Refiguring Bodies, Rethinking Sexual Agency - 1997 MMLA Presentation

Refiguring Bodies, Rethinking Sexual Agency in Contemporary Latin American Women Authorsi

Dianna NiebylskiPresented at the Midwestern Modern Language Association

Conference- 1997

Much of this paper has been published in separate articles by theauthor on Pía Barros, Luisa Valenzuela, Ana Lydia Vega and Diamela Eltit. See below for instructions on citing this essay.1

El cuerpo femenino/Es una pausa/Terrible/Proximidad inaccesible (A woman's body/ Is a pause/Terrible/ Inaccessible proximity). The image of a woman's body as an “terrible”, abysmal pause in Octavio Paz's poem nestles in one of the most pervasive metaphors of Western psycho-sexual thought: that which posits universal woman, and in particular this universal woman's carnal materiality, as enigma, puzzle, question mark. Under the aggressive but incomprehnding gaze of a phallophiliac erotics anda phallocentric aesthetics, the female body --so often represented asa mere torso or a nude back and buttocks in Westernart--evokes both fascination and terror, desire and repulsion in texts that seek to conquer its mystery by examining it, dissecting it, autopsying it. As foreign objectcs to be mastered rather than understood or pleasured, the female bodies that appear on the beds or on the operating tables of these dominant discourses lose their fluidity, become stolid, numbed or petrified. Likewise, as the irresistible but terrifying pause ofthe androcentric imaginary, women's bodies must repress their ownyearnings, silence their own needs, in order to make room for theexplosions of semen and signification that constantly gush out ofincontinent phallic spouts.

Against this long-standing sexual-textual censorship, a number of contemporary Latin American women writers are writing bodies into their texts and writing texts that belie their 1 For citing this article:Niebylski, Dianna. “Subversive Bodies, Resistant Sexualities in Contemporary Latin American Women Authors.” Conference Presentation. Chicago: Midwestern Modern Language Association, 1997.

author's embodied (and sexed) subjectivities. In the process, these writers are finding ways to refigure and re-inscribe carnalrealities and carnal knowledges. Claiming the use of their two pairs of lips (as Luce Irigaray famously noted), writers as diverse as Luisa Valenzuela, Diamela Eltit, Pia Barros, Griselda Gambaro, Cristina Peri Rossi, Ana Lydia Vega and many others not mentioned in my paper, explore lived and living, sexed and sexualbodies from multiple angles, creating, in the process, both a newsemantics of sexuality and eroticism and a new aesthetics of libidinal representation.ii

"Write with your body. . . The secret is res, non verba" ("Escribí con el cuerpo. . .el secreto es res, non verba")(16), urges the protagonist of Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel with Argentines(Novela negra con argentinos). For at least the last two decades, thewriters I mention above (and a number of others I don't mention here) have been doing just that: writing the body into their texts, and writing their texts as embodied agents rather than as disembodied sensibilities. In their writings the project of refiguring the erotic or eroticized body necessarily involves theproject of recovering an embodied voice, or rather, embodied voices that speak from, within and out of bodies and that refuse to remain a 'terrifying pause.' The charged calligraphy of theseauthors' carnal inscriptions (or inscribed carnalities) belies a multiplicity of rhetorical, narrative and structural strategies. Together, the plurality of visions and voices holds the promise of new models of somatic representation, new figurations of desire and pleasure.

Although an exhaustive overview of the various modalities explored by these new erotic discourses written by Latin Americanwomen authors is beyond the scope of this paper, I propose to briefly preview three modes of refiguring or reconfiguring the erotic in the works of some of the authors mentioned. It should be clear that these grouping are tentative and somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, my present taxonomy aims both at gaining a preliminary appreciation for the variety that characterizes these authors' incursions into sexualities and somatic pleasures and at presenting possible channels for viewing

these various incursions from a wider perspective. For those notfamiliar with the texts cited, it is important to note that many of the works mentioned in this paper are not always erotic texts,but there is in these texts examined a sustained exploration of the physicality (and often the erotic potential) of the sexed body.

I. Comic-Parodic Erotic Reversals in Griselda Gambaro and Ana Lydia Vega

An increasingly common approach to reconfiguring the erotic possibilities of bodies, particularly as regards to heterosexual unions, appears to rely on parody--often parody with comic intent-- for exposing and puncturing the rigid limitations of traditional porno-erotic scenarios. In work after work, writers like the Argentinian novelist/playwright Griselda Gambaro and thePuerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega successfully expose the current impasse of traditional porno-erotic discourse by demystifying thefascination with phallic power that underlies so many of our conventional erotic scenarios. Writing against the grain of thistraditionally male-authored genre, Gambaro and Vega succeed in disarming the heavy arsenal of dominant (phallic) erotomania, onewhich targets women's genitals (almost exclusively, women's vaginas) but only as the hidden depositories of male (ejaculatory) pleasure.

