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Queering
the Past, Imagining the Future: Jovita González’s The
Dew on the Thorn and the Imaginings of the New
Intellectual
Jaime
Humberto Cruz
University
of California - Berkeley
(Estados
Unidos)
The project that I begin to
explore in this essay is the one (suggested by Walter
Mignolo) of reading a subaltern text from a subaltern
position. I want to purposely locate one of the characters
in a subaltern position in order to read his trajectory as
a possibly successful (though not unproblematic)
representation of an “organic intellectual”. Thus, I
propose to read the figure of the young
intellectual-in-training Cristóbal, in Jovita Gonzalez’s
Dew on the Thorn, as a possibly queer figure that will
embody a kind of border thinking that tries to begin to
make sense of the experiences of the many subaltern
figures that inhabit this space northeast of the Rio
Grande.
How it is that we read into
a text the sub-text that we so want to find? After all, we
are all perfectly aware that we can never produce an “objective”
reading of a text, as if what we read in a text were not
already what we are looking for. Along these same lines of
reading “into,” I consider Walter Mignolo’s idea of
“thinking (reading?) from” (8) and the possibility of
trying to unpack the many layers of possible transgressive
gestures in Gonzalez’s text. Could reading into and from
a queer perspective help to illuminate other instances of
the subaltern in dialogue with the hegemonic? I would like
to posit Gonzalez’s text as an instance of border
thinking that is in dialogue with two hegemonic
perspectives, a Mexican and an American one. It is a text
that covertly posits its critiques (from the closet, let
us say).
The moments when a critique
of the patriarchal structure of Mexican society can be
glimpsed are framed in moments that also exalt the very
structure critiqued. The possibility of reading a text
queerly, or queering a text, represents for me the
possibility of inserting my “self” into a discourse
and tradition from which my “kind” has been excluded.
If we accept that Gonzalez was writing under certain
constraints and knew the limitations of that which she
could write about, is it possible to read the text against
the grain, between the lines, guessing (desiring) that
perhaps this is one way in which the author would have
wanted it to be read? What then could it mean to read an
already subalternized text and to find within it further
subjugations or to read Dew on the Thorn as a possible
initial step in a long journey to the representation of a
queer intellectual?
About Jaime Humberto
Cruz
Mr. Cruz is currently
completing a dissertation on the neo-baroque in Latin
America. His interests focus on comparative literature in
the Americas, questions of the relation between aesthetics
and politcs, and the intersection of gender, sexuality,
and race.
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