With reference to Grewal and Kaplan, discuss how politics are implicated in the formation of sexual subjectivities. Consider national and transnational dimensions/examples of the production and regulation of sexuality.

“Everything is politics.” –Thomas Mann

Before searching this quote, I must admit I was unaware of its context. I still am, as a brief Wikipedia skim only gets you so far. But interestingly enough, I do not remember a time when I did not know this phrase. “Everything is politics.” This quote seems especially accurate today, November 4, Election Day. As I write this, my phone illuminates constantly with the newest projection or final score. Who will be in government at the start of 2015? How will United States politics change and who will be privileged? Who will be oppressed? Who will be ignored completely?

Sexuality as a discipline, as a subject, is political as well, of course. In “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality”, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan explore sexuality as a transnational movement and the implications of transnationalism across modern disciplines. According to the authors, transnationalism is able to address the inequalities, or the “asymmetries” of globalization. In turn, a transnational approach allows a more “adequate” study of sexuality in the age of globalization. By dividing the study of sexuality in a transnational context into multiple spheres, Grewal and Kaplan outline precisely the role of sexual subjectivities today, specifically the current frameworks that hinder their advancement.

In all aspects, the traditional binary system of categorization and analysis is incredibly limiting. Everything is either this or that, the one or the other. How has it taken such a long time to destabilize this concept?

Traditionally, sexual subjectivities have been exclusively represented in the binary. The family model is seen solely as a means to reproduction, eliminating any sexual tendencies that deviate from this model. Recent movements have aimed to destroy this notion, particularly the second and third waves of feminism and the development of queer studies departments in academia. While the United States has seen a rise in acceptance of “non-traditional” families and means of sexual expression (I am thinking of laws enabling gay marriage and trans* rights, among other movements), many other Western nations are still woefully reactionary. Though individuality is developed as an inherent trait, the politics of society empower or prohibit self-expression. Depending on “politics”, sexuality may be repressed or celebrated, punished or liberated. Grewal and Kaplan write about the “tradition-modernity split”, referencing the “global feminist” and the “nexus of modernity” that is marked by the freedom of choice in coming out.

Transnationalism as applied to the study of sexual subjectivities, offers us (and by “us” I include anyone interested in sexuality, scholar or no) the means to address the role of sexuality in a multitude of areas. As Grewal and Kaplan write, “Since ignoring transnational formations has left studies of sexualities without the tools to address questions of globalization, race, political economy, immigration, migration, and geopolitics, it is important to bring questions of transnationalism into conversation with the feminist study of sexuality” (666).

Grewal and Kaplan’s article piqued my interest from the start—how can studies of sexuality be conceived when sexuality is so varied throughout the world? How is feminism viewed throughout the world? These questions, and many more, are why I find their argument (albeit rather wordy and technical) so interesting. Through further reflection, I found myself asking how anyone could not perceive sexuality through a transnational approach.

The authors focus much of their article defining the term “transnationalism” and its uses in the modern academic conversation. First, they write, the term is used to explain or depict migration. Additionally, it indicates “the demise or irrelevance of the nation-state”, as individuals identity less and less with the nation, and more with specific cultures (664). In terms of sexuality, this idea struck a chord with me, as I began to ponder the alienation of those who identify outside of the heteronormative binary. If the nation refuses to provide support, who acts as the unifier? “The binary gender model is so pervasive and universalized that it has become naturalized,” Grewal and Kaplan write (667).

The political movements that have traditionally boxed in sexual subjectivities are losing steam. Earlier this semester we discussed the Internet as being a major factor in the spread of transnational ideas and in sharing information throughout the world. Though the political tradition has previously focused exclusively on those who are white and middle-class, I sincerely hope that this will not always be the case. Politics may play an important role in the obstruction of personal freedom and self-expression, but it cannot prohibit the development of sexuality, despite all efforts.

PS: As an election update, I have just been notified that the Republicans have gained control of the US Senate.

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Vol. 7, No. 4, 2001, pp. 663-697.

In the article “The Encyclopedia Must Fail!” Raval discusses how Wikipedia has evolved from its inception a decade ago from an “encyclopedia that anyone could write” to an open source platform with diverse, innovative contributions. As digital culture and literacy has become the norm, traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica have ceased publication, while Wikipedia has grown to include several languages, accessibility on various types of devices, and other media applications to enhance knowledge production. In her assessment of improving Wikipedia in a “post-Wikipedia” world, Raval believes that Wikipedia should further consider the diversity of its contributors, particularly relating to gender diversity and volunteer encouragement. Upon reading Raval’s commentary, I was struck how my own digital literacy in the realm of education has mirrored Wikipedia’s development, both as a teacher and student. Furthermore, my perception of how one gains access to knowledge in the 21^st century has both changed and been challenged.