Relying on reversals which both parody and deconstruct theoriginal models, Gambaro and Vega cannily and complicitly introduce the reader to what appear to be recognizable libidinal scenarios only to turn the tables and force the reader to revisitand re-evaluate the erotic expectations created by centuries of the same master porno-text. In Lo impenetrable, a novel which David W. Foster classifies as "burlesque[d] pornography"(288), Gambaro parodies with hyperbolic panache the chase towards sexualconsummation towards which nearly all traditional romantic encounters must lead. "The impenetrable" is indeed Madame X's sex, but not through any reticence or reluctance on the part of Madame X herself. On the contrary, and here one appreciates the parodic inversion which exposes the debilitating effect of rigid erotic codes (of sexual behavior) on both men and women, what

accounts for the inviolability of the willing hymen is its own impatience to be penetrated. It is Madame X's unbridled sexual aggression which renders her impenetrable: her relentless pursuit of "el caballero" ("the gentleman") has the effect of exacting from him nothing but premature or displaced ejaculations.

Maintaining the plot form of classical seduction narratives but reversing the gender roles, Gambaro's novel follows Madame X's increasingly more desperate advances on her gentleman ("el Caballero"), and this gentleman's badly sustained attempts at resisting the final outcome in the erotic scenarios he himself has suggested. The gentleman can write about the eroticized body(Madame X's pursuit is largely guided his written instructions) but never on the body of Madame X (although he scribbles all around it). As in conventional pornographic novels, orgasms and male ejaculations abound, but the novel once again flouts the rules of both high and low pornography by keeping the characters (both Madame X and her gentlement) in a state of perpetual (if partial) dissatisfaction. Although David William Foster rightfully notes that Gambaro's text fails to take advantage of its subversive potential by refusing the option of lesbian sex i The title as appeared on the program was changed at the time of the presentation.

ii. It has been noted than in a number of popular Latin American women writers associated with inscribing the body into their texts (in other words, with someform of "writing with the body". One could object that, in the the erotic discourse does not offer recognizable alternatives to traditional (phallocentric) patterns of pleasure and models of sexuality. Critical objections to the romantic eroticism found in the Chilean best-selling author Isabel Allende, the all too popular flavor of Laura Esquivel's exploration of sexual desire, and even the neo romantic-marxist heterosexuality celebrated in the works by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli stress that these authors' representations of sexuality and eroticism falls into the traps and trappings of phallocentric discourse. Similarly, some of the authors I study have been criticized for failing to consider seriously non-heterosexual models of eroticism. I would like to think, however, that the very insistence with whichall of these authors claim the right to experience and speak of women's bodies constitutes an important step in the process of rescuing and re-inscribing female bodies and female desiring voices into the dictionnary of our (multi-) cultural erotic imaginary.

offered by her lower-class maid (thus rejecting the possibility of a truly revolutionary eroticism), the novel's parodic appropriations of easily recognizable pornographic conventions affirms its own brand of rebellion and revisionism. More importantly, it amply demonstrates a woman writer's ability to invade and conquer this bastion of phallocentric desire and figuration: the pornographic novel.

Role reversal and gender transgressive roles are paradigmatic of Ana Lydia Vega's stories, many of which use the staples of carnavalesque parody to turn sexual codes of behavior on their head (or tail). In the comic-carnavalesque tone which has become her trademark, Vegas's stories provoke both revindicatory laughter and recognition as they show the castrating effect of role reversal on recalcitrantly phallic heterosexual males. Explosively funny, Vega's parody is highly subversive. It seeks to and succeeds in uncovering the not so subtle mysogyny behind the brutal possessiveness of the Latin macho--a possessiveness which ironically masquerades as true love in high romance and popular tabloids alike.

The plot, and the parodic inversions, of "Letra para salsa ytres soneos por encargo" ("Lyrics for Salsa and Three Songs by Mail Order") are reminiscent of Gambaro's novel. Set against thebackground of carnaval (mardi-gras, but note the 'carnal' in carnaval), this story begins with the relentless pursuit of a virginal, sultry but romantically disenchanted "Tipa" (chick) by a male predator (the "Tipo") who sees her--not unexpectedly--as carnival meat.iii The scene, and readers' expectations for the plot, are turned upside-down when the Tipa, tired of the verbal assault which her pursuer has heaped upon her for three consequetive days, decides to invert the roles of hunter and hunted and suddenly proposes a quick trip to a motel. Once againwe see the uses sexually explicit language as a tactic of deferral on the part of the male--he would have been content to imagine the story he would have told his compadres at the bar. When woman decides to cut short the (verbal) foreplay and get to the consumation scene, male virility (and the male prerogative oftaking the initiative) is seriously threatened.

