THE+PART+ABOUT+POWER+AND+THE+FEMALE

When Elizabeth Norton leaves Mexico, she writes letters to Pelletier and Espinoza in which she says, At moments I wished I hadn't left Santa Teresa, that I'd stayed there with you until the end. More than once I felt the urge to rush to the airport and catch the first plane to Mexico. These urges were followed by other, more destructive ones: to set fire to my apartment, slit my wrists, never return to the university, and live on the streets forever after. But in England at least, women who live on the streets are often subjected to terrible humiliations, I just read an article about it in some magazine or other. In England these street women are gang-raped, beaten, and it isn't unusual for them to be found dead outside hospitals. The people who do these things to them aren't, as I might have thought at eighteen, the police or gangs of neo-Nazi thugs, but other street people, which makes it seem somehow even worse.

I think one can safely presume that the suffering of homeless women in Mexico is a parallel journey. In a way, the street people //are// the residents of Juarez: outside of society and outside of the rule of law (see The Part About Santa Teresa and Juarez). They destroy each other and themselves: the starving lions in the Roman coliseum. __2666__ addresses a case of systematic rape and murder, but does so in a way that deconstructs our concept of “rape.” In one vignette, group of French explorers comes to a native village. Their leader shakes hands with one of the village men, who immediately shouts, “dayiyi!” and claims to be assaulted and degraded. “Dayiyi” has a fluid definition. Its meanings include “man who rapes me,” “cannibal who fucks me in the ass and then eats my body,” or “man who touches me (or rapes me) and stares me in the eyes (to eat my soul).” If a handshake can be “rape,” what happens to our definitions? This complicates matters, but actually makes the Sonoran femicides appear more serious because we can no longer define the crimes as “crimes” (that is, as //legal// transgressions denoted by the words “rape” and “murder”), but rather as specific and unique cases of violence and suffering. When “rape” ceases to refer to a specific class of behaviors, it begins to bleed outward, to grow and loom larger. To illustrate, allow me to construct the following rudimentary model:

SPECTRUM OF SEXUAL COERCION Totally free sex <--> Incentivized sex <--> Coerced sex <--> Forced sex

Consider four situations, each with a man, A, and a woman, B:

1) TOTALLY FREE SEX: A and B have sex purely out of mutual affection, totally without regard for any advantage one may confer upon the other. Given that human sexual attraction is based partly on physical fitness, health, intelligence, competence, success, etc, this is probably unrealistic. 2) INCENTIVIZED SEX: B's family is poor. B wants things: opportunities or commodities for herself or her family (commodities for which they have been taught desire). Or maybe B isn't poor. Maybe she's just middle class and A is rich. They could even be in the same economic class. In any case, A offers her gifts on the explicit or implicit condition that he will receive sex in return. 3) COERCED SEX: B's family is destitute or starving. Her children can't afford education. A offers her gifts on the explicit or implicit condition that he will receive sex in return. A did not personally make B become poor, but he is invested in a system that maintains a certain balance of power. 4) FORCED SEX: A physically assaults B and forces sex upon her.

This suggests that all economically-incentivized sexual activity exists on the same continuum as rape. In situation 3, B probably imagines that he is saving A from starvation, not threatening her with starvation. This is because the blame for her economic position does not fall to him, but rather to a system in which he participates. He does not feel responsible because, just as a corporation protects its members from risk, the machine protects is servants from guilt. The question here is not, "Is gifts-for-sex a form of rape?" I don’t believe we can draw a strict line between 'rape' and 'not rape.' What I mean to say is that most sex is somehow incentivized and a great deal of sex is coerced in a way enabled by socioeconomic systems. What occurs in Juarez is a "slide" towards greater levels of coercion than we consider acceptable. (I would argue that many conceptions of "acceptable" are already too high on the scale. The entire field of possibilities described in Situation 2 makes me uncomfortable.) This slide may occur because of the breakdown of rule-of-law and the climate of impunity. Situation 3 is common around the world and is considered legally, if not socially, acceptable all around the world. Juarez is exceptional because only there does the power thusly gained over the woman so often transform into Situation 4, physical violence. The problem may be that, in Juarez, no consequences are expected. In Bolaño, both Rosa and Rebeca are in danger of sliding from coerced/incentivized sex into the sphere we call "rape." Note that both fit the victim profile perfectly: slim, young, and dark-haired. Chucho Flores courts Rosa with lavish gifts and brings her to a house where "they are all caught up in it," as Oscar Amalfitano, her father, says. She is only saved by Fate's intervention. (That is to say, she was not fated to be among the victims... at least not yet.) Espinoza courts Rebeca by buying rugs from her, then fetishizes her and abandons her (see The Part About New Chilean Poetry). They first have sex alone in his car out in the desert, where she could easily “disappear.” She is spared only because he chooses to spare her. The process of entrapment in these cases begins with incentivized sex and slides in the direction of forced sex. (Of course, there may be force without any incentive.) Disparity of wealth or power enables the giving of incentives in all cases, but sometimes the additional component of //desire// is needed – desire for material goods, status, or even just food. Oscar Fate interviews the aforementioned Black Panthers founder, now turned author of healthy cookbooks, who says: Useless things are forced upon us, and it isn't because they improve our quality of life but because they're the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and high-class people require admiration and worship. Naturally, fashions don't last, one year, four at most, and then they pass through every stage of decay. But markers of class rot only when the corpse that was tagged with them rots.