As an undergraduate student in a history seminar in 2001, I distinctly remember how I first encountered Wikipedia while researching the music styles in Weimar Germany. Although I intended to conduct research in the library stacks for “concrete” information, I also hoped to do preliminary research on the internet. While the internet was in use at the time, it was certainly not the vast tool that we know and use today. Interestingly, an article accredited to “Wikipedia” offered the most thorough information on the subject. When I began compiling my bibliography to submit, neither my professor nor my MLA reference book could tell me how to cite such a digital source. As Wikipedia gained popularity in the coming years, I remember how professors deemed Wikipedia “unreliable” and discouraged its use, while peers searched for comparable digital resources, only to cite Wikipedia as one of the best. While I rarely use Wikipedia for my own academic research projects, it is refreshing to see how far it has come and far it can further evolve. I am particularly intrigued by Raval’s endeavor to compose articles that defy what is considered main-stream knowledge, as well as her discussion of how teams can collaborate on volunteer projects for Wikipedia.

Although I tend utilize Wikipedia as a student, I must confess that it’s an invaluable tool for my job as a high school teacher, particularly when I need a quick historical or cultural reference point for a theme, lesson, or unit. In addition, I recognize and realize that my own students, who have grown up as digitally literature users, peruse Wikipedia quite often for their own work. This fact that has allowed me to consider how I might better engage with digital platforms familiar to my current and future students. With the discovery of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Educator tools, I am motivated to teach with Wikipedia and its associated projects in the world language classroom.

For example, one platform that I could possibly use for an advanced German class is the Wikibook, which focuses on creating books. In our Grimm’s fairy tale unit this upcoming January, for example, students could re-write a fairy tale in German as a class. With a Wikibook, we could create a collaborative class project accessible to other German language classrooms. On the transnational scale, it could be feasible to team with an English class in German speaking classroom to offer a bilingual version. Another interesting platform could be Wikinews in German, which focuses on news reporting. In lower level classes, students could work collaboratively to ascertain headlines and current events in Germany.

When considering to teach with Wikipedia or an associated digital platform in the world language classroom, it would be essential for students to understand the global or open-source nature of the end product. With this in mind, the educator should establish concrete learning objectives, which could include, but not be limited to: creating a product with a diverse audience in mind, recognizing the global scale of Wiki-products, developing collaborative skills with peers at home and in the Wiki-sphere (which also transition to a real, globalized society), and valuing feedback and edits from a diverse audience. In turn, as a teacher, I would need to consider how best to utilize the tools provided to me as an educator, whether through continuing education, peer educator collaboration, or Wiki-tutorials available to the education community. In keeping both student and teacher objectives for the use of digital platforms in the classroom, the teacher could develop an innovative curricular tool, which is no longer deemed “unreliable.” In sum, I believe that Raval draws several valid conclusions regarding how Wikipedia can further improve regarding diversity, a perspective which has certainly inspired me to consider using Wiki-platforms in my own world language classroom.

From this week’s readings, I have a better understanding of the term ‘transnational’ than I did before.  After ten weeks, we’ve struggled to pinpoint the denotation of the elusive term (especially compared to international, global, cosmopolitan, etc, like we discussed in our first weeks).  Grewal and Kanplan provided a handful of worthwhile uses of the term (664-665), but they were able to relay a particularly clear definition of the term in their article: “such usage relied on a universal subject of feminism, while transnational could signal cultural and national difference” (666).  This idea, to me, demonstrates the inability to use ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ as synonyms, because it emphasizes the difference between universal and particular conceptualizations.  Rather, ‘transnational’ finds itself safely between the two extremes.

The idea of transnational (rather than global/universal or local/particular) feminism is helpful for incorporating specific issues from different nations or cultures to create a strong, unifying activist force.  Ferree and Tripp delineate the history of modern feminism, particularly the conflicts and disagreements confronted between separate states.  For instance, when feminism is portrayed as a global issue, confusion arises.  This is because feminism is such a vague umbrella term under which so many diverse issues reside, that global agreement does not exist.  Cultural nuances in different areas of the world place greater importance on political representation than a woman’s right to her own body, for instance.  Recall Shu-Mei Shih’s article in Minor Transnationalisms, where she referenced a woman who “disagreed strongly with the assumptions of Western feminism […] and has since publicly repudiated Western feminism” (73).  Ferree and Tripp pointed out that this feeling is not uncommon among feminists outside of the United States, especially.  For instance, the global South has complained about the “limited and singular vision of feminism” presented by the North (61), and they have made strides to alter the transnational feminist lens to make these issues more relevant for them as well.