Although Vega's colloquial, even vulgar style contrast with Gambaro's ironic mimicking of high-class pornographic style, the parodic inversions register the same phallic failures and invite almost identical deconstructions of dominant sexual codes. As the story unfolds and the scenario becomes more graphically porno-erotic, the narrator registers (not without some feminist glee) the progressive shrinking of the male ego and the rapid deflating of the phallic bravado represented at the beginning of the story. Role reversal spells impotence for this hunter turnedprey: reduced to envisioning erotic scenarios in the hotel bathroom in order to rescue not so much his viril pleasure as hisviril image, the Tipo is ultimately incapable of enacting the script he had envisioned for this erotic scenario. The willing hymen is a Medusa's head: it stiffens only to castrate. Bakhtin has noted that an unexpected or boundless eroticism destabilizes the hierarchies of power. Here it not only destabilizes them but(momentarily) erases them. As in Gambaro's novel, in Vega's stories the price for the heterosexual male's failure to adapt toa new erotic script claims both men and women as its victim.

Because the sexual encounters in the texts mentioned are deconstructed for purposes of subversion or comedy, one might object that the exploration of the erotic is secondary to the revisionist deconstruction. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. In these authors, at least, both the comedy and the parodic revision seem to have the effect of re-charging tired erotic conventions. At the same time, the sustained verbophilia present in both authors tends to keep the narrative in a state ofexpectant palpitation, always on the verge of slipping on one of the many verbal lubricities of the comic-erotic imagination.

II. Violence and Eroticism: Eroticism and Survival in Luisa Valenzuela and Diamela Eltit

iii. The "Tipa's" disillusionment stems from having just been jilted by her fiance. Her aggression against this new pursuer is also an act of revenge against the man who has left her for someone else. Still a virgin, she plans to offer her prized hymen to the first available penis. Once again, the all too willing availability of the female body renders the male impotent.

"La mujer es como el indio. Se pinta cuando quiere guerra."(Women are like Indians. They paint themselves up for war/sex).iv Appearing in the banal but intrusive form of a bumper sticker on a passing truck that almost runs into her, the words that greet Bella, the protagonist of Valenzuela's novella “Cuarta version”, at the beginning of the author’s much acclaimedshort story collection Cambio de armas (Other Weapons), set the toneand start the engines for stories of dangerous and sometimes lethal seductions in dark, dictatorial times. The narrator who reconstructs Bella’s story on the basis of sporadic entries in the journal found after the latter’s demise imagines that the seductive and politically committed actress at the center of the story immediately notes that the main character should have paid more attention to the double entendre of the bumper sticker: sometimes failure to read street signs (even mobile ones) can be deadly, and deadlier still for self-assured, politically committed women who think they can stop or redirect traffic, metaphorically speaking, simply by the force of their seductiveness and their wits..

Just as the narrative interference with the actual events ofthe story belies the confusion between eroticism and manipulation, power and play, and power plays, the sign on the red bumper sticker, with its purposefully ambiguous double meaning, serves as a not so comic reminder that the entangled webthat traps women, and women's sexualities, into rigid stereotypes, still parades on the streets of our cities with impunity, often masquerading as popular wisdom. As erotic/exotic objects and conniving subjects, women are equated with the vanquished (Indians), and both groups--exotic indians and erotic women--are in turn linked with subterfuge (paint) and dishonesty. The force of the popular saying featured on the bumper sticker resides in the dual meaning of "querer guerra," (to want war), as both wanting trouble (most likely of a sexual kind) and waging war. Gradually, as the narrator puts together the pieces of the story, we understand that Bella’s erotic seduction of the foreign ambassador and the subsequent love storythat follows is either coincidental or strategic to Bella’s iv. All translations of Spanish texts are mine.

