Celebrating Erotic Autonomy: Decolonizing Desire in Vanessa Vilches Norat's "Del dulce olor de sus pechos"

"¡Puta antes que corrupto!", "¡Puta pero no corrupta!", "Puta no, ¡putísima!", and "¡Qué gobiernen las putas!" were just some of the chants that were heard on the streets of Old San Juan, during the July protests of 2019 in Puerto Rico, better known as the protests of the Verano del 19. During the Verano del 19, citizens took to the streets in response to a Puerto Rican government that had targeted and ridiculed them in a series of private chats that took place between the then governor, Ricardo Rosselló, and his top advisors and friends.¹ Published in their totality on July 13, 2019 by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, the 889 pages of chats, commonly referred to as "el chat de la infamia", sparked the protests that would begin the next day and that would ultimately lead to Rosselló's resignation on July 24, 2019 (Pérez 62). In these chats, Rosselló and his top officials referred to women as putas while also targeting the LGBTQ community and mocking citizens that had died as a result of Hurricane María.² For this very reason, many of the women that took to the streets during that July both (re)appropriated the word puta and "used their bodies as moving canvasses", to use Frances Negrón-Muntaner's terminology, in response to a corrupt government that has treated women, the LGBTQ community, and other vulnerable citizens as disposable bodies (see "Puerto Rico Remade"). According to Joseph Drexler-Dreis, decolonization involves dismantling how the other is positioned in Western thought by transcending these knowledge systems (39–42); in other words, "the possibility to be, think, and imagine in ways that are not beholden to the confines of the coloniality of power" (37).³ It was precisely this coloniality of power that came under attack during the July protests through the use of the erotic body as a political instrument of dissent, especially during the sensuous "perreo combativo" (reggaetón dance style) on the steps of Old San Juan's Cathedral.⁴ As Negrón-Muntaner comments, "That the majority of these practices put an emphasis on the body is significant. The protests were acts of self-creation at a time where people's bodies are literally on the line" ("Puerto Rico Remade"). The corporeal protests of the Verano del 19, therefore, articulate a new decolonial and emancipatory politics; one rooted in a celebration of the erotic and of previously marginalized bodies that disrupt the heteropatriarchy.⁵

Speaking about women's erotic autonomy as part of decolonial black feminist projects, Christian Klesse defines it "as a woman's right to sexual self-expression and individual sexual choice", and explains that "demands for women's erotic autonomy have been part of a wider critique of heteropatriarchal structures" (217). Klesse's definition builds on Audre Lorde's claim that

[t]he erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

(53)

Women, then, have not only been taught to suppress the erotic from their lives, but also that the erotic is "in the service of men" (Lorde 54). The knowledge of the erotic is empowering, explains Lorde, because it opens us to the joy of experiencing everything deeper, fuller, and more intensely satisfying without having to subsume it under established patriarchal categories like heterosexual marriage (56–57). Women's erotic autonomy is viewed as a threat to heteropatriarchal institutions, specifically the family unit, because it endangers the heterosexual reproduction of the State. As M. Jacqui Alexander clarifies, "Erotic autonomy signals danger to the heterosexual family and to the nation. And because loyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality...