: Y es que es muy dificil, a su edad, ser amigo de si mismo. Aceptarse asi, como es: la nuca raleando, la piel de la nariz rojiza (se llama cuperosis), olor en el cuerpo, no sabe bien a que, pero olor, cansancio inocultable que lo hace bostezar a cada rato, antes de hacerle el amor (o despues) a Sabine, quien se encarga, entre otras cosas de "levantarlo un poco" luego de cada sesion ... No duerme tranquilo, teme oir a Silvina, teme a su ex mujer, teme la presencia de su hijo, teme que Marcela se le aparezca en su nueva modalidad vampiresca ... Y ha asociado a eso la fecha de caducidad. De modo que se deja exprimir por Sabine, pospone la respuesta a las llamadas de Silvina, le da largas a Marcela. (118)

As we witness Julian's eventual collapse, we are forced to revise gender differences that, at least on the surface, separate men from women. In order to find himself, he runs away from his three lovers and hopes to find a room of his own but, instead, ends up at a hospital, as a result of an anaphylactic shock caused by all the drugs that Sabine has administered him. At the end of the novel Don Juan is metaphorically dethroned by his three women, accepts his new passive condition and waits to be rescued, loved, and taken care of.

AGAINST REPRESENTATION

The conclusion of Alta infidelidad in conjunction with the gender arguments developed throughout La cresta de Ilion and Cuerpo naufrago implicitly revisit Maria Elena de Valdes's study on the Representations of Women in Mexican Literature, where the critic eloquently points out women's constant struggle within Mexico's patriarchal society, due to an entangled web of sexist constraints that eliminates their individuality and transforms them into objects to most men. While her study reminds us that women in Mexican letters have been portrayed as wives, mothers, daughters, and lovers, usually as objects of desire, it also traces the birth and development of a postmodern feminist social criticism in contemporary Mexico, where "the voice of women writers is heard alongside that of their male counterparts" (193). This, as we know, is an argument that has been previously developed and supported on various occasions by Jean Franco, Debra Castillo, and Kristine Ibsen, among other critics of Mexican literature. (4) When reflecting on this situation, feminist writer and theorist Francesca Gargallo notes that literature, "ha puesto como positivos los simbolos de lo masculino y ha convertido en negativos aquellos adscritos a lo femenino, confiriendo a los hombres movimiento, honor, seguridad, subjetividad, y a las mujeres una amalgama de sensaciones relativas a lo caotico y lo estanco" (133). Simultaneously, however, she recognizes that women have employed literature to write like women, in order to see and name themselves as women, as human bodies that impose their growing presence within their respective societies. The point to observe here is that, at least to a certain extent, writing has always managed to create and recreate metaphorical spaces where women are capable of constructing their own autonomous identities (Guerra 51). (5)

Perhaps in response to Valdes's argument that most Mexican women suffer a particular kind of "sociopsychological loss of identity as persons," more so than other women of the third world "because of Mexico's proximity to the dominant first world, consumer-driven culture of the United States" (14), the novels that we have briefly analyzed vocalize a language that understands how culture, society, and history have affected the construction of our gendered identities. In the process of accepting his/her true self, for example, the confused doctor in La cresta de Ilion tries to find inherent or intrinsic male and female characteristics among his colleagues at the Granja del Buen Reposo, but he/she only corroborates what several gender theorists have been supporting for a long time: that "being a man ora woman means enacting a general set of expectations which are attached to one's sex--the 'sex role'" (Connell 22). Along these lines, the fact that masculinity and femininity are often interpreted as internalized gender roles becomes apparent during Antonia's male transformation in Cuerpo naufrago. Also in that novelistic place, the author proves that masculinity is built "on overt reactions to femininity" and that its making implies the "subordination of women" (Connell 11). If we take a superficial look at Beltran's Alta infidelidad we might be tempted to simplify the novel asa mere reversal of gender roles when, in fact, it exemplifies different manifestations of feminista as it deconstructs any preconceived and mistaken notions that "women" share a "common identity" (Phoca 59). In the novel, these concepts are best expressed when Helga, one of Julian's friends, accuses him of reducing women to a single category. "El caracter unico del yo no puede expresarse a traves de una suma, ni menos encarnar en lo general: Las mujeres," she argues. "Que tonteria pensar que era posible apoderarse de algo como la variedad, el conjunto de manifestaciones de eso que llamamos 'lo femenino.' Como si se tratara de una tierra incognita hecha de un mismo lodo. Como si todas fueran una" (89).

