“Disfruto disfrutar”: Corporeality, Cross-Dressing, and Jouissance in Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme

The wounded, defiant body of M. de Fleurcy/Claire Fleurcy/Clara Flor is the center of gravity in Carmen Boullosa’s 1994 novel Duerme. The novel’s opening chapter focuses on the narrator-protagonist’s physical sensations: she cannot speak or move but can perceive what is going on around her, so that the reader is introduced to her through emotions and corporeal sensations: cold, pain, amusement, fear. Claire’s body is later drained of blood and filled with pure water from ancient streams by an indigenous woman, which grants her eternal life. This water also traps her, since she will fall into an eternal, ageless sleep if she ever leaves the Valley of Mexico. Despite these difficulties, Claire finds ways of extracting pleasure from all of the identities she occupies throughout the course of the novel, ranging across genders, nationalities, and ethnicities, vitally living out each identity (Pirott-Quintero 1). In this article, I argue that Claire’s insistence on being born to and for physical pleasure serves to interrogate the gendered, racial, and social identities that she occupies over the course of the novel. Through her cross-dressing protagonist, Boullosa establishes a profound questioning of the intensely hierarchical social castes created by New Spain’s obsession with social status via dress and limpieza de sangre during the earlier years of the Viceroyalty (1521–1821).

To keep this interrogative pleasure at the forefront of my analysis, I propose a reading of Duerme as a Barthesian text of bliss and of pleasure, a text of pleasure (plaisir) that “comes from culture and does not break with it” that is also a text of bliss (jouissance) which “imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts . . . unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relationship with language” (14). While Barthes did not write his text with the colonial era or Mexico in mind, Boullosa’s textual play between Barthesian pleasure and bliss serves her well in her re-imagining of the Conquest in a way that is both playful and deadly serious, with a protagonist whose cross-dressing upsets and blurs boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and nationality, along with cultural assumptions of identity. Examinations of these elements during this time period also require the consideration of the historical significance of cross-dressing for a character such as Claire, as well as the implications of Boullosa’s employment of blood, water, and purity in a society consumed by uncomfortably mutable notions of limpieza de sangre.¹

Duerme is part of a series of postcolonial² novels that Boullosa published in the 1990s, among them Llanto. Novelas imposibles (1992), Duerme (1994), and Cielos de la tierra (1997). As part of his work on contemporary readings of the colonial period in Mexico, Oswaldo Estrada observes that these novels “confront unresolved identity conflicts of the colonial era and the postcolonial present, at the same time that they openly blur the lines between history and fiction as part of a self-conscious process” (“(Re)constructions” 132). Duerme in particular addresses these unresolved conflicts through its fragmented narrative structure, through Claire’s ever-shifting identities, and through its unresolved ending. Claire comes to the New World as a male pirate; upon arrival, she is captured and forced to change places with Count de Urquiza, who has been sentenced to death. When her biological sex is discovered, an indigenous woman saves her life, but she does not consider it to be an act of mercy, telling Claire: “Usted que no eres (sic) ni hombre ni mujer, que no eres nahua ni español ni mestizo, ni Conde ni Encomendado, no mereces la muerte” (Boullosa 28, my emphasis). She then cuts open Claire’s left breast, replacing the blood in her veins with the pure waters of Anáhuac in what Boullosa has referred to as “a baptism in reverse” (Kroll 13). She survives the hanging and escapes being buried alive by engaging in a series of cross-dressing performances that alternatively allow and require her to inhabit...