Okinawan Peruvian Poet’s Gender Performativity: On “Diario de la mujer es ponja” by Doris Moromisato
- Okinawan Peruvian Poet’s Gender Performativity: On “Diario de la mujer es ponja” by Doris Moromisato
Shigeko Mato received her Ph.D in Spanish American literature from the University of New Mexico. She is Associate Porfessor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Spanish Language at School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. Her articles on contemporary Japanese Peruvian literature and Mexican literature have appeared in Hispanófila, Confluencia, and other journals. She is also the author of Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation: Desire and Limits for Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Mexican Fiction (2010).
Endnotes
1. The painting on which Juan Kanashiro Iparraguirre bases his could be one of Utamaro’s many that depict a woman sitting in front of a mirror, either putting white powder to her neck or fixing her hair or makeup (Asano). As in Utamaro’s paintings, in Moromisato’s Diario’s covers, the viewer also sees the woman’s face reflected in the mirror and her long neck from the back.
2. “Esponja” in Spanish (sponge in English) has the connotation of a person who has a great faculty for absorbing information, according to Real Academia Española. Debbie Lee-DiStefano also interprets the meaning of sponge as a woman “capable of soaking up her surroundings, of absorbing any information” (48)
3. Derrida, elaborating on J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances,” delineates that it is the citationality and iterability of every sign (spoken or written) that first “do things” or make it possible for a sign to produce certain effects and actions (by repeating), yet it is also the citationality and iterability that make the effects and actions of a sign unidentifiable, incomprehensible, and invalid within any given context (by altering), “engendering] infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). Butler, also adapting Austin’s concept of “performative utterances,” applies this notion of citationality and iterability of performativity to her study of the construction of gender and sex. For her more detailed analysis of Austin’s performativity of speech acts, see the introduction of Bulter’s Excitable Speech, in which she examines how “injurious speech” (“hate speech”) functions both as “the deed that [utterance] effects” and “certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself” (3).
4. Butler states “the question is no longer, How is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the “matter” of sex untheorized), but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates that normative conditions of its own emergence?” (xviii–xix).
5. Paracelsus (1493–1541 b. in Einsiedeln, Switzerland) was a 16th century physician, alchemist, and botanist who invented new chemical treatments for illnesses and wounds (such as use of laudanum and mercury for syphilis) (Norden).
6. See p. 1–2 of this study.
7. I first found this quote in Carmen Tisnado’s study on four South American short stories with lesbian themes (278) and then examined Butler’s original study.
Works Cited
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