The novelistic results of each writer's particular endeavors vary tremendously, but their overt intention to pull us away from any dichotomy of male and female, good or bad, superior and inferior, passive of active, distinguishes this set of women writers as representatives of an innovative Mexican narrative. If we group them together, their works represent "gendered readings" that expose "the interplay of gender and social control, the fallacy of the self-contained autonomous individual (predicated on the masculine universal subject set up only by virtue of what it is not), and the exclusion of those identified (by themselves or others) as women or transgendered subjects" (Davies 183). In reaction to a contemporary civilization that promotes pure entertainment, conformism and auto-satisfaction through various forms of light literature and film (Vargas Llosa 14-15), Cristina Rivera Garza, Ana Clavel, and Rosa Beltran produce writings that transgress the limits of language at the same time that they promote the formation of fluid identities that bypass gender divisions. The final product of each novel is never an answer but a set of questions that challenge our notions of equality and difference, subject-positioning, rigid parameters of sexual orientation and behavior, the constrictions of a physical body and its psychic counterpart, or the normalization of the masculine and the feminine as opposing forces within the same spectrum.

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by Oswaldo Estrada

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

NOTES

(1) Although there are various and contradictory uses of the term "postfeminism," I use it to indicate a continuation of feminism and not to denote a rejection of this movement. Following Sarah Gamble, I consider postfeminism a pluralistic epistemology "dedicated to disrupting universalizing patterns of thought, and thus capable of being aligned with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism" (50).

(2) I apply the term trans-Rulfian to Mexico's new narrative following Gonzalez Rodriguez's categorization. "Al inicio del siglo XXI," he argues, "coexisten en la literatura mexicana tres generaciones, o mas bien, tres sensibilidades que se ensamblan y forcejan entre si: la rulfiana o canonica (de los nacidos entre 1918 hasta 1948), la postrulfiana (de los nacidos entre 1948 y 1962) y la transrulfiana (de los nacidos en las inmediaciones de los anos sesenta en adelante)" (4).

(3) The idea of masculinity and its study is largely debated in academic circles. Here, I use the term in a broad sense, to refer to the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. If we follow this logic, "masculinity," would certainly argue R.W. Connell, "is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture" (71).

(4) I am referring specifically to Franco's Plotting Women (1989; translated as Las conspiradoras in 2004), Castillo's Talking Back (1992) and Easy Women (1998), and Ibsen's The Other Mirror (1997).

(5) Following Helene Cixous's canonical postulates on the relationship between women and writing, Guerra reminds us: "Al tomar su propio cuerpo como fuente de conocimiento, de innovaciones linguisticas y de sentido para su Yo, la escritora se transforma en amanuense de su propio cuerpo y artesana de una identidad autonoma. Asi, el cuerpo retorna a su origen etimologico, al vocablo griego karpos (del sanscrito gahr, encerrar, contener; y gharbas, embrion), para volver a ser corporalidad, ambito que evade la territorializacion falogocentrica entre cuerpo y espiritu a traves de un yo que trasciende los limites de las divisiones binarias" (51).

Oswaldo Estrada is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Focusing primarily on the literatures of Mexico and Peru, in various research projects he has studied the aesthetic effect of rewriting history, the cultural implications of amalgamating the present with its colonial past, and the hegemonic forces that affect the construction of identities in the 20th and 21st Centuries. He has published several articles in Latin America, Spain and the United States on colonial and contemporary literature, from Bernal Diaz del Castillo and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Manuel Scorza, Elena Poniatowska, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. He is the author of La imaginacion novelesca. Bernal Diaz entre generos y epocas (Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2009). He has edited and co-authored Nueva narrativa latinoamericana /New Latin American Narrative (Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanisticos 2009-2010), Transgresiones en el tintero. Nuevos narradores mexicanos (Explicacion de Textos Literarios 2009), and Ningun critico cuenta esto ... Genero y transgresion en la obra de Cristina Rivera Garza (Eon 2010). Currently, he is working on a book manuscript on gender and transgression in Latin America's new narrative.