Gender, identity, and the security state: The politics of international drug trafficking

This dissertation examined how United States illicit drug control policy, often commonly referred to as the "war on drugs," contributes to the reproduction of gendered and racialized social relations. Specifically, it analyzed the identity producing practices of United States illicit drug control policy as it relates to the construction of U.S. identities. ^ Drawing on the theoretical contributions of feminist postpositivists, three cases of illicit drug policy practice were discussed. In the first case, discourse analysis was employed to examine recent debates (1986-2005) in U.S. Congressional Hearings about the proper understanding of the illicit drug "threat." The analysis showed how competing policy positions are tied to differing understandings of proper masculinity and the role of policymakers as protectors of the national interest. Utilizing critical visual methodologies, the second case examined a public service media campaign circulated by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that tied the "war on drugs" with another security concern in the U.S., the "war on terror." This case demonstrated how the media campaign uses messages about race, masculinity, and femininity to produce privileged notions of state identity and proper citizenship. The third case examined the gendered politics of drug interdiction at the U.S. border. Using qualitative research methodologies including semi-structured interviews and participant observation, it examined how gender is produced through drug interdiction at border sites like Miami International Airport. By paying attention to the discourse that circulates about women drug couriers, it showed how gender is normalized in a national security setting. ^ What this dissertation found is that illicit drug control policy takes the form it does because of the politics of gender and racial identity and that, as a result, illicit drug policy is implicated in the reproduction of gender and racial inequities. It concluded that a more socially conscious and successful illicit drug policy requires an awareness of the gendered and racialized assumptions that inform and shape policy practices.^

Representación de la mujer transgresora en la novelística de la Cuba republicana

This dissertation explored the subversive feminine discourse in the most representative novels of the first quarter of the twentieth century in the newly born republic of Cuba. Drawing on the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi and Pierre Bourdieu, these women were analyzed in the context of their time, their class level and their race. Because it is oppressive and theoretically unsatisfactory to reduce women to their general "humanity" or to their "femininity", my purpose was to analyze them as human beings in a "specific situation" and show how they curtailed the laws that patriarchy has prepared for them. The novels studied were: Doña Guiomar, by Emilio Bacardí; A fuego lento, by Emilio Bobadilla; La manigua sentimental, by Jesús Castellanos; Las honradas, by Miguel de Carrión; Las impuras, by Miguel de Carrión, and Ecué-Yamba-O, by Alejo Carpentier. Women will obtain freedom and independence from patriarchal control, symbolic power, symbolic violence, and hypnotic power when they are educated and have obtained a working position in society similar to men or by joining the political struggle in their community, in their country, or in the global organizations.

Dulce Maria Loynaz' Jardin: Subversive tropological discourse

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how the tropes or figurative discourse in Loynaz’s novel, Jardín, becomes a means by which she involves the reader within a text that subverts socio-cultural conventions. Through textual analysis, it explains how the poet communicates her views of the world as a conflictive space where existence is the will to live, life being a human construction like a garden, and a woman’s decision –often frustrated by men– to seek self-realization.^ By tracing some critical studies focused on polarities allegedly present in Jardín, such as: poetry/prose, lyric poetry/novel, word/silence, life/death, character novel/space novel, civilization/barbarism, posmodernismo/vanguardismo, and femininity/feminism, this essay explores Loynaz’s esthetic and ideological codes to demonstrate how opposition can be seen in her novel as part of her arrangement of an artistic philosophy.^ This research refers to three main sources: the semiotician Umberto Eco’s notion of the text’s indeterminacy as an opera aperta, reception theory, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. By applying these theories to the analysis of this novel, I seek to show Loynaz’s literary modus (tropological language) and ideological dictum , which correlate oppositions and transform them as a point of departure to reconsider civilized life. The poet is presented as an esthetic force that compels the reader to question some false values, by creating an implicit but intelligent dialogue between him/her and a lyrical text. To describe such literary procedure, I coin in this study the term dialirismo (dialyricism). ^ My essay is centered on the tropes through which Loynaz creates her dialyrical text. By focusing on metaphor, symbol, synecdoche, and metonymy, I examine Jardín as a convergence of the following conceptual aspects: intertextuality, primitivism, and feminist discourse. I argue that Loynaz’s novel is a creative response to the literary tradition, as well as a proposal to understand writing –and reading– as an open, interactive process in search not only of artistic values but also of critical knowledge.^ This exploration shows how the novelist faces a so-called civilized world through the eyes of her fictional character, Bárbara, who confronts patriarchal discourse. It celebrates Loynaz’s poetic representation of this inquisitive woman, in her fenced garden, as a human being who can see, above and beyond an iron curtain, the possibility to overcome an aggressive male-centered civilization.^

