I begin with a marvelous quote from Jonathan Littellâs novel The Kindly Ones that goes hand in hand with one of the most recent theories of gender studies, the performance of gender or gender as performance that made Judith Butler one of the most outstanding gender theorists at the close of the twentieth century:
Our bodies are identicalâŚ.Arenât men the vestiges of woman? For every fetus starts out female before it differentiates itself, and menâs bodies forever keep the trace of this, the useless tips of breasts that never grew, the line that divides the scrotum and climbs the perineum to the anus, tracing the place where the vulva closed to contain ovaries that, having descended, evolved into testicles, as the clitoris grew unrestrainedly. (Littell, 896)1
Considering the high regard in which gender performance is held, the question posed by Littell indirectly pertains to the mutation of gender, or the erasure of gender, a âthird attitudeâ as Julia Kristeva puts it, in which âthe very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysicsâ (Kristeva, 33).2 Wouldnât you say we are already on the liminal zone of the question as to whether or not the effacing of difference is possible? Perhaps we are on the threshold of the demassification of the problematic of difference, the dedramatization of rivalry and opposition, so that the struggles caused by the implacable difference, the violence with which it operates âdisintegrate in its very nucleusâ (Kristeva, 34). What once was an irreducible, deadly, implacable intransigency in the social contract is now forcibly under siege, hence the title of my book, Gender Violence in Failed and Achieved States: Besieging PERVERSE Masculinities. The title comes from the sense and feeling given to me by the bibliographies I read to write it. There has been so much effort invested in understanding what gender is and what masculinities are that rather than limiting myself to a title like âPerverse Masculinities,â I wanted to honor the efforts of women scholarship as trail blazers in the unraveling of the issues at hand.
The subtitle comes from my intent to articulate gender with state power. My initial impulse was to write about newspapers in Nicaragua, but as I read on I realized the phenomenon was so ubiquitous and the differences between extreme gender violence in well-established states in comparison to weak ones were so appallingly similar that I could not avoid a comparative analysis. Although well-organized states over legislate to protect women, the kind of cruelty and sophistication we read about is so unnerving that gender violence well deserves the subtitle of performing the joy of hating women. I did just that in one of the chapters of this book. Masculinity in itself is not the theoretical issue in my work as much as is the topic of what masculinity does. Nonetheless, I acknowledge the work done in this area.3 Most studies of masculinities I have read verse solely on men, and I am interested not only in the male/male, male/female interaction but also in the political power implied in the liaison. I am also invested in how masculinity comes up first in media narratives and trash literature and, subsequently, how it is reinforced or re-inscribed by high art, literature, and film. So, the comparison between high and low forms of representation is in order, as is the underscoring of their similarities. Trash literature like media literature has been useful in this respect. In both of these archives, I see masculinity operating on the threshold and positioning women between what is destroyed and what endures. Mass media states that masculinity is tested from the age of 10 to 14. Boys organized in gangs get drunk to go prowling for women, sometimes like a wolf coming up swiftly and noiselessly behind a deer; some others with their dicks right out. If found in the streets, women are abducted forcibly and taken to empty, solitary locations where they are raped and left abandoned to their own resources. If at home, women are usually taken to a hideout, preferably the bedroom, bathroom, or an obscure hallway. This initiation of masculinity is coupled with raping and beating a woman in the presence of others; it consists in making her afraid, causing pain, intimidating with fists or bladed weapons to produce a cellular memory as well as genital and extra-genital lesions, sores, and death. In the TV show The Fall, the woman detective poses her lover a question: âWhat do you think men fear most about women? They fear women will laugh at them. What do you think women fear most about men? They are afraid they will kill them.â4 Here is how a woman writer, Joyce Carol Oates, writes this in fiction:
He stood over her, prodding with his foot. The toe of his shoe between her legs, making her writhe in pain. âEh baby? What you like, is it? Rebecca was too slow and dazed to react as Tignor wished, he lost patience and straddled her. Now he was truly angry, cursing her. So very anger now, and she had no idea why. For she had not fought him, she had tried not to provoke him. Yet he was shutting his hands around her neck, just to frighten her. Teach her a lesson. Shaming him in front of his son! Thump-thump-thumping the back of her head against the floorboards. Rebecca was choking, losing consciousnessâŚ. There was the understanding between them, wasnât there?âhe would never seriously hurt her. He would threaten but he would not. Yet he was choking her and stuffing bills into her mouth trying, to shove bills down her throatâŚ. Rebecca could not breathe, she was choking. She struggled to save herself, panic flooded her veins. The man was jeering, âJew! Bitch! Whore!â He was furious, exuding a terrible righteous heat (The Gravediggerâs Daughter, Kindle, 328).5
Having said this, the purpose of this book is to discuss gender violence and share some key difficulties encountered in articulating different bibliographies and archives, trash and prestigious, to come up with a plausible hypothesis to understand it. The principal nodal points of my research are: (a) the erasure of gender violence in cultural debates about human rights, which, for me, goes to the heart of the politics and policies of state formation and deformation; (b) the rethinking of violence from a gender(ed) perspective as related to the power implicit in the constitution and exercise of masculinities; and (c) the tensions implicit in the intertwining of diverse narratives in the elucidation of these matters.
I began my research on incest motivated by a story told by a doctor working at a medical facility in Ciudad Sandino, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Managua, Nicaragua. This was a story of affect turned sourâthe story of paternal love in whose underbelly laid an unrestricted male libido. The story had a decisive effect on me, and I found in the newspapersâor what I call here media memoryâan important archive on the subject. This is a key point, given that information on incest becomes immediate news and brings into the fore events that the private occludes and protects. Yet, media archives do not enjoy epistemic privilege. On the contrary, they chip away the social weight of abuse in that they are considered narratives bordering on morbidity and alarmâa yellow press that easily falls into what is called a crime report. I think it would be interesting to discuss the value of these media archives as âtrash archives.â The most generative direction of my research points to the contrast in the treatment of incest and gender abuse by well achieved and failed states. Here we reckon with the interweaving of masculinity and power to the a-stateship condition of women, studied by Catherine MacKinnon, which leads to the formation of womenâs groups that exert pressure on state policies and politics regarding gender. This relationship is a sore spot for social sciences that feminist scholarship touches with womanâs hands.
I also explore the interlocking of diverse gender narratives: from those gathered by womenâs organizations invested in collecting and propagating hard data, such as CatĂłlicas de Nicaragua, to solid and prestigious feminist theories, such as Julia Kristevaâs and Judith Buttlerâs, to literature and film as part of global culture.6 In the crisscrossing of narratives, I found the greatest and most productive tensions, ones that reinforce gender belligerence, thus contributing to an understanding of masculinities. Furthermore, the crisscrossing of narratives discloses what disciplinary contracts veil, and trespasses the borders between achieved and failed states. Understanding the interlocking of masculinities and power is a necessary condition to debate the meaning of incest, pedophilia, rape, and feminicide as particular instances of gender violence. Politically, gender violence has been considered a social plague, one of the greatest pandemics affecting public health and social development.
In studying gender violence, it is of essence to establish a counterpoint between well-achieved and failed states. I analyze particular cases of gender violence in the USA, Austria, and Russia. In the USA, I study the cases of Anthony Sowell, a serial killer from Cleveland, Ohio; of Phillip Garrido, a psychopath from California who abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her in his backyard in California for 18 years and had two daughters with her; and the case of John Phillips, Mackenzie Phillipsâs father, a famous singer from the rock band The Mamas & the Papas.
In Austria I take the case of Joseph Fritzl, who kept his daughter captive for over 20 years, locked up in his house basement that he fixed as an atomic shelter, and with whom he engendered five children. In Russia I take the famous case of Andrei Chikatilo, the Rostov assassin, who killed numberless childrenâperhaps over 50. In Sowellâs case, I establish a contrast between feminicide and the storing of bodies in a refrigerator, synonymous with a butcher shop.