Ferree and Tripp reveal a spectrum of conceptualization from universal agreement regarding feminist issues across the globe, to particular cases based on state or culture.  Generally, global agreement exists regarding women’s suffrage and violence against women, as the article points out (56, 63).  However, some cultural practices, such as foot binding in China, bride wealth in Uganda, and genital cutting in Kenya and other parts of the world, are more specific and ambiguous (58).  While some could argue that cultural relativism must be accounted here, others proclaim the gendered injustice of these practices; “the global feminist is one who has free choice over her body and a complete and intact […], while the traditional female subject of patriarchy is forcibly altered, fragmented alienated from her innate sexuality, and deprived of choices or agency” (Grewal, Kaplan 669-70).

All in all, despite the wide spectrum regarding the scope of feminist (or anti-feminist) customs, transnational feminism stands apart from global or local feminism in that it is able to encapsulate and give credit to nuances between nation-states, without overgeneralizing goals in a manner that may be interpreted as a “subtle form of cultural imperialism” (Ferree, Tripp 61).

As a high school and college student, I heard the instruction many times, from nearly every teacher I wrote an essay for: Use academic sources, not those that are only published online, and not — emphatically not — Wikipedia. As an instructor, I now find myself giving the same advice, suggesting that students choose peer-reviewed, academic publications over informal articles and depositories of information such as SparkNotes and Wikipedia. While the move to embrace technology and new media in the classroom has turned tweets and blog posts into viable objects of critical analysis, a bias toward the stable, authoritative voice of texts that are privately written, published and purchased remains in academia. This is the form of knowledge that allows a voice to speak with the authority of the intellectual, state-sanctioned academy, knowledge that, as Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “presuppose(s) and constitute(s) at the same time power relations” (27). Such a voice must be fixed as a referent; it offers a complete thought with a position that is assumed rather than negotiated. It invites neither collaboration nor interrogation.

It is clear, then, how sources such as Wikipedia that can be cooperatively edited, that bring together competing voices, and that do not and never will exist in a stable, final form fail to access the authority that is particular to academic constructions of knowledge. In “The Encyclopedia Must Fail! – Notes on Queering Wikipedia,” an article published in online, open-access, open-peer-reviewed journal Ada, Noopur Raval addresses issues of how even sources of knowledge like Wikipedia may continue to enforce ideological limits on who produces knowledge and what information should be accessible. The content of Raval’s argument raises important questions about just how open collaborative sources like Wikipedia truly are, but the form that argument takes provokes pressing questions as well. Raval’s article appears in a context that, like Wikipedia, lacks the permanence and imposing presence associated with professional publication. The source is solely online, targets a “diverse and fundamentally interdisciplinary readership,” and allows online, open peer review through its review website (Ada). It is neither specialized nor professionalized in the manner of those reassuringly academic sources my past professors and I have recommended to students.

Raval’s article calls our attention to the importance of analyzing “the transactions, the people, and conditions of knowledge production that facilitate or create challenges to diversity programs within any movement.” In her critique of problems she believes Wikipedia must address, Raval reiterates the issues that exist in traditional forms of knowledge: only some voices are represented, information can be suppressed, and access is not universal. If these are problems a source like Wikipedia cannot fully resolve, we can easily imagine the attack Raval might mount on traditional forms of academic knowledge. The expensive, highly specialized books and journals that are produced and reviewed by a small field of scholars who possess authority do little to increase diversity, access, or freedom of expression in the production of knowledge.

Given the content of Raval’s article, publication in Ada seems well suited to her engagement with collaborative, open access bases of knowledge. However, the article’s publication in such an open format emphasizes to me the fundamental problems that still exist in how we construct, access, and reference information from collaborative and variable sources. Though Raval addresses failure as a means of critiquing through commentary and collaboration, her depiction of failure as a “subversive process” that “gains transformative potential as a strategic tool in history writing and permanently etches difference in its grain” can also speak to the form of her article. I wrote earlier that sources like Wikipedia and, perhaps, like Ada, fail to represent academic authority. If we assume such failure in Raval’s article, can we read it as a form of subversion? If so, how effective can that subversion be within a wider field of academic discourse?

