Argentina: Stories for a Nation, and: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory Adela C. Licona Feminist Formations, Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010, pp. 201-207 (Review) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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The weekend that I finished reading these texts, the film adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s 2004 novel My Sister’s Keeper was released. It was against the backdrop of Coates’s, Flavin’s, and Harwood’s work that I viewed the film, which deals with the consequences of a mother’s choice of using ART so that she could give birth to a “donor baby” that would keep her ill daughter alive. I am certain that each of these texts, as well as the film, would make a fine addition to a unit on women and reproduction in an upper-division course. These authors’ exploration of women’s reproductive lives will provide students with a lively exchange of ideas and concepts. Reference Picoult, Jodi. 2004. My Sister’s Keeper. New York: Washington Square Press.
Glenda Lewin Hufnagel is a faculty member in the Department of Human Relations and a faculty affiliate in the Women’s Studies program at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches interdisciplinary graduate courses for the Master of Human Relations degree, which is offered in the United States, Europe, and Asia (she has taught at all three sites). She is currently under contract for a book on the cultural construction of menstruation, with a projected publication date of 2012. She can be reached at
[email protected].
Argentina: Stories for a Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 282 pp., $67.50 hardcover, $22.50 paper. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory by Catherine S. Ramírez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 229 pp., $79.95 hardcover, $22.95 paper. Adela C. Licona In Argentina: Stories for a Nation, a book about trans/national imaginaries, representation, and the possibilities of representation as a productive process, Amy Kaminsky examines cultural artifacts to meticulously consider Argentina as it is represented from within, as well as how it is represented by, and exists in the minds of, others. Throughout, Kaminsky considers why those in Argentina are so interested and invested in what others believe about it as a nation. Through a thorough examination and analysis, the author demonstrates how Argentina’s own understanding of itself is deeply related to what others imagine and believe it to be. It is in this relational play across boundaries that Kaminsky introduces
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the notion of a trans/national imaginary. Revealed trans/national and transcultural relations demonstrate a reciprocal and relational productivity contributing to the trans/national myths that constitute Argentina over time and space. Importantly, Kaminsky demonstrates how contexts that produce a postcolonial subject ultimately do “violence to the indigenous people,” who are made invisible throughout the productions and representations of Argentina (31). Catherine Ramírez also explores trans/national imaginaries and how they invisibilize resistant, transgressive, and ultimately gendered identities. In The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, Ramírez simultaneously considers U.S. nationalism and Chicano cultural nationalism, particularly as these have served to obscure, if not altogether erase, the pachuca from the historical record. The Woman in the Zoot Suit, Ramírez explains, is a book about history as a contested production with competing interpretations. The distinction of and engagement with these two competing nationalisms makes this work uniquely compelling. Ramírez approaches nation as “official” and “unofficial,” as well as racialized and gendered, in order to consider multiple and competing myths of nation, particularly for the pachuca. Like Kaminsky, she considers a multiplicity of cultural productions and artifacts, as these are implicated in contradictory nationalist imaginaries. Both Kaminsky and Ramírez complicate the historical record and, therefore, understandings of the social actors who populate these records, not only to resist historical silences and/or misrepresentations, but also to resist the homogenizing tendencies that can occur when matters of nation and identity are considered. Each author carefully reflects on the discursive mis/representations of nation as a spatialized location constituted by myths that contribute to trans/national identities. In reading these works in tandem, I recalled the work of Emma Pérez (1999), whose decolonial imaginary is, for me, at play in both texts. According to Pérez, it is the decolonial imaginary that often makes room for revisioned histories that resist and can serve to transform historical misrepresentations in order to consider not only a historical presence, but also diverse historical roles for those previously obscured or silenced in and by dominant historical narratives. I have become increasingly interested in how spaces and social discourses converge to reproduce and/or resist dominant narratives. As I argue elsewhere, in order to ascertain how different discourses and spaces are implicated in the production and subversion of historical narratives and their produced invisibilities, we must attend to the ways in which such discourses and spaces are imbued with and shaped by ideologies and relations of power (Massey 2005). Kaminsky and Ramírez each prove adept at creatively and critically attending to such matters. The chapters in Argentina give readers an understanding of the trans/ national imaginaries that have been constructed and that construct Argentina. In addition to considering the ways in which Argentina has existed and exists in European and American imaginaries (and how important such imaginaries
