Ileana Rodríguez

The Places of Tradition: Modernity/Backwardness, Regionalism/Centralism, Mass/Popular, Homogeneous/Heterogeneous

THE TOPIC OF MY WORK IS TRADITION. IN WHAT FOLLOWS, I REVIEW THE different hermeneutic places of “tradition” for the purpose of pinpointing the discussions on the relationship between modernity and backwardness, regionalisms and centralisms, the mass and the popular, the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. I also pay attention to how the discussion on “tradition” involves the spheres of the state and of civil society (Martín Barbero),1 and the party and the trade unions (Hobsbawm),2 and the critical philosophies of praxis and common sense (Gramsci).3 Such reflection also demands examination of related theories and philosophies of history, above all the relationship between “determination in the last instance” and social struggles, willfulness (voluntarism), economic determinism, and popularisms (Laclau, Mouffe).4

Gendering Globalization: Women in the Corporate World and the Marketing of Women’s Bodies

women are a global group in the sense that the distinctive social defi nition, treatment, and status of women as a sex relative to men is recognizable in diverse forms all over the world. Both women’s subordination and their resistance to it have been global all along, predating what is now called globalization....Gender inequality is a global system....Women’s world...is the globe, in inherent tension with subsumption of women and their rights to states....As the mountain of women moves, the state in its male form is arguably becoming anachronistic, even obsolete. (13) 1

Trash Literature: Reports of Incest in Democratic and Failed States, The Cases of Jaycee Lee Dugard and Mackenzie Phillips

Narratives of incest, pedophilia, and rape project an ample spectrum of sexual fantasies for purchase in the market place, translating violence into cultural discourse, as in serial killer or incest stories. These are big business narratives. So-called Trash Literature thrives on them. On the flip side, stories of child abuse and violence against women stunt the imagination. Stories of materialized male fantasies bring us face-to-face with the incongruous-grotesque, a style resulting from an inflection and intensity that signifies a mixture of the harrowing and gruesome, abhorrent and bizarre. The mode hits the reader in her guts, pointing in the direction of the unbearable in affect: that which can no longer be listened to, can no longer be seen or comprehended, a threshold. No single master code seems capable of embracing these fantasies in their entirety. Lacan’s concept of narcissism may offer the reader a preview of the barely graspable; a concept that, in cramming everything into a convenient explanation, discloses previously undisclosed pathways hanging over sexual fantasies. The psyche is revealed as an immense universe, a network of points of affinity and traumas. As it stands, male erotica seems to escape the complicity with some meta-narrative, with fictions than render possible representation but certainly fit what Lauren Berlant dares to call public intimacy. We examined the materialization of this concept in the last chapter.

Incest, Pedophilia, Rape: Theories of Desire and Jurisprudence, The Case of the Other Rosita

It was a dewy morning when Juanita, with rose-pink cheeks and wearing a crisp skirt, went to the spring-fed pond at the bottom of the ravine. Her skirt flew in the breeze swept by a northern gale, and her hair whirled like tiny black snakes against her face. She was so happy seeing the scented trees running at her across the plain and gusts of fragrant winds filling her jar of joy. She bounced in her step, being swaddled in her laughter right in the middle of the meadow, the dog barking at her side chasing leaves that swam swiftly in the wind. The spring-fed pond was shaded by all kinds of fruit trees, surrounded by sleeping blue ponds like long and soft ribbons of sky and by greenish rocks sweating out the day. She sat down and, with imperious breaths, reined back her breasts that wanted to break free, fixed her shirt, caressed the dog, contemplated the branches bathing in the waters below, took a mirror and cast a loving gaze at herself. She was alone. Around the ravine a horseman rode by. The hooves broke the mirror of the waters. Juana recognized him and her heart hung in her chest. She could not run away, thus waited for him holding onto a leaf. The horseman hurried up and soon was by her side. He didn’t mind the dog’s lapping up the spring with its tongue and began to seduce her with the steady pace of the blowing wind. With gentle no’s and weak pulls, a delicate resistance was put up, then laments, sobs and after that, the eye of water blinked to carefully assess her reflection. With one arm over her eyes Juana remained in the shadows, her honor gone, in awe like the sleeping skin of the blue sky. A story that begins in harmony and beauty ends in rape. With this pleasant, soft, and delicate language, the writer poeticizes the disturbance of a quiet, candid life by impulse and power. Nothing further from the theoretical language of psychoanalysis; nothing more alien to a juridical debate. This is the onset of “La Honra,” a short story by Salvador Salazar Arrue (Salarrue) that begins in a clear morning, in a clean world, and ends in the shadows of rape and a suggested homicide. Juanita soon becomes Juana, the shaded meadows, a somber landscape, and the loving father, a murderer, shining dagger in hand.

State Archives, Mass Media Reports, and Visceral Memories: The Cases of Margarito y Marianita

It is thus that the rapist looks at his victim in the masculine fiction of Torotumbo, a short story by Miguel Angel Asturias; and it is thus that the writer represents the figure of the rapist, always an abject masculinity. In this story, the rape of the indigenous girl, Natividad Quintuche, empties into a popular mass killing. What permits the ensnaring of a private and a public event to the point of making them one and the same? The answer takes a long, skewed way over the plot until the body of the girl and the body of the fatherland become one. Who would doubt then that the state in its formation and maintenance passes through the bodies of women? Insofar as language signs are concerned, “women” and “fatherland” are unrelated. But, in terms of their poetic possibilities, the process of subliminal transposition is rendered possible and generative in their coalescence. Yet the road to their convergence is long and warped.

Trans-State-Border Subjectivities: International Violence and Immune Citizenship

In this chapter, I examine the case of Doris Ivania Jimenez, a woman who was raped and murdered on November 21, 2006, in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. The men involved in the crime are Eric Stanley Volz, Julio Martin Chamorro Lopez, alias Rosita, Armando Agustin Llanes Navarro, and Nelson Antonio Lopez Danglas. Volz and Chamorro were found guilty of committing the crime; Llanes and Danglas were exonerated. In subsequent investigations and mediations, the intervention of a North American law firm and of a former member of the CIA under investigation by the Italian police, Volz was absolved. He left the country by way of a specially charted helicopter after being in prison for some time.

In the Living Flesh: Maternities and Masculinities

In Reina Roffe’s Monte de Venus, a lesbian girl, Julia Grade, meets a man at a bar and befriends him. As pals, and “from man to man,” they establish a drinking relationship that ends at the guy’s house where they continue partying. As it gets late, he invites her to sleep over. She agrees and tells us,

Human Rights/Sexual Desires: Incest/Pedophilia/Rape

Every day Nicaraguan newspapers report cases of young girls being assaulted by their fathers. These are men who sexually utilize their daughters. Headlines inform the public of outrageous deeds in dreadful language such as “Man that Raped his Daughter for 3650 Days Goes Before Judge” (El Nuevo Diario [END], 01/21/2008); “She is Only Ten-Years-Old and Seven Months Pregnant” (END, 01/24/2008); “[Man] Rapes Three Minor Daughters” (END, 01/27/2008). These and other stories of adult cases of rape can be read as corollaries to those of incest, pedophilia, and rape. Although incest, pedophilia, and rape are technically and theoretically separated from each other, the cleavage does little to explain their convergence in the cases reported earlier. Thus, I am treating them under the all-encompassing rubric of male sexual abuse against women.