Though I agree that the extremely limited ability for diverse groups to access and contribute to academic knowledge is problematic, I wonder whether shifting to the open format of Ada and articles like Raval’s is a tenable option. Reading Raval’s article, I found myself wondering whether I would be willing to cite it in my own work. Whether because of the author’s work, the open review process, or its transposition to the website, the article contains several errors in grammar and style, and its online context does not engender a sense of reliability. I realize that the neat and resolved image of academic perfection and finality to which I’m comparing the article often acts as a barrier that prevents us from engaging with knowledge that doesn’t fit our arbitrary standards, but those standards are safeguards as much as limits: they allow us to assess the quality of information we bring into our own work. Even if those standards are not wholly rational or effectual, their undeniable influence makes it difficult for me to conceive how we can foster academic engagement that truly melds professionalism and accessibility.

Speaking from within the discipline of English literature, I struggle to imagine methods of interrogating the advent of fixed and authoritative knowledge in both content and form as Raval does without sacrificing the very authority that allows such an argument to be taken seriously. Yet perhaps my very perception of what kind of response would constitute a serious reception is limited by my academic training. Perhaps Raval’s article and the format of Ada step toward targeting a wider audience, with goals beyond the academy that can be enacted through our publications themselves, rather than through post-publication packaging of concepts or academic hashtagging that attempts to make our ideas meaningful to the public. Most troubling, perhaps my very resistance to integrate my idea of academic professionalism with the open forms of knowledge Raval discusses is indicative of an ideologically driven instinct to privilege sanctioned forms of knowledge over diverse, accessible, and less regulated media forms. As individuals within academia, we are often made poignantly aware of the systems that, like the Wikipedia policies Raval describes, “can be instrumentalized to systematically include or exclude factual information.” My academic training has made me cognizant of how such systems exclude certain groups, perspectives, and realities as well as particular facts. Yet despite this awareness, questions of how to combat those intellectual structures of exclusion in the present and especially in relation to the open production of and access to knowledge are often overlooked. Even when disciplines focus on granting a voice to the oppressed or critiquing social structures, they face the difficulty of breaking down academic barriers while speaking from behind them. Thus, I close this post still considering the question of how we can truly engage with issues of accessibility and openly confront the instability of knowledge in the form as well the content of academic work.

Transnationalism as an analytical frame supports both universalizing and particularizing visions of feminism.

As a transnational process feminism possesses a global constitution and at the same time it is composed and influenced by the particularities that characterize feminism in different regions of the globe. By analyzing feminism from a transnational approach it is presupposed that the struggle for equality is happening at a global scale and that it is a process determined by the interrelatedness between feminist movements from different parts of the world. Feminist movements benefit from both visions. The universalizing vision creates more opportunities for NGOs and international organizations, such as the UN, to pay attention to feminist movement’s concerns and demands, which can lead to financial support and policy changes that procure equality.

A particularizing vision of feminism, on the other hand, favors the perception of peculiarities in feminist movements around the world and how they influence each other. In addition a particularizing vision acknowledges that feminist movements are determined by varying factors, such as religion, policial and economic systems, depending on where they originate. Likewise this vision ratifies variations in feminist movements. The primary focus of some feminist organizations shifts according to the relevance of certain issues. For example, female circumcision in Africa or feminicide in Guatemala and Mexico, may not be the central concern in the agenda of a feminist group in Argentina. In the same way, video game feminism might not be the center of attention of a feminist movement from a country under an extreme religious regime.

Aili Mari Tripp provides particularizing and universalizing visions of feminism that are similar to what I have exposed above. Tripp states that the feminist movement’s influence and agenda have been multidirectional and that there are remaining issues around the world. Thus, feminism is still a universal matter. Indeed, after one and a half centuries of feminist movement’s efforts, inequality issues have not been resolved. Furthermore, misconceptions, misunderstanding, and plain ignorance plague the public’s general knowledge about feminism (social networks and Internet memes are a good example of this). A few weeks ago, Mariluz included in her post a speech given by Emma Watson at a HeForShe event in New York City, in which she called for men involvement and participation in obtaining equality for men and women. In addition, Watson reminds us  that women rights activism is not equivalent to a man-hating movement, rather a movement that seeks mutual understanding, which is achieved through communication.

