Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies

259 Pages·2000·12.728 MB·English

by  Robin Truth Goodman

I N F E R T I L I T I ES
CULTURAL STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS
Edited by George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores
Volume 4 Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies
Robin Truth Goodman
Volume 3 Latin Americanism
Roman de la Campa
Volume 2 Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
Jose Esteban Munoz
Volume i The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.—
Mexico Border
Claire F. Fox
I N F E R T I L I T I ES
Exploring Fictions
of Barren Bodies
Robin Truth Goodman
Cultural Studies of the Americas
VOLUME 4
M
IN
NE
SO
TA
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Portions of "Conrad's Closet" originally appeared as "Conrad's Closet,"
Conradiana30, no. 2 (summer 1998): 83—124; published by Texas Tech
University Press and reprinted by permission. Portions of "Mario Vargas
Llosa and the Rape of Sebastiana" originally appeared as "Mario Vargas Llosa
and the Rape of Sebastiana," Latin American Literary Review 27, no. 53
(July 1999): 86—107; reprinted by permission of the publisher, Latin American
Literary Review.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodman, Robin Truth, 1966—
Infertilities: exploring fictions of barren bodies/Robin Truth Goodman.
p. cm.—(Cultural studies of the Americas ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3487-4 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8166-3488-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Spanish American fiction—History and criticism. 2. Conrad,
Joseph, 1857-1924—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Infertility,
Female, in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ7082.F35 G63 2000
863.009'353—dc21
00-009089
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10987654321
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
Darwin's Dating Game i
Conrad's Closet 45
Carpentier's Marvelous Conception 93
Mario Vargas Llosa and the Rape of Sebastiana 135
The Rainforest Rape 165
Conclusion 189
Notes 195
Works Cited 211
Index 231
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Preface
This book analyzes literary and political representations of female infertil-
ity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It takes as a starting
point Darwin's studies on sterility between species. Darwinian evolutionary
science imagines class struggle as a sexual game, recreating colonial history
and the struggle for resources within representations of nonreproductive
female identities. I trace Darwin's findings through discussions of cultural
representations wherein female unreproductiveness is a defining feature,
arguing how femininity has come to represent global markets. As such, this
book is vitally concerned with the role of the family in policing identity
but also with how the family itself is involved—within literature, discourse,
and politics—as a defense against the ravages of new capitalist orders. It
shows, for example, how Latin America offers an origin story of migrant
identities where femininity defines the border along which economic inter-
ests—or, rather, the so-called natural freedoms of market enterprise—are
seen urgently, like the family, as needing protection. In exploring these
issues I examine how Joseph Conrad constructs a vision of feminism as a
product of miscegenation, how Alejo Carpentier deploys female homosex-
uality to figure Latin American literature as difference, and how ecological
devastation in the Brazilian Amazon is envisioned as failure in a Native
American marriage. By locating points of conjunction between queer, fem-
inist, and postcolonial theories, I trace the ways that evolutionary theory
vii
viii PREFACE
still affects how unreproductive femininity functions within narratives of
colonial and postcolonial histories; consequently, I read lesbian and repro-
ductive theory and politics as participating in critiques of globalization.
Although the focus here is mainly on the textual and symbolic fabrics of
female infertility—on unraveling, for example, the politics of representa-
tion in literature, film, anthropology, theory, and science—I cannot think
such issues outside of the political environments that make them impor-
tant in the contemporary political setting. As Nancy Fraser has pointed
out, the current idea of the welfare state is organized on the basis of single-
earner households that "provided the normative picture of a proper family"
(41). The prevalence of this type of family arrangement was overestimated
even during the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of the welfare
state. However, now, in an era of globalization, the family cannot any
longer be thought of as the root principle on which economic policy is
structured. Even as it is caused by capital shifts and mobility, the coming
apart of the family enters culture as a moral problem, usually about
women. The current foregrounding of debates about, say, gay and lesbian
rights, abortion, or maternal surrogacy brings out female infertility as a
hidden thematic setting the tone of much political movement and debate
in the United States today. This shows a large amount of cultural anxiety
forming around issues of inheritance even as paternity is becoming more
ascertainable. This concern with inheritance testifies to a growing insecu-
rity about economic issues more generally, a feeling of instability and panic
among ordinary people about the changing nature of industrial produc-
tion, the limits to social mobility, and the related transformations in work-
force roles. Concurrently, the highly politicized dismantling of the welfare
system finds justification in images of single, black, poor women who are
hyperreproductive and—like the tenement immigrant women identified as
eugenic targets for a birth control campaign at the turn of the century—
needing financial restrictions on birthing rates. A current distrust or even
vilification of sex on the internet has turned into a discussion about the
post-human, an apocalyptic vision of a future with babies produced in lab-
oratories (dystopically popularized in the images of human farms in The
Matrix), while a prevalent belief that unreproductive women are dangerous
infiltrates even medical practices—as, I have been warned, turning thirty
without ever having been pregnant places me at greater risk for cancer, and,
PREFACE ix
as nurse practitioners have informed me, I should start considering mar-
riage. Such highly volatile, politicized images certainly require dismember-
ment, and new findings in queer theory are one good place to begin taking
them apart.
In addition, much mainstream filmmaking involves plots about the
suspension of female reproduction leading to the end of the human as we
know it. Human bodies and consciousness are colonized either by tech-
nologies and media (e.g., in Videodrome, Robocop, Total Recall] or alien
invaders (e.g., in Alien, The Faculty). Such movies show female sexuality
as a place that, apocalyptically, endangers the human. Independence Day,
for example, starts with the president's wife being called away from her
family for personal business on a distant coast. The subsequent weakening
of the president's masculinity underpins the global catastrophe of evil aliens
crossing into national airspace and the destruction that follows, including
the destruction of the First Lady's reproductive capacity through an abdom-
inal injury leading to her death. As much as narratives about universal
extinction stigmatize female fertility as a problem, they also show feminin-
ity constituted as a site of death, destruction, and danger within, for exam-
ple, anxious fantasies posing immigration as a threat to national interests.
The evil aliens have, after all, come to earth forcefully and unstoppably to
take control and ownership of our scarce natural resources. This inalienable
hunger of the alien for what is our property and our heritage is intertwined
with the First Lady's symbolic abortion, the potential end of the line of
our first children. "We are fighting," says the president, prepping his troops
for an air raid, "for the right to life." His wife's absence from the scene of
reproduction becomes, in a sense, a stand-in plot for an alien conquest, a
robbing and removal of our territory. The president can then regain the loss
of national economic supremacy only by an excessive show of military vio-
lence that reinstates the family—the daughter's love and safety—as the
prize of global victory. In other words, the idea of the human that depends
on the reproduction of femininity is formed as a grid of global economic
power.
One wonders, indeed, if the cultural construction of homosexuality as
a problem is essentially, perhaps inextricably, connected to the depiction
of the immigrant as a site of panic. "Especially at those junctures," notes
Judith Butler, "in which compulsory heterosexuality works in the service