Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction

The figure of the prostitute has not been ignored in literary studies, yet there is no full-length manuscript dedicated to what Debra Castillo broadly calls the “transgressive woman” in Mexican culture. As a corrective to previous studies that used “culturally biased observational methods,” says Castillo, she provides perceptive readings of various discourses, including literary texts, testimonials, oral interviews, and sociological data in order to provide the reader with a serious and thorough perspective. By including aspects of the historical/sociological debate surrounding the figure of the sexualized woman, Castillo offers a well researched, subtly argued book that addresses important issues beyond the traditional “study of the prostitute as literary figure.” Although she engages seriously with various theoretical and methodological issues, her own style is often playful and punning in a positive sense, as she explores the signs in their various contexts, from etymological points to the diverse euphemisms for the prostitute: public woman, loose woman, streetwalker, working woman, etc. Thus, since the transgressive figure is often termed a “loose woman” Castillo informs us that she focuses on the areas of “slippage between boundaries and their transgressions” (3).

Another of the many distinctions of her work is that Castillo shows herself to be well versed in Mexican cultural attitudes. The reader finds thoughtful observations that explicate aspects of Mexican cultural behavior, from her discussion of gender-marked exclamations and insults, such as “¡Viva México hijos de la chingada!” (pp. 18–19), to her careful reading of individual texts, whether the canonical Santa or the less studied Demasiado amor by Sara Sefchovich.

In addition to the introductory theoretical chapter and a final coda entitled “No Conclusions,” five chapters form the meat of this book about the commodification of women as objects of consumption or of exchange. Since Castillo offers so much “food for thought” and reflective commentary, I shall refer to some of the ideas in each chapter to demonstrate only some of their more flavorful aspects to me. For example, chapter 2 offers a revision of the canonical Santa, a turn-of-the century novel set in a brothel in which Santa is the ironically named star attraction, the prize and the prisoner. Castillo asks the important question of this text, as with others, what happens when the reader is female? Gamboa’s failure to understand women’s sexuality leads Castillo to (re)consider “how later authors can rethink and revise the manner in which female sexuality will be understood in Mexican culture and represented in Mexican fiction” (62).

The third chapter contains a number of admirable insights as it deals with two well-studied, now canonical writers, Juan Rulfo and Elena Garro. Surprisingly the work by Rulfo which Castillo has chosen is his 1940 novel fragment, “Un pedazo de noche,” in which the “loose woman” narrative point of view is presented by the transgressive woman herself. It is a “piece” of a work, too, being an excerpt possibly from a lost or unfinished novel. It has received very little critical attention, but Castillo’s reading of it shows that it is a powerful and disturbing narrative despite the short shrift others, including Rulfo, have dealt it. It contains in its brevity the typical Rulfian masterful mix of myth and social history. In her rereading of Recuerdos del porvenir, Castillo offers a new look at some traditional themes; she reminds us that it contrasts with war stories told from the male perspective. “Women and corpses, the two highly allegorized elements of traditional war fiction, here pass from the background of meditations on war to the foreground that no amount of military-strategy talk can disperse” (82–83). Castillo reads these two texts through the meditations on ontology of gender presented by Monique Wittig (The Mark of Gender) and Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Inhuman. Castillo shows that Garro and Rulfo “disturb this assumed universality of the masculine gender by foregrounding gender itself as a problematic social and ontological category” (68). In addition, because relationships among...