In response to Watson’s speech, Andrea Peyser, a columnist from the New York Post accused Watson of asking for equal rights, but avoiding equal responsibility among men and women. Peyser considers that there is no inequality in the industrialized world and that the notion of women being victims of the patriarchy is rubbish. This is a clear example of the complacent attitudes that Tripp mentions in her article. Additionally, Peyser’s remarks constitute irrevocable proof that a particularizing view of feminism is essential, since she suggests that after achieving equality in the industrialized world, the matter is resolved and there is no need of speeches, such as Watson’s. Moreover, a particularizing view of feminism keeps us from generalizing women’s situation in industrialized nations. Women in these countries have different unresolved matters, which Peyser fails to notice. For example, in today’s elections there are proposals restricting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. According to Grewald and Kaplan, transnationalism is an approach that allows getting to the specifics. They refer to sexualities in postmodernity, nonetheless, as we have seen, the same can be said about feminism. Grewald and Kaplan call for an interdisciplinary approach to understand a global phenomenon. This approach, I think, would enable the study of specific groups. In this sense transnationalism supports universalizing and particularizing visions of feminism, since they complement each other.

On October 29th, Stephen Colbert interviewed Anita Sarkeesian on his show, The Colbert Report, about the Gamergate controversy. Before ending the interview, Colbert asked Sarkeesian the following question: “As a man, am I allowed to be a feminist?” to which Sarkeesian answered with a question of her own: “Do you believe that women should have equal rights to men and we should fight for those rights?” When Stephen answered in the affirmative, Sarkeesian said, “Great, then you are a feminist.”

Is he, though? If equality between men and women was the only premise on which feminism stood, and if Stephen Colbert, adhering to this all-encompassing premise of feminism, were to live in Rwanda, where female representation in parliament is as high as sixty four percent—compared to the sixteen percent female representation in the United States Congress—could he be a feminist there? As an article published in April of this year in The Guardian states, in Rwanda, “gender rights are enshrined in its constitution, and a swath of laws have given women the right to inherit land, share the assets of a marriage and obtain credit.”

So, mission accomplished, right? Feminism wins the day. Women have equal rights to men. By that definition alone, the feminist fight in Rwanda should be over.

But then the aforementioned article goes on to state that, despite these accomplishments, “Domestic violence [in Rwanda] remains common and widely accepted.”

Well, isn’t that something?

What I am trying to say here is not that Sarkeesian is wrong in her definition of feminism, for it concerns a very specific political agenda, but that she is wrong in not clarifying that the parameters through which she is defining feminism are not universal—though the possibility exists that she is assuming they are. At any rate, she could have said: “Great, then as far as the U.S. is concerned, Stephen, you are a feminist” and that would have been a bit closer to the truth.
But in expressing that gender-specific feminism is the only feminism, and by extent the only way to be a feminist, Sarkeesian is partaking in a very American and Eurocentric view of feminism—deemed, seemingly, universal—and discarding the radical differences with which other countries and cultures engage with feminism.

A good example of this is the UN women’s conference in Mexico in 1975, in which Gloria Steinem, an icon of feminism in the United States, drew up a feminist manifesto without consulting women of the southern hemisphere of the globe; that is, women who came from countries which had been former colonies and were considered, based on the country’s development or lack thereof, of the “Third World.” Aili Mari Tripp, in her chapter, “The Evolution of Transnational Feminism” (Global Feminism 2006), in recounting this incident, tells us that: “Women from the South tended to focus on how women’s problems were defined be global inequality, imperialism, and other political concerns that were not seen as gender-specific…[challenging] Northern women to see development issues as women’s concerns” (61).

Indeed, instead of a global feminism, which seems to be, as Grewal and Kaplan state in their article, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” articulated “primarily by Western or Euro-American second-wave feminists as well as by multinational corporations,” the shift to using the term transnational to talk about feminism could prove more beneficial as it “could signal cultural and national difference” (666). In talking about these differences, we could look at the example of China’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s, which emerged as part of an anti-Qing movement that demanded political rights for women, and not out of a desire to emulate New Zealand or Australia, which had granted suffrage in 1983 and 1902, respectively.

In regards to feminism as a transnational phenomenon which particularizes experience, rather than universalizes it, Tripp further notes that in Africa, for example, specifically in the countries such as Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and Somalia, the women present during peace negotiations have demands “more oriented toward pragmatic solution to health, education, and other problems, rather than vying for positions of power in a restructured state” (68).

The need to address these different needs, then, becomes paramount for the feminist movement. And the way to really do it is not through a Western-centric perspective on women’s issues which aims to be universal and in the process erases difference of experience, but by acknowledging the very real differences which exist across borders and cultures for women. In other words, by looking at feminism through transnational lenses.

Roberto Bolaño’s novel Amulet introduces the reader to a female narrator/protagonist by the name of Auxilio Lacouture. Auxilio opens her tale with a warning to the reader. “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection, and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that” (Bolaño 1). Indeed, throughout her narration the promised episodes of malice never materialize definitively. Instead, they are obscured, whether intentionally or not, by a series of remembrances and digressions, which themselves meld assorted locations, people, and times into an accounting of the significance of the happenings of September 1968.