In Garridoâs and Fritzlâs cases, I compare keeping women as prisoners in the house backyard or locking them up in the basement and using them as breeders of children as an analogy to a pigsty or chicken coops, and the use of a daughter as the object of pleasure. In Fritzlâs case, I establish a contrast between the Austrian Elisabeth and the Nicaraguan Rosita. These are two distinct instances of incestâone occurring in a well-achieved state and the other in a failed oneâthat offer the opportunity to gauge the different ways of treating incest.
In Chikatiloâs case, I study the technologies of desire, which consist in the opening of the body and the touching or fondling with oneâs bare hands the living and palpitating organs of desecrated bodies. In well-achieved states, sexual transgressions are immediately related to psychotic conditions, as in the cases of Sowell and Garrido, or to instances of permissible pleasure and transgressing of the law by privileged social sectors, as with the case of John Philips, for whom incest is not coupled with violence but with pleasure, music, and drugs. Can you believe it? Or, they are related more directly to political regimes and state formations, such is the case of Austrian Joseph Fritzl, whose childhood was concurrent with the ascent of Nazism to power in Germany and to the admiration the child felt for that process coupled with the presence of an abusive and âdenaturalizedâ motherâFritzl is the only case of a rapist mother. Chikatilo also refers to the formation of absolutist and totalitarian states that take us to the Great Russian famines at the beginning of the revolution where the offensive mounted by the capitalist nations against Russia propelled the transgression of ânatural lawsâ expressed in cannibalism. We are told that Chikatiloâs brother was subjected to cannibalism.
Examples articulating gender violence to state politics are of great relevance for studying Nicaragua, a country where a 45-year dictatorship controlled the nation, followed by a revolution that, having been defeated in the electoral polls, came back to power in recent years and is considered now a second dictatorship with a direct analogy to the first. Thus, the Somoza regime and the Ortega regime are paired in the minds of people, giving flesh and blood to Marxâs adage of history repeating itself, the first time as drama and the second as comedy. In Nicaragua, I am not interested in the most singular and notorious cases but in the ubiquity of the phenomenon that I argue is part and parcel of the cultural national paradigm and, hence, an important item to figure out in the articulation of event and structure. The cases presented are those of Marianita, Rosita, the âother Rosita,â Margarito, and Janeth Isabel Treminio. The large majority of articles on gender violence reported by Nicaraguan journalists speak either to the indifference of the state or to its lack of capacity or even negligence to administer such problems. This type of state performance leads me to a discussion on masculine sexuality and power. Thus, there is a well-knit chain articulating state power, gender violence, and masculinity. Here a definition of masculinity is in order, and I take this definition from a performance of gender that betrays itself as self-entitled and that is deployed in all types of archives.
To understand masculinities, my first question was sentimental: what motivated or enabled men to commit such heinous atrocities against children sometimes less than a year old? Theories of desire and sexuality were primordial to answer these questions. The newspaper vocabulary that referred to this type of masculine performance as perversion, degeneration, and aberration led me directly to Freud. He offered me a definition of the concepts that, surprisingly enough, coincided with their uses in newspapers. I guess that is why Antonio Gramsci upheld that all of us are philosophers. However, Freud established a dividing line between perversion, aberration, and degeneration. The most delicate points of these definitions of transgressing the law were those related to the endangerment of life.7 Nicaraguan sexual practices oscillated between the three concepts. Freudâs article on perversion led me to Lacan and then to Ĺ˝iĹžek. Ĺ˝iĹžek, in turn, led me to the work of Renata Salecl and back to feminism. In this regard, the theoretical corpus that has made the phenomenon of sexualities most comprehensive to me is, first, the work of Julia Kristeva and, second, that of Judith Butlerâthough the scholarship of Eve Skosowsky Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, and the heavy battery of social scientists like Iris Marion Young, Seyla Benhabib, Joan B. Landes has also been very useful to me. However, it is in Kristeva that I found the concept âsymbolic denominator,â which takes us to linguistic contracts and systems of meaning and from there to a type of soc...