Hechura y confección: Escritura y subjetividad en narraciones de mujeres latinoamericanas (review)

Upon embarking on a reading of María Inés Lagos's recent book, Hechura y confección: escritura y subjetividad en narraciones de mujeres latinoamericanas, her readers are inevitably struck by the sweeping scope of this project. That is, Lagos endeavors to trace the development of female subjectivity in a number of Latin American works, beginning with Ursula Suárez's Relación autobiográfica (written between 1708 and 1730) and ending with Andrea Jeftanovic's Escenario de guerra from 2000. It is a study whose theoretical depth and variety of included authors combine to produce a collection of essays especially well-suited for specialists in twentieth-and twenty-first century Latin American narrative.

The book contains an introduction, five chapters (each offering three to five sections which investigate the works of different authors) and a useful bibliography. The point of analytical departure is a productive one: Lagos studies the ways in which female subjectivity manifests itself in a number of texts in light of influences such as "el género, clase, sexualidad, religión, cultura, raza y etnia" (16). Following the theoretical leads posited by Butler, Ortner, Foucault, and others, Lagos envisions this subjectivity as one that is increasingly fluid while allowing for possibilities of personal agency and cultural negotiation.

The opening chapter of Lagos's investigation presents a rigorous consideration of Suárez's Relación autobiográfica and its early elaboration of the critical crossroads between subjectivity and gender. This section succeeds in its deliberate departure from the extensively employed example of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in favor of Suárez, a Chilean figure often overlooked by Latin American literary criticism. Conversely, Lagos's first chapter seems to stand on a temporal island in terms of its connection with the novels from the twentieth century that dominate this collection's critical focus; a more explicit explanation of how Suárez's resistant subjectivity creates a dialogue with succeeding generations of female writers would be a welcome addition.

In chapter 2, there is a critical fast-forward to texts of the twentieth-century whose narrators are often male. Works by Julieta Campos, Luisa Valenzuela, Clarice Lispector, Ana María del Río, and Rosario Ferré serve as the literary base for this section, which clearly demonstrates a female subjectivity best described as evasive and multiple. Furthermore, Lagos examines these narratives in terms of relations sustained between the female literary subject and the "Other," domestic/public space, as well as the influences exerted on gender formation by social, historical, and class factors.

The focus of chapter 3 turns to the development of female subjects in the midst of social flux. Ferré's "La muñeca menor" forms an important critical nucleus along with works by Rosario Castellanos and Isabel Allende. This part of Lagos's book is particularly effective in its profound analyses of narratives whose female protagonists struggle to develop their subjectivities under external pressures such as exile, patriarchal demands on the female body, and cultural fragmentation. Although Lagos includes narratives from Mexico, Chile, and Puerto Rico, respectively, her analyses retain critical coherence in their concentration on the protagonists' often painful process of discursive transformation. In the end, she volunteers these particular texts to underline the point that female subjectivity need not project one stable voice, but rather, embraces a fluid multiplicity of narrative selves.

Narratives from the Southern Cone dominate chapter 4, with the most intense critical attention reserved for Valenzuela and Diamela Eltit (two sections for each writer). While Marta Traba also receives analytical treatment in this chapter, Lagos devotes the majority of her energies to investigating how female subjectivities in Valenzuela are the target of masculine, hegemonic efforts to immobilize them, yet resist these impositions by subversively crossing boundaries of gender and nation. The fragmentation of feminine subjectivities represents a crucial point of examination in Eltit's novelistic production, along with a consideration...