The convergence of time and literal and metaphorical space in Amulet can be traced to a single location and span, namely a toilet cubicle in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. It is in this setting that Auxilio witnesses the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on September 18, 1968. By a fortunate chance, she finds herself sequestered in the bathroom and has the wits about her to remain hidden while students, faculty, and staff are beaten, arrested, and carted off to unknown fates. More than a hiding place, this bathroom becomes her “timeship from which [she] can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56). It is a temporal epicenter, from which her story races in multiple directions, and back to which it inevitably returns. One might see in this fractured timescape a rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Like cracks spreading across the surface of a damaged mirror, Auxilio’s thoughts expand laterally into the future and the past, from Uruguay to Mexico and beyond.

Herself a native of Montevideo, she is unsure of the exact date of her arrival in Mexico City. In trying to pin it down, she sets reference points according to the deaths of writers she has encountered. “Hold on, let me try to remember. Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anesthesia” (Bolaño 2). In her description, she imparts not only a physical quality to time, but also a pliable one. Time is subject to change; it can be repaired to account for aesthetics. Throughout the novel, Bolaño plays with this malleability of time through Auxilio’s recollections. She often offers ranges of years when recounting meetings with various (usually) literary figures, sometimes blurring when one or the other actually lived.

The same flexibility is true of nationality, as seen in her often-hesitant declaration of herself as the mother of Mexican poetry. Later, she describes some Mexican clay figurines given to her as a gift. “…[T]hey were just figurines made by Indians in Oaxaca, who sold them to traders, who resold them at much higher prices at markets and street stalls in Mexico city” (Bolaño 12). Especially in the second example, nationality and its part in identity formation undergo a sort of evolution. The figurines, created by the indigenous people, become Mexican merely by virtue of an economic transaction.

Location, in the form of nationality, also clashes with time in some of Auxilio’s stories. One of her friends who makes frequent appearances in her thoughts is Arturo Belano. An alter ego of Bolaño himself, Arturo is also Chilean. Auxilio grapples with the disconnect of Arturo’s non-Mexican identity, which complicates his inclusion in either the “young poets” or “new generation” in Mexico. Further problematizing the constraints of canon by means of location versus time, Auxilio ponders a “what if” meeting of two poets, Darío and Huidobro. She speculates that Darío might have been able to establish “an island…between modernism and the avant-garde” (Bolaño 60), a metaphorical ground between two literary epochs.

Auxilio also extracts physical spaces from their real-world locations and brings them together in the non-fixed time of her thoughts in the bathroom. One striking example is the Clover Hotel, where she travels with Arturo to help free another friend from impending sexual slavery. She finds the hotel’s neon sign “funny, in a way, since it was like finding an establishment by the name of Paris in the Calle Berlin…” (Bolaño 90). The improbable Irish name is compared to the almost antipodal relationship between France and Germany, all within the confines of Mexico City. Similar juxtapositions are suggested through language. When listing the places she visited with her friend Elena and her love interest, many seem to have origins in indigenous tongues, though the orthography is clearly Spanish. On another occasion she comments on the return of Arturo’s Chilean accent after he has spent some time in his home country, and wonders if she might experience something similar were she to return to Montevideo.

While the actual time Auxilio spent in the bathroom at UNAM is revealed to be approximately twelve days, the trauma of the military occupation she witnesses clearly skews her experience. Hours, days, and even years swirl together with her memories leading to sometimes contradictory storylines. One could argue that this altered perception of time calls into question her reliability as a narrator. However, I believe that Bolaño’s choice to unanchor his protagonist from the constraints of linear time frees her to better convey the importance of 1968. Her recollections push the boundaries to encompass the time before and after that year, much as Sarah Waters and Martin Klimke and Joachim Shcarloth do in their discussions of 1968 as a truly transnational phenomenon. The main setting in Amulet—the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor—as a non-linear, non-locational focal point for Auxilio’s stories echoes the events of ‘1968’ as they occurred and rebounded around the globe.

