Mad Love: The Problematization of Gendered Identity and Desire in Recent Mexican Women's Novels

Despite the fact that the issue of gendered representation in literature has provoked lengthy and often heated debate among theorists for most of the twentieth century, women writers today still face the complex task of creating a uniquely feminine voice for self-expression in their texts, regardless of whether their work is meant to speak for women's experiences in general or one woman's experience in particular. As Shoshana Felman points out, to speak for women or to speak in the name of women is: a precise repetition of the oppressive gesture of representation by means of which, throughout the history of logos, man has reduced the woman to the status of a silent and subordinate object, to something inherently spoken for ... To "speak in the name of," to "speak for," could thus mean, once again to appropriate and to silence. (8) How, then, does a female novelist create female characters who speak in their own voices and function as subjects when women are perceived in our culture as objects who are spoken for and acted upon? This important theoretical question is one that women writers must contemplate and attempt to resolve each time they produce a work of fiction, for it becomes not only a question of how to speak but of who is speaking in the text. Simultaneously, the writer must attempt to find a way for the female character to act as an autonomous subject, to do rather than to be done to. The shift from object to subject position is a difficult one to achieve in a society where gendered identity is rigorously upheld through a system of binary oppositions; femininity is defined as what is not masculine, as lack, as absence. Since males have historically occupied the subject position, both in literature and in life, the representation of women as objects has become a cultural norm. Specifically, the representation of feminine sexuality in literature, together with the difficulty of pinpointing how women's desire might manifest itself through the written word, have been intense areas for investigation in women's writing because they beg the larger question: can women ever function as desiring subjects in their own right? Freud's belief that women embody desire but cannot possess it has been questioned, disputed, and negated by an army of scholars over the past decades, yet the concept has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it has become a subconscious truth for many people. Jessica Benjamin notes, "At times we are shocked by how much the reality of woman's condition differs from what we, in our minds, have long since determined it should be. Even the more modest demands for equality that we take for granted have not been realized" (87). Women's liberation has allowed women more freedom in the expression of their sexuality, but, as Benjamin observes, the sexually active woman does not necessarily signify an active subjectivity. Rather, the "`sexy' woman ... is sexy, but as object, not as subject. She expresses not so much her desire as her pleasure in being desired; what she enjoys is her capacity to evoke desire in the other, to attract. Her power does not reside in her own passion, but in her acute desirability" (89). In an effort to sidestep the thorny problem of feminine desire, some women novelists shy away from sexually explicit texts. Their female characters appear as de-sexualized beings who, although they escape the confines of masculine desire, "can only avoid sexual objectification and passivity by giving up on sex altogether" (91). Both of these extremes--the sexy wontan and the sexless woman--perpetuate and preserve the old gender system in which women acquire value only through their ability to evoke desire in others or through their renunciation of desire in favor of a de-eroticized existence. In a society where woman is positioned and identified as "Other," the path of least resistance has led some women writers to embrace feminine "otherness" as a redemptive quality. …