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are to Argentina), Kaminsky includes considerations and distinctions among filmmakers, writers, visual artists, and academics. She carefully considers what is at stake for Argentina in the trans/national imaginaries she explores. Once the trans/national scope of the imaginary has been established, Kaminsky moves readers to a more localized focus so that the Otherness of Argentina is explored across lines of sex, race, and ethnicity from within Argentina. Finally, Kaminsky interrogates how Argentina’s Dirty War figures (and does not figure) into national myths, memories, and material actualities. In the first chapter, Kaminsky introduces the relational reciprocities at play throughout the text and reacquaints readers with the relationship between literary and cultural critic Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf. This relationship perfectly reflects the argument Kaminsky’s text is making: Namely, that imaginaries are both constructed and construct. Woolf, Kaminsky reminds readers, writes to Ocampo to inquire about the blue butterflies of the Argentine pampas. Never having seen them, Ocampo obliges the request by sending Woolf a gift of this exotic butterfly. Kaminsky suggests that this relationship offers readers insight not only into the processes of “othering” and “self-exoticizing” that goes on between Argentina and Europe, but also into the “tortured” nature of their relationship. It is here that Kaminsky’s aim is made explicit: Her book aims to “reflect upon Argentina in the international imaginary, without losing sight of Argentina’s stake in its being present in the mind of the rest of the world” (10). Ultimately, Kaminsky argues, these reciprocal relationships are indicative of a kind of power on the part of Argentina and Argentines, as well as an expression of dependency, that I would argue is really a kind of codependency whereby Argentina is deeply invested in how its imagined sense of self exists and is enabled in trans/national imaginaries. Mimicry and its menacing potential are considered throughout Kaminsky’s next chapter, in which she argues that it is vital to be aware of the tracings of othering that are part of trans/national imaginaries regarding Argentina. Readers confront Argentina’s relationship to empirical and colonizing forces, to Eurocentrism, and even to what Kaminsky later refers to as “Hispanic” orientalism. Kaminsky deploys feminist poststructural and psychoanalytic theories that move beyond binaries to third spaces of relational productions. Understanding the relationship between colonization and globalization proves crucial in understanding how trans/national identities are continually produced and contested through interactions over time. Chapter 3 addresses the spatialized anxieties that haunt the productive imaginaries responsible for creating Argentina as barbaric and civilized, modern and not-modern, and ultimately doomed by both its hybrid and indigenous inhabitants. Like the United States, Argentina imagines itself a country of immigrants. This imagined sense of self renders invisible the history of those who populate/d Argentina prior to colonization. Chapter 4 examines Argentina as Europe’s uncanny Other, both like and unlike Europe. Kaminsky
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distinguishes among the relationships Argentina has had with the Spanish, French, and British and with Central Europe, and then considers each of their mis/representations as inventions of “an Argentina that responds to their own desire” (69). In other words, Argentina as a relational invention is imagined differently from different locations and as a result of different transnational relationships. In chapter 5, Kaminsky explores and exposes the narcissism, as well as the elitist, hetero/sexist, and racist imaginaries that inform Herman Keyserling’s travel writing about Argentina. Kaminsky carefully traces the gendered, racialized, infantilized, and othering nature of Keyserling work. In chapter 6, she considers the absence and racialized presence of Argentina’s indigenous population. In the following two chapters, Kaminsky explores representations of Jewish Argentine identities and the exoticized representation of the Jewishness of Argentine culture. She concludes that, although the presence of Jews is not repressed in the same way that the historical presence of blacks and indigenous peoples have been, the presence of Jews has also not had a significant impact on national identity in Argentina (157). The last three chapters explore and complicate the relationship among memory, knowledge, and im/posed ignorance. Kaminsky’s book demonstrates what a number of scholars across contexts are presently exploring regarding