It would be difficult, I think, to see Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet as other than allegory. In a novel whose narrator is both named Auxilio (“help” in Spanish) and claims to be the “mother of Mexican poetry,” it becomes impossible to see the narration as working on a purely “individual” level, or rather, not on a symbolic one. Nonetheless, I would hesitate to categorize Amulet as the type of third-world national allegory that Fredric Jameson wants to define in his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

In that controversial essay, Jameson asserts that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, even when, or perhaps . . . particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69).  This statement, I would argue (as others already have), is problematic in a number of ways, but perhaps primarily in its conception of “third-world texts.” In the end, I would probably agree with Aijaz Ahmad’s objections to it: “I shall argue,” Ahmad writes, “that there is no such thing as ‘third-world literature’ which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge.”[1] I think Jameson’s assertion here becomes even more problematic, though, in relation to Latin American literature. In his thesis, for example, Jameson equates “first world” (or not-third-world) with “western” (which is, I think, a slippage, though not an uncommon one). While Jameson would likely categorize the majority of Latin American countries as “third-world” (especially in 1986) – would he also categorize them as “non-western”? Latin America is certainly not “eastern”… although perhaps, in the formulation “the West and the Rest” one might think of Latin America as being part of “the Rest.” These ambiguities only get more complicated when we consider Jameson’s categorization of the novel as “western machinery,” and then consider the complex roles of Spain, Spanish and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Latin America.

Bolaño’s Amulet, in particular, presents other problems for this (reductive) category of ‘third-world literature’ (including, among other issues, recent contentions that Chile, Bolaños’ country of origin,  has “ascended” to the first world)—but, more importantly, it also seems to disrupt Jameson’s concept of national allegory as it relates to the third world.

Jameson outlines the difference between “allegory” in first world literature and “national allegory” in third-world in four parts, but I’ll just focus on the first two for now:

1. Jameson contends that in the first world cultural tradition, the political is usually recast as psychological. It is common, he offers as an example, to interpret “60s revolts in terms of Oedipal revolts.” In the third world, on the other hand, this formulation is reversed and the psychological (or libidinal investment, as he terms it) is recast as political. Here, his example is of a character’s oral fixation—it’s cannibalism—being recast in terms of a national/social oral fixation (and cannibalism).
2. He then argues that in “first world” tradition of allegory, “figures and personifications” are assumed (even if incorrectly) to be static: they can be “read against some ‘one-to-one’ table of equivalences.” In other words, we see each animal in Orwell’s Animal Farm is symbolic of one “type” of person (or even real person) in the real political world. In third world allegory, though, there isn’t “one-to-one” equivalence. To illustrate, Jameson gives Lu Xun’s novel as an example, where more than one character symbolizes China itself (thus casting China itself as an unstable, multivalent, entity).

To combine these two points—if I am not being too reductive (and I might be)—Jameson is more or less contending that in the third world, all individuals are representative of the nation, whereas in the first world, while the nation can be cast as an individual for the purposes of art, analysis, etc., each first world individual is allowed to be a private entity and isn’t representative of the nation.

(I could say many things about this, but I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent. I will say that in general, I find this formulation frustrating, reductive, … But, I would also mention that I realize that there are several recent defenses of Jameson’s argument—and I haven’t read them, but knowing that they exist makes me think that I am perhaps missing some of the nuances of Jameson’s contention.)

So, according to Jameson, to be a third world national allegory, Amulet’s allegory would need to be multivalent—or rather, various characters would need to represent the nation–and, more importantly, those would need to be related first as individuals with various psychoses, and then, one could cast those characters/their psychoses back on the political sphere to determine the character of the nation.

To me, Amulet doesn’t do that. In fact, I would argue that Amulet’s allegory it fits better into Jameson’s category of first world allegory.

From the start, as mentioned above, Auxilio Lacoutre’s name and role as “the mother of Mexican poetry” sets her up as a symbol. While it’s a bit hard, at first, to pinpoint what exactly she’s symbolizing—Mexico itself? The student movement?—she seems to reveal it more clearly to readers in the fourteenth chapter: “I thought: I am the memory”(174). Auxilio Lacouture, it would seem, is the nation’s 1968, or rather, Mexico’s memory of 1968 and its student movement.

Indeed, like a memory, perhaps what is most noticeably/immediately strange about Auxilio is her relationship with time; by the second page, she’s already unsure of her arrival year in Mexico. It soon seems clear to the reader that she holds 1968 as a sort of ground zero. That “ground zero”, though, is constructed by future events—or rather, the future shapes the memory of 1968. But the past also overlaps with 1968, or spans out from there, so that the past and the future happen at the same time in the memory of 1968. So, for and in Auxilio, future/past/present become indistinguishable. Auxilio, or the memory, is, as Martin Klimke notes in thinking about the memory/legacy of 1968, “in a constant state of transformation”; “previously coherent forms of group memory have now been substituted by locations of memory with no particular hierarchical or narrative order”(18).