We see this today in the poor kids with fashionable clothes and new iPhones but no books or solar panels. A kind of vanity. Planned obsolescence by way of going-out-of-fashion. A necessary component in a machine that needs to produce useless material in order to continue existing in its present form. The production depends on the use of human bodies as resources. It isn’t just women who are victims of this economy, but it is women who are entrapped in this way in Sonora. Men are entrapped in a different way. Psychologist Elvira Campos says, “As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise.” The disproportionate suffering of women could be the result of Mexican culture described in Bolaño and elsewhere as “macho.” Not precisely a “having something to prove,” but... What ails these people is that they believe in “the female” and “the male.” They believe there is a //way things should be//, or at least too many do. But who are “they?” The ones doing the killing, but also the ones investigating it. They believe in “whore” and they believe that “a whore” is a woman who should do certain things or should have certain things done to her. Maybe machismo becomes gynophobia because the female has the ability to "disprove" masculinity via rejection, manipulation, or cuckoldry. Thus control of the woman's behavior is necessary to preserve the "macho" image. It’s discovered that one of the murdered girls had disappeared after going home from a bar with a stranger. “Practically a whore, said the police.” Melissa Wright raises an interesting point in her essay, “Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico.” The term “public women” is used pejoratively in Mexico to link all women engaged in public or commercial work with prostitutes. Thus the maquiladora workers killed are victims of their “risky lifestyle” because they are “public women,” whether or not they actually sell sex. (Also victims of the slur are members of movements protesting the femicides, who are accused of pursuing personal profit.) The police lump together victims and prostitutes, and take the next step of implying that the victims were killed because they were prostitutes, i.e. because their behavior deviated from the norm. Fate and Rosa and Chucho and the rest of the caravan come to a restaurant called “El Rey del Taco,” “decorated like a McDonald’s, but in an unsettling way.” “Some of the girls had tears in their eyes, and they seemed unreal, faces glimpsed in a dream. ‘This place is like hell,’ [Fate] said to Rosa Amalfitano.” A strange hell indeed. Maybe a border-hell. Maybe purgatory. Some place at the intersection of so many sufferings and humiliations as to be nearly incomprehensible. There is the sense of America being The Sadist (a boxer famous for patiently and carefully annihilating a Mexican opponent so violently that he ended the latter's career) and Mexico being Merolino (the defeated Mexican boxer whose match Fate watched), ordered to prove something to his archetype. Macho-ness as a response to subjugation. “Almost all Mexican men are afraid of women,” says Elvira Campos, “Gynophobia, and optophobia, fear of opening the eyes.” The latter is, in a figurative sense, an answer to gynophobia. “In the literal sense, it leads to violent attacks, loss of consciousness, visual and auditory hallucinations, and generally aggressive behavior.” This is a sort of behavior we’re all too familiar with. Lalo and Oscar Amalfitano have their auditory hallucinations, the imagined ghosts of ancestors. The rest have their “violent attacks” or continued silence. All this is the result of a peculiar intersection of power flows and social norms. In America, it is natural for “the female” to work. In Mexico, “the female” is still a role that’s strictly regulated. The woman's desire for agency and the family's need for income clashes with the culture's strict regulation of female behavior. Among the other sins Elvira Campos lists is “peccatophobia,” fear of committing sins. We here see a conflict between Liberal Values and The Church, itself a remnant of an older colonial period. At this this taco joint, this mockery of Mexico (a joint that apparently makes very good tacos), we see the horror of a female who believes she is Female, who works in a foreign hell without much hope for change. To the corporate master, the Female’s body is a resource to be used and expended if necessary. (Source somewhere says factory lords prefer females...) To the Mexican Man, the Female’s body is likewise to be regulated, but in this case to avoid enflaming his peccatophobia. Unversed as he is in the tenants of Western Psychology, the Mexican Man prefers punishment to reward. For the lower-case female, the only recourse is resistance, be it though Ni Una Mas or something more extralegal. Hell is a conflux of forces pulling the mind apart – a multiphrenia with immediate consequences. This hell’s for us as well, for every reader’s entangled in this thing. As you’ll see by the time we reach The Part About the Basement, it is not enough to be //not causing the evil//. The aloof individual, the good German, can still be implicated in the violence. The remote, incomprehensible evil is no longer so remote. We are within it... or rather, it has expanded (or our understanding of it has expanded) so that it’s now everywhere. A matrix underlying “the real,” its tentacles ensnaring us all and its tunnels suddenly visible in everything.

 2666. Loc 3682  2666. 16241  2666. Loc 5886  == RBolano 2666 (adam.bredenberg@gmail.com) - Highlight Loc. 13474-75 | Added on Wednesday, August 08, 2012, 12:59 AM

 2666. Loc 10575  2666. 7491 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> cite <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> cite <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. Loc 9075. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. Loc 9052