decision to convince the ambassador to take in her “friends” as temporary refugees by allowing them sanctuary in his embassy. The friends turn out to be men and women she hardly knows who aretargeted by the military Junta for immediate capture and almost certain death. Predictably, the story ends with the military storming the embassy and gunning down the refugees along with Bella. It is never clear whether the ambassador, frightened by Bella’s risk-taking political passion or simply frightened of thepotential personal consequences of the episode, was complicit or simply passive in the face of the military’s illegal invasion of the embassy. In the end, Bella’s confident, powerful erotic appeal fails to result in the success of her strategic move to subvert male power and military might. Yet the story never questions Bella’s decision, premeditated or not, of exchanging sex for political favors (or in this case, political freedom). It does question Bella’s judgment in assuming that a man in a position of power and privilege might be willing to sacrifice that, and his domestic tranquility, for erotic or romantic bliss.But perhaps Bella never expected this – perhaps Bella’s “painted”, eroticized body was always meant to be a mere political weapon, one she was willing to sacrifice in order to wage her own “dirty” war, and the narrator who reconstructs her story, like the neo-romantic readers that we are, fails to see the extent of her sexual performance.

In the History of Sexuality, a work whose influence on contemporary Latin American writers cannot be overestimated, Michel Foucault insists that sexuality itself (or at least its deployment) is the effect of power: a power energized, channeled,controlled and regulated through the training and control of bodies. The convoluted ways in which power seeks to control, betray and sometimes destroy women’s bodies by controlling or provoking their sexual urges in Valenzuela’s stories from Cambio de armas finds its detractors, and this is a legitimate stance. The affirmation of sexuality in the face of violence is always troubling . In my reading, however, the author’s in-your-face affirmation or women characters’ right to own or wield their sexuality in the face of political violence is daring precisely because it raises difficult questions about women’s agency in

situations where agency is aggressively, even brutally denied them.

“I am your horse in the Night," whispers the battered, tortured protagonist of the story by the same name in the same collection. The willingness with which this woman offers herselfas a sexual fantasy for the disappeared lover who has been a victim of the dictatorship has both puzzled and disturbed feminist critics. Yet, as Diane Marting perceptively points out, Chiquita's insistence or retaining her body's potential for pleasure (specifically sexual pleasure) immediately following a torture session which doubtlessly included multiple rapes, is a sign of resistance, not subservience. In a similar vein, the "so-called Laura" ("la llamada Laura") in the story "Other Weapons" ("Cambio de armas") begins her journey back to re-memorying and to sanity by deciding to own the libidinal energy of her amnesiac body in moments when her so-called husband penetrates her with a violence more revealing of his hatred than of his desire-- although for him the two have become inseparable:“The moments when she makes love with him are the only ones that really belong to her. They're truly hers, they belong to so-called Laura, to this body right here, the body she's touching, and that gives her shape. . ." (120).

Although disconcerting for many feminist and non-feminist readers, I argue that so-called Laura’s subconscious decision to allow herself to feel her body in the violent encounters with herso-called husband are crucial to her ability to recapture memory and agency at the end of the story. Ownership of the sexualized body as the only weapon left in her possession by an enemy who has taken everything else, including her identity, is a necessary precursor to the character’s psychic recovery. It is only from the standpoint of a body that can steel feel pleasure as well as pain that the so-called Laura can summon up the strength to repossess the other weapon that had been taken from her at the time of her imprisonment and torture. In other words, the key to understanding the juxtaposition of the lover-torturer’s phallo(go)centric sexual domination and the gyno-centric metanarrative that centers the story resides in the

woman's insistence on the erotic as the real key to her body. This "so-called" Laura's only chance for survival stems from her determination to reclaim her body and that body's possibilities for pleasure after (and in the midst of) terror.v As one of the "polymorphous perversions" discussed by Herbert Marcuse, a thinker who closely examined the link between repression and sexuality, the ability to reclaim one's body as a locus of pleasure at the very moment when the other tries to define that same body as a target of pain can be understood not just as a strategy for survival but a subversive tactic.vi Elia Kantaris puts it most persuasively when noting that "the insistence on thesheer physicality of the woman's body is a way of resisting (phallic) logical reduction" (255).

Much less interested in dwelling on the erotic possibilitiesof women's bodies, Diamela Eltit, Valenzuela's contemporary and abitter critic of the Pinochet era, is perhaps the preeminent exponent of the violence perpetrated on women’s bodies by repressive political and social systems. At the same time, the unusual and painful survival skills of her women characters do not exclude sexual and erotic subversions. Her female charactersare all exiles, yet their exile takes place in their country of origin, sometimes in open and public spaces (such as the main square in Lumpérica), sometimes in their own claustrophobic homes (as in Los vigilantes). As in Luisa Valenzuela’s stories from Cambiode armas, Eltit places her women characters under constant surveillance. In Lumpérica L. Iluminada (literally, “the lit v.It should be amply clear that Valenzuela is not prescribing (or even suggesting) that women in similar situations (torture, rape) ought to turn the situation to their advantage by recasting violence in terms of auto-erotic pleasure; nor is the author advocating that this type of resistance as a path to rehabilitate and redeem the violator of the woman's body. What I am noting is that, in some of Valenzuela's stories, her women characters's claiming theirbodies --and their body's potential for pleasure-- is seen as a subversive tactic.

