The Ontology of Sex. A Critical Inquiry into the deconstruction and reconstruction of categories (review)

Quinn Sánchez’s claim that the imposition of inauthentic, non Mexican forms of government furthered the fundamental error of the founding fathers – imagining the “ideal” nation and its citizens in a way that did not correspond to the realities of the Mexican people – is quite valuable in understanding the Mexican project of nation building. As Samuel Ramos had anticipated, Mexicanism alone would not bring authenticity to the nation and its citizens. The goal of the State was to create a unified nation, but the reality is that Mexico is heterogeneous. Hence, in the 1950s, writers such as Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes asserted that the solution for Mexico would have to include the stripping off of the false masks. Paz and Fuentes advocated an imaginary return to Mexico’s origins because understanding and accepting the nation’s past lead to the insight that one’s origins are not based on one source alone; that we are all multicultural and peripheral, and that Mexico was and will be the product of a plurality of histories, citizens, and identities. For Quinn-Sánchez, then, these writers represent a radical departure from the founding fathers to an increased awareness and acceptance of cultural differences within the concept of the nation. In A Literary and Political History of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Quinn Sánchez makes a most welcome addition to the history of nation building in Mexico. The book interconnects and expands on Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions by establishing the missing link between the populist romances that Sommer identified and the counter foundational texts that led to the Boom literature of the 1960s. Broad in scope and rich in detail, this book is a mustread for students and scholars alike who are trying to understand the fundamental failures of indigenismo as well as the pluralistic Mexico that contemporary writers, from all types of peripheries, are re-imagining today. CLARA ROMÁN-ODIO Kenyon College Hull, Carrie. The Ontology of Sex. A Critical Inquiry into the deconstruction and reconstruction of categories. Routledge: London, 2006. 185 pp. ISBN: 0415359791. En The Ontology of Sex, Carrie Hull discute en seis capítulos los conceptos del sexo y la sexualidad a través de diferentes variables biológicas y culturales como elementos postestructuralistas, para proponer por último un acercamiento realista a la distinción entre el sexo y la sexualidad. Tomando como punto de partida la postura de Michel Foucault, el nominalismo de Nelson Goodman y la relatividad ontológica y del behaviorismo ling üístico de W VO Quine, Hull estudia las alternativas contemporáneas de la reRese ñas 121 construcción del sexo y la sexualidad y cuestiona la premisa de que el conocimiento debe ser absolutamente cierto para ser válido. Seguidamente Hull establece la noción de que el cuerpo en sí posee una profundidad y se opone a la doctrina contemporánea de que el comportamiento humano (incluyendo el sexual ) se aprende estrictamente a través de la imitación de normas culturales, lo que la lleva a cuestionar el postestructuralismo y el constructivismo feminista y proponer una alternativa realista, para distinguir entre sexo y sexualidad. El resultado es un libro interesante y provocador que propone un nuevo ángulo de consideración y es punto de partida para un entendimiento del mundo que acabe con la injusticia social y la desigualdad. BEATRIZ LOMAS-LOZANO University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 122 Reseñas ...