The representation of motherhood in contemporary Catalan fiction

This dissertation analyzes four twenty-first-century Catalan novels which present the complex positions occupied by mothers in the last seven decades. Its conceptual framework posits motherhood as both a changing social construction and a political institution in a constant state of flux. In Inma Monsó´s Todo un carácter (2001), Eva Piquer´s Una victoria diferente (2002), Carme Riera´s La mitad del alma (2004), and Najat El Hachmi´s El último patriarca (2008) motherhood is explored as a metaphorical act, a gender-constructing experience, as well as the locus of expression with regard to gender and power relations. During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the majority of women were excluded from public spaces, and forced to stay home to care for their husbands and children. Furthermore, the state criminalized abortion, made contraception and divorce illegal, and promoted an ideal of femininity based on silence, sacrifice, and self-denial. The political changes of the late 1970s allowed women greater personal autonomy, and many women writers began to challenge stereotypical views of women’s social roles. Yet in the 70s and 80s, the narratives of Esther Tusquets, Ana María Moix, and Montserrat Roig represent the mother as a repressive figure whom the daughter must reject in order to liberate herself and regain her voice. It is not until the 90s when the novelists Mercedes Abad, Maruja Torres, Carme Riera, Imma Monsó, Eva Piquer, and María Barbal rehumanize the mother figure, recovering their matrilineal heritage. However, far from suggesting a unified trend in representations of motherhood in Catalan fiction, the diverse points of view of the novels under discussion here reveal that differences in attitudes among women authors about mother-daughter conflict are far from resolved. The theoretical background for this dissertation draws mainly on the work of Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, and Julia Kristeva. It includes psychoanalytic studies as well as sociologically based essays by Anna López Puig, Amparo Acereda, Jacqueline Cruz, Barbara Zecchi, Ángeles de la Concha, and Raquel Osborne, among others.

Teoría y práctica del neobarroco en Severo Sarduy

This dissertation analyzes the theory and practice of the Cuban postmodern writer Severo Sarduy (1937–1993) from his early adult years in Cuba to his exile period in Paris, France, where he lived until his death. By studying his narrative through the light of his theoretical essays, this paper demonstrates that the author created his own type of reading model—from and for Sarduy. His literary work is influenced by three major elements: (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, which combined form what Sarduy himself called the Neobarroque style. The Sarduyan writing is a transgressive exercise expressed through his concept of simulación. This style breaks with the traditional art concept of mimesis (the representation of reality in the western world), and therefore with the correspondence between the signifier and the signified. Sarduy does not intend to represent reality but to go beyond it, achieving by his technique of signifying exhaustion to represent absence itself. The Neobarroque of Severo Sarduy is an aesthetic of the empty signifier based on the reckless expenditure, and ultimately exhaustion, of the artifices of language that precipitates in a signifier chain towards the infinite. His language does not transmit a message but it signifies itself, that is, a means without an end. Paradoxically, this signifier chain produces an excess of metaphors beyond the material limits of language and its support, the page. The space beyond language is the hipertelic technique inherited by Sarduy from his literary master, José Lezama Lima. This is also the empty space of no signification or nonsense in which occurs the depersonalization of the speaking subject; in Buddhist terminology this becomes the dissolution of the ego. The Sarduyan language is determined by a Lacanian psychoanalytic erotic drive (pulsion) known as the Barroquean desire, a death drive which directly relates to the exile condition of the author. But the genesis of this desire lies in a primordial desire of encounter with his origin: mother, maternal language, paradise, God. That is the reason why Sarduy not only poses an aesthetic question but also an ontological one. This other dimension of the Sarduyan writing is based on a liberating drive that permeates all his work—an ontological liberation expressed through language. The empty space created in the text provides the subject with the possibility of fusion with the all. Ultimately, Sarduy strives for a language that goes beyond the symbolic limits towards a place of constant dissolution, evanesce, and death-horror vacui. This corroborates the Sarduyan statement: “la simulación enuncia el vacío y la muerte.”