globalizations as extensions of particular localisms. Because the Other is a relational figure, Kaminsky argues that representation, though always incomplete, imperfect, and contestable, is also a process of dispersed and unpredictable expressions of power and resistance and so is not impossible. The last section of her book establishes the importance of counter-hegemonic discourses, particularly during repression. Her engagement with the historical practices of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and what their work accomplishes vis-à-vis nationalist scripts and memories offers a segue to Ramírez’ work, as Ramírez, though in a different context with different historical consequences, also considers the role of mothers in resisting dominant erasures. Although not aligned in scope with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina’s Dirty War, Ramírez examines how pachucas and their mothers served as voices of contestation and contradiction, particularly in mis/representations of the riots and resistant identities. Ramírez also focuses on the tensions in the reciprocal relationship that exist between what she refers to as “official and unofficial nationalisms.” She uses the trope of the “vendida,” or the “sellout,” to propose pachucos/as as archetypes in national imaginaries. Drawing from feminist and Chicana-feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, Ramírez considers the invisibilization of the pachuca in the U.S. historical record, as well as in Chicano origin and opposition narratives. She examines archival sources and oral-history interviews to recover and reclaim the presence of the pachuca in both. While Ramírez’s inquiry spans decades, she reconsiders and re-presents pachucas/os and zoot suit culture in
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the focused contexts of World War II and the Chicano movement, and even more specifically on the Sleepy Lagoon incident, the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, and on the People v. Zammora, which she notes, introduced the terms pachuco and pachuca into U.S. judicial discourse. Ramírez proposes that feminist critiques of Chicano cultural nationalism both unearth and help to explain the absence of pachucas, particularly in historical accountings of the (era of the) Zoot Suit riots. Ramírez’s work is the local to Kaminsky’s global. While Kaminsky is focused on Argentina as a nation, Ramírez is focused on community and the collective identities in spaces as localized as the street. In chapter 1, she focuses on two oral-history interviews as a tactical renarrativizing of the Sleepy Lagoon incident, which she carefully chronicles for readers. In examining these histories, she begins to account for the relegation of the pachuca to the margins of dominant narratives. Ramírez examines the gendered dimensions of citizenship and contested expressions of national and cultural identities. She complicates the cultural meanings of pachuca by exploring different understandings from the perspectives of Mexican American women. Through careful analysis, she demonstrates how pachucas were read as distinctly unpatriotic, particularly in the context of World War II. She complicates this reading, however, to argue that while pachucas were “deemed violent, unpatriotic, and sexually promiscuous,” they also “signified style, defiance, independence, generational difference, and youthful enthusiasm” (53). In chapter 2, Ramírez considers the dominant discursive mis/representation of the pachuca. She also considers style politics and the spectacle of the zoot suit, arguing “that the zoot suit was construed as a sign of an aberrant femininity, competing masculinity, or homosexuality during the early 1940s. As a nonwhite, working-class, and queer signifier . . . it was perceived as unAmerican” (56). She considers the role of conspicuous consumption of style, space, and leisure as these relate to the production of war enemies, especially on the home front. Through a focus on style politics and on the discursive and visual, Ramírez shows how pachucos were pathologized as feminine and queer, while pachucas were simultaneously sexualized and rendered unfeminine for their consumer practices, revealing a gender paradox that de-masculinized, defeminized, and infantilized the pachuco/a. Ramírez demonstrates how in the U.S. wartime national imaginary and corresponding historical narratives, la pachuca could not embody the visual cues of femininity that were related to the national home front in its idealized wartime imagery. In chapter 3, Ramírez explores the languages of resistance, arguing that pachuco slang, like black jive, produced and shaped a distinctly raced and classed masculinity (94). She moves beyond considerations of the relationship between nonnormative discourses and masculinity to focus on discourse and language and the linguistic varieties of pachuco/a slang to reveal how linguistic imperialism had explicitly marginalizing effects for the “tough-tongued pachuca [who was] ignored and maligned” (94). Ramírez examines cultural and