viThe author and this critic, are both highly aware of the fact that this attitude is forcefully rejected by many feminist theories. Yet “states of exception” also provoke and sometimes demand exceptional and troubling deviations from more acceptable norms.

one”), and again in Los Vigilantes (The Guards), Eltit's protagonists must somehow protect, preserve, nourish, or discover and reconstruct their always threatened subjectivities. Everything threatens them: military force, the law, family units in turns repressed and repressive, frightened neighbors willing to turn each other in, and even the frigid cold which is an almost constant physical presence in Eltit's narratives. Starved, babbling, muttering, often screaming, Eltit's women recall nothing if not Edvard Munch's despairing anorexics at times. Surrounded by vigilantes on all sides and stalked by angry men (familiar or not) who would control their bodily functions –theirsleeping, eating, mothering-- the scarred, soiled, sometimes seemingly deranged but rarely silent women of Eltit's narratives seek to survive one more day by asserting the still organic nature of some bodily function, even if that function is fear, orhunger.

Eltit's novels do not gravitate towards the erotic or the sexual with the same insistence that we find in Valenzuela's narratives, but the close examination of bodily functions cannot exclude moments in which the body's sexual nature is recognized and explored. In Los vigilantes, the shivering protagonist, who has barricaded herself inside her apartment with her strange young son, dreams that the beginning of the libidinal experience of thebody is to be located in one's awareness of the potential for contact and feeling in discreet body parts. This electrified erotic field described by the narrator as part of her dreams is reminiscent of Cixous or Irigaray’s claims that women’s sexualityis all over women’s bodies and not limited to their sexual organs.vii At the same time, Eltit's insistence on focussing (paying attnetion) to specific bodily parts (without at all priviledging the traditional erotogenous zones) refers us to someof the most recent theories of somatic pleasure, those which argue that erotic discourses must abandon both the reductive singularity of the privileged phallus and the tendency to forget that the body is composed of discreet parts. Both Alphonso Lingis and Elizabeth Grosz have argued this last point eloquently.viii

It is important to note that this call for attention to bodyparts is not at all an attempt to reduce the living body to the status of laboratory organism, where detachable parts are subjected to the cold scientific gaze of the dissecting other. There is nothing clinical about the way in which Eltit, or any ofthese writers mentioned, approach the task of representing the body. Rather, by refusing to veil women's bodies any longer, they expose bodies and sexualities to the public eye is (sometimes literally, as in Eltit's novels, where the bodies of the women protagonists are under constant surveillance). The particularities or women's bodies: women's bodies at rest, in motion, in the throes of pain or ecstasies of pleasures, in hunger or satiety. Understood as the workings of its parts, thisliving body can and does reconstitute itself as a moving, changing subjectivity. But, as Rosi Braidotti insists in NomadicSubjects, what makes possible the union and unity of the parts is the fragile desire to be a unified field, both for oneself and inorder to relate to the other, to others: "this living sexed organism has a unity of its own, which hangs on a thread: the thread of desire in its inextricable relation to language and therefore to others"(55).

III. Pia Barros and Cristina Peri Rossi: Re-inventing the Language of Pleasure

Remembering her first attempts at writing erotica in the 1930's, Anaîs Nin lamented that "the language of sex had yet to

vii Hélène Cixous's writes that “woman's sex is all over [her body], the geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, multiple in its differences, complex, subtle, than is imagined." (28)

viii. In Space, Time and Perversion Elizabeth Grosz insists on the need "to abandon our habitual understanding of entities as the integrated totality, and instead focus on the elements, the parts. . .to look beyond the organism to the organs that comprise it. . .In looking at the interlocking of two such parts--fingers and velvet, toes and sand--there is not, as psychoanalysis suggests, a predesignated erotogenic zone, a site always ready and able to function as erotic: rather, the coming together of two surfaces produces a tracing that imbus eros or libido to both of them, making bits of bodies, its parts or particular surfaces throb, intensify, for their own sake. . .(182).

be invented."(100) Half a century later (in 1978?), Hélène Cixous registered a similar complaint when noting that "women have everything to say about their. . .sexuality. . .about the infinite and mobile complexity of their eroticism."(55) Written shortly after the porno-erotic novels of Erica Jong and other popular women writers and other taxonnomies of female sexuality (i.e. Shere Hite, Jacqueline Susann), Cixous's comment strikes asmuch more surprising and problematic than Nin's. Yet, as a number of scholars and critics have repeatedly pointed out, much of the erotica written by both men and women in this century still resonates to the male phallocentric semiotic code. In its imaginary, sexual acts gravitate around the rise and fall of maledesire, and bodily pleasures (both male and female) are felt and told around the binary Freudian paradigm of the vaginal gap that needs to be filled and the magical phallus that comes to its rescue by inscribing itself all over the empty space.

