Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction

Introduction

1 Introduction / Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its centre, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Mikael Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel” In providing libidinal gratification, laughter can also provide an analytic for understanding the relationships between the social and the symbolic while allowing us to imagine these relationships differently. JoAnna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter Toward the middle of Ana Lydia Vega’s story “Pasión de historia” [“Red Hot Story”],1 there is a moment when the story’s narrator, an aspiring writer, and her friend Vilma, an unhappily married femme fatale trying to cling to a Caribbean sense of pleasure in a sleepy French village, break into spontaneous laughter over a comment Vilma makes about the meal she is about to serve for dinner. In a rare show of domesticity, the spirited Vilma has taken over her mother-in-law’s kitchen to cook a traditional Puerto Rican meal of rice and beans. She does so in honor of her visiting friend, but she is well aware that her French family finds the dish unpalatable, uncivilized, and, worse, indigestible. As she begins to dish out generous portions of the “great Puerto Rican national stew” onto the “resigned plates” of her husband and in-laws, Vilma tells Carola (in Puerto Rican Spanish, so the others will not understand) that her recipe will “hit them like a stink bomb.”2 Vilma’s comment, with its nasty scatological implications, catches the normally reserved narrator off guard, causing her to lose her composure for the first time in the story. As the women start howling, the rules of civility begin to crumble 2 HUMORING RESISTANCE and the normal routine around the dinner table quickly disintegrates. Vilma chokes. The old couple watches in disbelief and discomfort, and their long faces further feed the women’s laughing frenzy. The husband sits nursing his quiet but visible rage at being left out of the joke. And no wonder. While it lasts, the unpremeditated laughter turns the narrator and her friend into women who are suddenly capable of becoming temporary agents of disruption even in the face of grim disapproval. The comic exchange, neither witty nor verbally offensive in this case, nevertheless has the effect of turning the two exotic but marginalized women into potential harbingers of social and cultural chaos. An emancipatory signal and a warning sign of more dramatic transgressions to come, the laughing spectacle opens up a space for indecorous excess and illicit pleasure, a space the narrator has been eager to explore from the beginning of the story. Loud and literally uncontrollable, the two women’s laughter at the dinner table has immediate and disturbing effects. It shatters convention, it augurs trouble for family and community, and it momentarily topples the gender, age, and ethnic hierarchies encoded in the different bodies that share the stereotypically bourgeois kitchen. Significantly, the burst of unexpected laughter propels the friends into visible, and offensive, physical action: they are literally shaking with laughter. As material evidence of a surplus libidinal energy stemming from the two women’s bodies, this laughter angers those who are outside the joke (the old parents-in-law and the young husband), forcing them to take defensive measures in return. “Pasión de historia” is part of a rapidly growing corpus of works by contemporary Latin American women authors who engage multiple “genres of laughter” (Laura Mulvey’s term) and a wide variety of “performative” excesses in order to explore alternative forms of resistance to mechanisms of control and containment.3 Markedly disparate in tone, mood, and style, these works have in common their refusal to participate in the discourse of victimization that has long dominated the writings of Latin American women and conditioned a large segment of Latin American feminist criticism centered heavily on this perspective. Narratives of victimization revolve around the traits of self-abnegation, elusiveness, invisibility, compliant speech, and obedient silence, tropes often associated with the discourses of “purity,” or idealized femininity. By contrast, contemporary texts by Latin American women who engage the comic vision—lightly, darkly, ironically or absurdly—seek to...