Other connections seem to come out of the woodwork: By the early 70s, Auxilio has, like the student movement, and/or the memory, lost her teeth. She covers her mouth when she speaks, conjuring the image of Mexican student protesters with tape over their mouths: “I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand,” she writes, “a gesture that…was taken up and imitated in certain circles.” Indeed, her next statement, “I lost my teeth but not my sense of propriety”(33), evokes Claire Brewster’s narrative of the September 1968 silent student march: “their silence was a protest against the lack of public dialogue, and to show the students’ discipline in contrast to the violence used against them” (153). Auxilio’s life takes place at night. Her own narrative is inextricable from her interaction with poets. Auxilio—the mother of Mexican poetry—later attends “the birth of History.” And finally, finally, Tlatelolco’s presence/memory enters Auxilio’s narrative (though not by name), as she sees/hears “the children, the young people…singing and heading for the abyss” (183).

Thus, in the end, I would argue that Mexico’s nationhood—or more specifically, the Mexico’s social/political memory of 1968—is recast in terms of a narrator’s psychoses… and not vice versa. The nation is cast as an individual, while the individual only really ever exists in the novel as a symbol of the nation.

Frederick Jameson´s article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, offers a different perspective that expands our understanding of transnationalism, contributing to some of the debates held in our class. More specifically, Jameson interrogates how Western thought has been determined by the fundamental division between the public sphere and the private realm, a dichotomy that has been extensively studied in a number of different fields. For example, Susan Bordo draws on Carlos Guillen to support the argument that during the Renaissance, European culture “became interiorized”, bringing about the proliferation of oppositions, including divisions “between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between self and world” (45).  Jameson focuses on the radical split between public and private and the way this separation distinguishes Western thought from “third-world” texts, particularly literary texts.

I would like to argue that Jameson´s illustration of the epistemological distinction between the private and the public spheres through his allusion to two of the most influential thinkers of our time -Marx and Freud- serves us as a staring point in order to examine the different approaches we have seen so far in our class. For example, while Bhabha´s central concepts are strongly influenced by psychoanalytical theories, Appadurai or Appiah are mainly concerned with the psychological dimension, as well as the different ways in which individuals are affected by transnational processes. However, I consider that in some cases, their emphasis on the psychological causes them to overlook a materialist analysis that could take into account the impact of external forces. On the other hand, Ong´s Flexible Citizenship aims to combine a Foucaltian approach that pays attention to the specific power contexts that enable certain practices and imaginings.

Jameson attempts to bridge this epistemological breach through his theory of a third-world literature, which according to him, provides us with a breakout from Western binaries. As an example of how theory can become more inclusive when dualisms try to be overcome he mentions the “cultural phenomenon of subalternity” as theorised by Gramsci: “not in that sense a psychological matter, although it governs psychologies … When a psychic structure is objectively determined by the economic and political relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a baleful and crippling residual effect” (76).  In this particular example, we can see how psychological forces cannot be separated from external elements. Although this is not a new thing, Jameson gives a step further when he suggests that this awareness is more visibly manifested in third-world literature.

In other words, third-world literature, as well as third-world intellectuals, merge theory and practice, conceiving literature as a political act. In this sense, Amuleto can be read as an excellent instance of Jameson´s concept of the allegorical. But not only Amuleto, I also consider that to some extent Open City blurs the lines between fiction and epistemology, art and politics, turning literature into a political act. “third-world national allegories are conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationships of politics to libidinal dynamics” (80). The historical awareness  exhibited by these literary works characterises “third-world” literature, at the same time that distinguishes them from Western narratives. Jameson refers to their situational consciousness and how that cannot be separated from the collective, and, as a consequence, from politics. “Third world must be situational and materialist despite itself. And this is finally which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture” (84).

The allegory he uses to parallel Western and third world literature to Hegel´s Master-Slave relation summarises his convincing argument about third-world writers not being able to escape the “nightmare of history” -as it is obvious in Cole and Bolaño´s novel-.This impossibility or reluctance to ignore material circumstances provides them with a larger vision that reminded me in certain ways of Sandra Harding´s idea of the “epistemic privilege”. As Jameson claims, “only the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is precisely to that that he is condemned” (85).  Despite Jameson´s important contribution, his idea of a “third-world literature” is quite problematic, for even if it is acknowledged that these properties emerge from different historical circumstances, I still feel that there is a certain degree of essentialisation as far as his thesis of the so-called “third-world literature” is concerned.

Bordo, Susan . “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought”. Signs 11 (31). pp.  439-456, 1986.