According to Elizabeth Grosz, when the female body has not been constructed as "a lack or absence" in the Western imaginary,it has been represented as "as a leaking, uncontrollable, seepingliquid."(203) As this "formless flow," it has inspired not so much fascination and terror as revulsion and derision: contrastedto the curves and flows of women's bodies, the solid geometry of the phallus appears as a model of control over formlessness, of (will)power over matter. Not surprisingly, the (erotic) discourses that record phallocentric pleasures tend to be linear (the ejaculatory explosions break the line only momentarily) and to dramatize the conquest of phallic verticality over an all but ignored gynocentric labyrinth. Robert Scholes has noted that Western literature has performed textal (rather than physical) cliterodectomy on women. At the very least, it has bracketed every female sexual "point of pleasure' except for the hidden vagina--which can be hidden again in penetration. It is against this textual erasure of women's bodies and women's dispersed sexuality (erotogenic zones) and also against the imaginary and semantic censorship imposed on women's sexual pleasures by the codies of phallocentric pornoeroticism that authors like Pía Barros (Chile) invent novel and more fluid registers for celebrating the libidinal revolutions their characters undergo.

"Si nous continuous à parler le même langage, nous allons reproduire la même histoire," ("If we continue to speak the same language we will keep reproducing the same history/story") notes Luce Irigaray at the beginning of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. In opposition to the phallocentric rhetoric of virility so characteristic of traditional pornography and porno-eroticism, women who write about eroticism, and especially those who write erotic texts, persistently explore the possibility of writing thebody erotic into different (and novel) aeesthetic and semantic registers.

For Barros "writing with the body" means inscribing "underpants, pubis and fingers" ("el calzón, el pubis y los dedos") in the text. In "Historia para ventana" ("Story for Window"), the double act of self-pleasure that results from discovering one's erotic potential even as one begins to imagine possibilities for one's life story works against the grain (both imagistically and rhetorically) of phallocentric eroticism. Although the male presence is what inspires the young woman in the story to begin her solitary games at the window, the male body turns out to be dispensable. The male gaze, furthermore (important because it excites the exhibitionist protagonist) is necessary only as a catalyst for the woman's desire. Once desiretakes over the character's body (and the narrator's imagination),women's fingers will do the rest: the protagonist's will inscribe pleasure onto her body; the narrator's will engage in a different kind of self-pleasure as they write the story of this young body's awakening.

"Historia para ventana" offers an early preview of the 'polymorphous perversions' that fill the pages of Barros's more recent Signos bajo la piel (Signs under the Skin). Taken together, the stories in this collection offer a smorgasboard of sexual practices and erotic yearnings. An atmosphere of sexual anarchy hovers over plots and characters, and a laissez faire attitude may be the only constant in these erotically-charged narratives whichaddress masturbation, lesbian encounters, violent sexual couplings and a host of other sexual happenings with equal

acceptance. Yet what the most interesting (and most remarkable) aspect of Signos bajo la piel is not the combinatorial sum of bodies engaged in unorthodox sexual ventures but the wide tonal span of the erotic discourse that runs through the stories. The melancholy eroticism of "Virgilia y las palabras" ("Virgilia and Words"), a story in which a virginal and lonely woman is seduced (physically and psychically) by the verbal artistry of a false storyteller (a hollow-hearted foreigner with Virgil-like skill for spinning tales); the simple, humble erotic tone with which "El mensajero de las otras rutas" ("The Messenger of the Other Bus Routes") registers the surprising but quiet sexual awakening of the middle-aged female passenger on the bus that takes her from the slums to work); the harsh, cold impersonality of "Como los perros" ("Like Dogs"), where an anonymous pair struggles to maintain a mutual sexual attraction on the margins of subjectivity only to realize too late that the only hope for lustlies in embodied subjects, not depersonalized bodies; the erotic euphoria of "Cartas de inocencia" ("Naive Letters"), in which a delightfully original exchange of erotic requests for auto-eroticmoves turns out to be one big masturbatory game where fantasy, desire and two colors of ink come together: these and other tonal variations work to preserve the vibrancy and fluidity of the erotic discourse in the stories. Even the most jaded reader of erotica will find in Barros's tonal polyphony a antidote to the boredom and exhaustion that often set in after a few pages (or a few minutes) of porno-erotic tales.

