Women in the Crucible of Conquest. The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600 (review)

238 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies O'Connor addresses specific authors and specific works. His chapter on Lezama Lima tackles the problem of Paradise's overt respect for the patriarchy and asks to what extent the work might be read as a "parricide" if it refuses to denounce the father and his rule. In the most carefully structured of these chapters, the figure of Felisberto Hernández gives O'Connor a wide berth for considering the triangulation of commodity fetishism, consumer capitalism and a lingering sense of a peculiarly naïve voyeurism, all contributing to the sense of melancholy that oozes out of Felisberto's fictions. Those of us who are fans of Felisberto's stories have long felt the melancholy; now we can come closer to understanding its complex source. The chapter on Cortázar and Pizarnik and their common but unequal interest in sadism and masochism offers a new and unexpected reading of 62: modelo para armar. The contrast between Cortázar's merely academic and Pizarnik's more daring stint with Sadeian aesthetics is forcefully documented, yet I found myself wishing the author would be more explicit about how Pizarnik's fascination with sadomasochism could help us better understand the limits of Cortázar's experiments with deviance. Nothing is missing, on the other hand, from "(Triple-) Cross-Dressing the Boom: Fuentes, Donoso, Sarduy, and the Queer Sixties." The chapter is a tour de force of literary analysis, queer theory, great literary gossip and the way in which both high and popular culture bear on biographical and literary models of Latin American masculinity. O'Connor's epilogue take him far away from the narratives of the Boom and up into the US-Mexico border. Gübert Hernandez's illustrated queer novel Love and the Rockets allows O'Connor to question other influential contemporary Latin American cultures and literary critics's continued reluctance to consider the alternative narratives that he has been showcasing in his book. If there is a weakness in the powerful theoretical paradigms of critics like Idelber Avelar, Alberto Moreiras, and Gareth William, O'Connor notes that it is their neglect of the alternative (perverse, deviant) narrative in their operating models. As to the answer to the million-dollar question ("is there a uniquely Latin American contribution to the narratives ofthe perverse?"), readers will need to decide for themselves. O'Connor's chapters superimpose enough eUiptical arguments to discourage the specific attribution to particular forms of deviancy to particular cultural terrains or literary trends. The difficulty of determining particular lines of contact between cultures and perversions has to do, no doubt, with the ontological indeterminacy of deviance, but also of desire—sexual or otherwise. Perhaps it is impossible to imagine Felisberto's complicated scenarios with dolls and women anywhere but in the cultural, historical and economic milieu of Montevideo in the 1940s, and perhaps equally impossible to imagine Lezama's Titanic deviant but sneaky bravado anywhere but in Castro's Havana. Perhaps not. In the end, however, the attribution of specific perversions to specific areas (or authors) becomes less relevant—and less influential—than the author's conviction that there needs be a fundamental rethinking of much of Latin American literature in terms of its focus on gender and sexuality. At the same time, O'Connor's subtle stress on the difficulty of determining some forms of masculine identification as weU as some forms of perversion opens the way for what should be less rigid and less dualistic studies of Latin American women authors (whether deviant or not). This book is a must read not only for Latin American scholars and queer theorists but for anyone interested in literary constructions of normalcy and deviance. Dianna C. Niebylski University of Kentucky Women in the Crucible of Conquest. The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600 University of New Mexico Press, 2005 Por Karen Vieira Powers Dentro de la serie "Diálogos," a la que pertenece, el libro de Vieira presenta una interpretaci ón intrigante, profunda y bien organizada Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 239 del choque de culturas que supuso la conquista y colonización de América en el siglo XVI, y...