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literary discourses, as well as legal transcripts. Similar to the visual disruptions la pachuca represented to national imaginaries of women on the home front, pachucas’ linguistic practices disrupted dominant and deeply gendered notions of polite and proper discourse. In chapter 4, Ramírez highlights and carefully analyzes Chicana cultural and visual representations of the pachuca. She considers how Chicana women have resisted the cultural-nationalist erasure of the pachuca in order to express a more complicated and agentive subjectivity for the pachuca. The heteronormative imperative of the Chicano movement is confronted through the introduction of the lesbian pachuca. Ultimately, Ramírez demonstrates that the pachuca is reclaimed by Chicana feminists to “reconfigure alliance[s] and to imagine extranational group identities” (136). In her epilogue, she demonstrates that national imaginaries are constructed by dominance, dissent, and competing ideologies. By carefully studying the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, Ramírez is able to critically consider the implications of the relationship between family and the nation, as these are maintained and challenged through dominant reproductions and nondominant resistances. Reading these books together affords readers the opportunity to experience distinct though related focuses on trans/national imaginaries and identities in localized and globalized contexts. While I have sketched some broad connections between Argentina and The Woman in the Zoot Suit, I think more nuanced connections are possible around, among others, masculinity (gaucho/pachuco), citizenship, and (queered) sexuality. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these books together, but I believe doing so in the same classroom will be a challenge. It can, however, be done particularly for courses considering constructions of nation and identity and their attendant intersecting complexities and contradictions. While these texts could obviously circulate in history, literature, ethnic, and gender/women’s studies courses, they are also suited to memory studies, rhetoric, and cultural/feminist geographies. Kaminsky’s text is best suited for a graduate seminar, while Ramírez’s text is more broadly accessible and suitable for graduates and undergraduates. References Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Adela C. Licona is an assistant professor in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English at the University of Arizona. She is an affiliated faculty member in gender and women’s studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, film and media studies, and Mexican American/Raza studies. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include borderlands rhetorics, third-space theory, critical race studies, U.S./
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Third World feminisms, cultural and gender studies, social-justice media, community literacies, action research, and public scholarship. She is co-editor of Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (2009). Her manuscript Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric received a semi-finalist designation in the 2008 First Book Competition in Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Press and is currently under review there. She has published articles in the NWSA Journal (now Feminist Formations), Nóesis: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, and Latino Studies. She has also published essays in TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Sexing the Political, and Café Revolucíon. She is presently in postproduction as co-producer and director of a documentary film titled aguamiel: secrets of the agave. She can be reached at
[email protected].
The Judy Grahn Reader by Judy Grahn, introduction by Lisa Maria Hogeland. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2009, 317 pp., $19.95 paper. A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008 by Adrienne Rich. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009, 180 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Judith Katz The late 1970s and early ’80s were heady days for young lesbian feminists like me in Northampton, Massachusetts. Smack in the middle of Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, and Amherst colleges and down the road from the University of Massachusetts, we had access to every aspect of what can best be described a “dyke cultural revolution.” It was possible to hear lectures and readings by famous lesbian thinkers and writers, listen to women musicians, watch new plays by feminist theater collectives and drama students, attend women-only dances, watch women martial artists perform graceful katas, dine at a collectively owned women’s restaurant, and shop at a women’s bookstore, all within the space of a few miles and sometimes all in the same weekend. In between all that culture, a person could work on actions involving such things as surrounding the Pentagon; argue about the ethics of monogamy, sadomasochism, and celibacy; debate the place of race, class, and separatism inside the feminist movement; or make a mess of one’s personal love life or find a girlfriend and mate with her forever. It was during those early 1970s and ’80s that I first laid hands on a mimeographed prose poem by a Bay Area writer named Judy Grahn. Her “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke” read like a hilariously horrible and familiar dream: “Dr. Knox,” Edward began, “my problem this week is chiefly concerning restrooms.”