In her superbly argued "Arqueología de la imaginación: erotismo, transgresión y pornografía" ("Arqueology of the Imagination: eroticism, transgression and pornography"), Iris Zavala remarks that in erotic and pornographic discourses, "the silenced body of woman is the object and target of signifiers" imposed on it by an agressively phallic scopophilia. As I state in my introduction, traditionally the male gaze silences the (generally female) body it seeks to penetrate. Indeed, in conventional porno-erotic narratives, the erotic text seeks to demonstrate its mastery over a mute or silenced (usually passive or fragile) female body by inscribing its phallocentric codes allover it. Surely, then, one of the projects which women writers

of the erotic (or writers which incorporate eroticism) in their books have been engaged in, as must be clear from my previous comments, is that of recovering the female voice(s) which can speak of and about female eroticism(s). While Barros's multi-tonal narratives of desire offer proof of this revindicatory project. So do Cristina Peri Rossi's novels and stories, where non-comic inversions (of conventional binary (psycho-sexual) oppositions, of gender stereotypes) produce surprisingly new waysof writing about male and female sexuality.

The trajectory of Cristina Peri Rossi's impressive ouevre belies a sustained effort to write against what Barbara Spackman calls the "fascist rhetoric of virility."(81) Fragmented, airy, multi-vocal and always pluri-cultural, Peri Rossi's fictional voices explore sexuality as the most fluid and mutating part of women's and men's subjectivities. For the author of La nave de los locos (Ship of Fools), sexuality is often elusive (both sexual identity and sexual preference). What is less elusive is the author's insistence, work after work, on unmasking the many (false) faces of phallocentrism, of exposing the emptiness at theheart of its macho bravado. Her much acclaimed Nave de los locos navigates a tortuous but nevertheless sure course towards the rejection of phallic aggresion as the only way out of (ontological/ existential) exile. The way back to belonging somewhere, anywhere is through a process of radical feminization,a process that requires a questionning first, and eventually an abandonment of phallic virility. Realizing that his only chance of winning the love of the androgynous Lucia--a woman who has recently suffered the brutal invation of an abortive needle--is to offer her his sexual impotence as a kind of promise that therewill be no more unwanted penetrations of her body, X seems to go a step further still. There is, in his rejection of phallic masculinity a recognition that the end (or the numbing) of the phallus is the beginning of sexual equality between men and women.

Peri Rossi's more recent Solitario de amor, an openly erotic novel which sustains its erotic impulse from beginning to end, explores in detph and at length the possibilities of inverting

the paradigms (still in Freudian garb) that have so dominated sexual codes in Western culture. As in her earlier novels and stories, here too we witness a marked (and entirely desired) feminization of the masculine narrator. Phallic virility is not rejected but seen exclusively as an object of pleasure for the desired woman's body. More important than the characters' (hetero)sexual relationship, however--which has ended before the novel begins--is the insistence of refiguring the sexual imaginary, of rewriting the codes that dominate sexual behavior. Exiled from the bodily presence of the woman he loves (his desirefor her has apparently either bored or exhausted her), Peri Rossi's male protagonist and narrator procedes to re-examine the symbolic codes that negotiate any possibility of discourse between him and his beloved. Under Peri Rossi's finely tuned femenine and feminist awareness, this exquisitely non-aggressive (yet sexually potent) male discovers that, malgré Sartre (and Beauvoir), the male of the species is the one who lacks (the one whose being is open, incomplete, a gaping absence). Woman, on the other hand, is so constituted as to be self-sufficient and self-contained at all times. Inverting the vagina-gap, penis-filler binary prejudice, Aída's lover reaches the conclusion--with absolute conviction--that a woman with a uterus is someone who inhabits the house of being so fully and intimately that no exile can be final (or lasting) for her. By contrast, with his projectile erection, man is a perpetual transcient, his only hopeto be allowed entrance into the home/being of women's bodies but knowing in advance that all passports of residence (all terms of shelter) are temporary.