El discurso vindicatorio de Juan Goytisolo y Zoe Valdes: Deconstruccion y recodificacion del lenguaje hegemonico

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the use of transgressive language in the works of Juan Goytisolo and Zoé Valdés. This study examines the socio-political and cultural contexts in which the narrative of both authors develops, as well as the textual devices employed by these writers for undermining the “official history” imposed by the dictatorial regimes in Francoist Spain and Castro's Cuba. Furthermore, this dissertation argues that the deconstructing strategies in Goytisolo and Valdés mark their literary trajectory. Their vindicatory standpoints seek an alternative discourse of national identity. ^ The function of language in demythifying and recodifying hegemonic discourse is examined in Goytisolo's trilogy Señas de identidad, Reivindicación del conde don Julián, and Juan sin tierra; and the novels of Zoé Valdés La nada cotidiana and Te di la vida entera. The parallelisms in the literary works of Goytisolo and Valdés are established by contrasting the authors' revisionist approach to history, the self-reflexivity of their novels, the sexual referent, and the use of irony and parody. The theoretical framework incorporates poststructuralist theorists such as Todorov, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva; the psychoanalytical theory of Freud; and the feminist theories of Cixous and Irigaray. The comparative approach of this study and the interplay of power, politics, aesthetic creation, and author's psychology provide an illuminating perspective that could be of interest to individuals from a variety of disciplines. ^

The Broken Mirror: Maternal Agency and Identity in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

This paper examined how Esther Summerson, Dickens’s ideal good mother, can be understood as a woman who has maternal agency and identity both as a character and as a narrator, and how she contrasts with other maternal characters in the novel, both major and minor. While more transgressive mothers, such as Lady Dedlock, Mrs. Jellyby and even Krook’s cat, are doomed to death, ineffectiveness and madness, Esther moves from a frozen, “unsexualized” state into a space of life and sexual possibility. In addition, Esther has agency and identity as a narrator since she shares the narration with a third-person male narrator. Esther becomes the one who speaks rather than the one who is spoken of, and her maternal, nurturing voice provides a balm for the often harsh, judgmental voice of the male narrator. As the narrator’s patriarchal voice dies away at the end, it is Esther’s maternal voice that survives.

Ghost Tree Social

GHOST TREE SOCIAL tells a coming out story of sorts. In terms of style, many of the poems are short, imagistic lyrics, though some are extended catalogues. Specific natural images—lakes, rivers, and snow—are often contrasted with cultural markers. The imagistic poems are thinking through the work of Sylvia Plath. The catalogue poems shift between diaristic, narrative, and critical modes, responding to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and the essays of Edouard Glissant. Voice-driven fragments disrupt the more traditional lyric poems. The fragments fall between formal lyrics like confetti from a gay club’s rafters; or the fragments hold the lyric poems in bondage. The lyric poem then re-signifies as form through resonances with the other discursive and poetic form of the fragment. Following critical writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, the re-signification of lyric form reflects the need for new signs for self and community organized queerly as opposed to more typical binary categories—man or woman, living or dead, rich or poor, white or black—where the first term is privileged and the second term often denigrated.

Fault Line

FAULT LINE examines the fragile humanity connected to the themes of sexuality, violence, addiction, family dynamics, and death. The book is not broken into sections; rather, as poems build upon one another to explore a narrative arc, FAULT LINE tracks a single speaker’s experience from girlhood to the verge of independent womanhood. The speaker employs formal structures such as the prose poem, sestina, and particularly the list poem to examine the fluidity of inner experience and also the culture at large while challenging the narrow definitions of femininity and masculinity. FAULT LINE works to not only address the question of blame but also the literal breaks in lines of poetry. By looking at a single speaker’s struggle, the book, like life, is both humorous and horrifying.