There is usually a comic-ironic flavor to Peri Rossi's feminist revisionism, yet the irony is never enough to deflate the deconstructive project or to undermine the intensely poetic eroticism of this novel. Instead, as with Barros's stories, the reader finds herself surprised at the unexpected, and unexpectedly eroticized, new sexual figurations that result from the author's deft inversions of conventional clichés. The irony is felt, rather, in the hyperbolic exaltation of the narrator's rhetoric (which parodies yet subvjerts the false rhetoric of praise present in conventional romances, where praise is used as a tool of seduction and domination. Ironic too, but also poetic

and polyvalent, the title (Solitario de amor), which suggests severalmeanings at once.ix By alluding to the well-known expression "jugar al solitario" ("to play solitary") the title might suggestthat masturbation is the only game left to the rejected protagonist. Less playfully but highly poetic is the reading of"solitario" as an adjective, so that the protagonist/narrator is "Solitary" both as a result and in the absent of love. Read as anoun, on the other hand, the title suggests something like a musical composition (hence, Love Solo), one for a blue soloist, of course.

The novel's ability to maintain the erotic tension throughout is itself predicated on a remarkably clever inversion.Whereas conventional porno-erotic texts silenced the body (and the mouth) of woman in order to allow the explosion of male semen/ink, here the envisioned but absent woman (who is more verbally and mentally agile than her suitor) inhibits phallic activity but instead provokes the nearly endless semantic explosion that is the text; a text which is above all a celebration of woman (and woman's body). Naturally, behind this (male) narrator's gushing mouth is Peri Rossi's pen, so the inversion is complete.

"When eroticism is not confined to the projection of power relations, or when it inverts those power relations," notes Zavala in the essay mentioned earlier, "it becomes a discourse ofprodigious/prodigal signifiers" in which "play and pleasure mingle and intensify (the possibilities) of discourse."(161). Cixous reaches a similar conclusion when noting that "when the repressed. . .returns, hers is an explosive return."(58) In PeriRossi's work, and most especially in Solitario de amor, revels in thepossibility of a textual juissance which rests on a radical revisioning, refiguring, and finally re-writing of the erotic possibilities of nomadic, fluid subjectivities.x

Preliminary Conclusions:

ix I am reminded also of Esther Tusquet's El amor es un juego solitario (Love is a solitary game) (1979) and the polysemic variations suggested in this title.

"A woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor. . .will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language."(58) Against great odds, not the least of which was the real possibility of their own body's literal disappearance in the case of authors like Valenzuela and Eltit, or the risk of being labelled obscene and censored out of critical circulation, the daringly vocal and powerfully sexual authors I've examined are succeeding in rethinking, refiguring, and even re-naming the experience of women's eroticized body. As my initial exploration into some of the works examined shows, the wide diversity which characterizes the sexually-conscious, erotically charged explorations of the authors mentioned here is challenging and promising. Challengingbecause it is forces readers and critics alike to consider new paradigms of reading as well as new models of somatic desire; promising because the "polymorphous perversions" explored and described in these works all point in the direction of verbal andstylistic polyvalence and thus open up many windows for stories, and many stories to new windows.

Dianna NiebylskiEarlham College 1997

x. Rosi Braidotti's notion of "nomadic subjects" is particular relevant here. Braidotti’s nomadism, transcience, and exile are potentially fertile ground forre-examining Peri Rossi’s treatment of fluid subjectivities and sexualities inher narratives.

Works Cited

Barros, Pía. Miedos transitorios. (De a uno, de a dos, de a todos). Santiago: Ergo Sum, 1986.

---. Signos bajo la piel. Santiago: Grijalbo, 1994.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Cixous, Hélène. La risa de la medusa. Ensayos sobre la escritura. Trans. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1995.

----. "Le rire de la Méduse," L'arc 61, 1975: 39-54. Eltit, Diamela. Lumpérica. Santiago: Editorial Planeta Chilena, 1983.

----. Los vigilantes. Santiago/Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1994.

Foster, David William. "Pornography and the Feminine Erotic: Griselda Gambaro's Lo impenetrable." Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica VII: 284-296.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980.

Gambaro, Griselda. Lo impenetrable. Buenos Aires: Torres Aguero, 1984.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Eds. de Minuit.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and civilization. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Peri Rossi, Cristina. La nave de los locos. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.

----. Solitario de amor. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1988.

Scholes, Robert. Semiotic and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Valenzuela, Luisa. Cambio de armas. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1982.

---. Novela negra con argentinos. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1990.

Vega, Ana Lydia y Carmen Lugo Filippi. Vírgenes y mártires. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Antilla, 1981.

Zavala, Iris. "Arqueología de la imaginación: erotismo, transgresión y pornografía." Discurso erótico y discurso transgresor en la cultura peninsular. Siglos XI al XX. Ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocáretz and Iris M. Zavala. Madrid: Ediciones Tuero, 1992.