Review of María Inés Lagos\'s Hechura y Confección

Lagos, María Inés. Hechura y confección. Escritura y subjetividad en narraciones de mujeres latinoamericanas. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2009. 361 pp. In this important colección of essays, María Inés Lagos draws on more than two decades of her trailblazing work on Latin American feminist criticism to offer a broad view of the makings and unmakings of female subjectivity, the doings of gendered agents and the creation or recapitulation of strategies for negotiating or resisting familial, sociopolitical or cultural structures in works by over a dozen Latin American women writers. Although several of the essays that appear in this volume appeared in earlier versions (or in Spanish), their juxtaposition brings new light to Lagos’ original readings of the narratives studied, allowing us to appreciate both the development of feminist criticism in the area of Latin American fiction and the author’s own intellectual and theoretical trajectory in the process. My first reaction to the volume was one of surprise at the rather quaint title (“Hechura y confección”) for a collection of essays on women authors whose work was or is considered to be cutting-edge, revolutionary, subversive, or at least contestatory. But I have a penchant for etymologies and word usage, and a quick review of the composition and history of the two terms quickly convinced me Lagos’s inspired title encapsulated perfectly the broad spectrum of critical essays included in the volume.

Influenced by feminist anthropologist Sherry

Otner’s distinction between doing and making (or constructing) in connection with subjectivity and agency, Lagos’s book pursues questions of identity, subject position and agency and considers these within the social, political and cultural structures which the literary subjects she writes about inhabit.

Separately, “hechura” alludes to various forms of doing, of behaviors and deeds, while “confección” has a more

complicated history, having referred to, at different points in the history of the term, the preparation of pharmaceutical pastes or syrups thickened with sugar or honey, the preparation of documents or treaties, the expert preparation of sweets and complicated articles of clothing (the last two meanings still current usage in Spanish). Combined, the phrase “hechura y confección” refers to the designs and constructions of experienced seamstresses and tailors. In the context of this volume, the phrase link textiles and textures to texts and intertexts and subtexts; also, to cuts, seams and designs. Throught the volume, we witness the undoings and deconstructions of a critic who examines both the complicated social, political and cultural forces that the writers she studies enlist or resist in constructing their gendered subjects. The essays in the volume are also highly conscious of the elaborate woven textual stragegies that sustain such creations. Lagos prefaces her studies of women’s narratives written between the mid 1970’s and the mid 1990’s with a “preliminary portrait” (“Retrato preliminar”) of the 17th Century Chilean nun Ursula Suárez. Arguing that sister Ursula’s autobiography shows the nun already “doing” gendered negotiations in her dealings with the normative male power structures, Lagos claims that Latin American women writers can look to homespun versions of gendered subjects in their midst, implying, of course, that those women writing in the 1970’s could look to their own hemispheric histories for narrative models of gendering identity and agency rather than having to rely strictly on foreign examples. In her next chapter, “Sujetos femeninos narrados por ‘Otro’”, Lagos analyzes texts by Clarice Lispector, Julieta Campos, Rosario Ferré and Ana María del Río, all written largely in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The essays in this section comment on the difficulties and limitations of women whose identity is being defined from the perspective of the other. In these essays Lagos carefully notes the tensions and contestations that develop as the subjects narrated seek to rebel or redefined themselves against the impositions and suppositions established by the other’s line of vision. “Sujetos femeninos en sociedades en proceso de cambio” juxtaposes an additional reading of Ferré to essays on Rosario Castellanos and Isabel Allende in order to examine the particularly strategic negotiations the feminine subject must learn to make in changing times, or in times of social and cultural upheaval. Chapter four, “Sujetos femininos y las marcas de la dictadura,” gathers together some of Lagos’s best known and most frequently cited essays. Her superb analyses of Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” and Novela negra con Argentinos and Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica and El cuarto mundo pointed the way to future combinations of feminist criticism and political critique, and they remain models of this type of engaged reading. Thematically what unites the essays in this chapter (which also includes an analysis of Marta Traba’s Conversación al sur) is their nuanced analysis of the challenges women face when attempting to reconstruct or reassemble themselves during or after the shattering repressions of dictatorial regimes. The volume closes with a chapter on more recent texts by Luisa Valenzuela, Andrea Jeftanovic, Tununa Mercado and Sylvia Molloy. These final essays examine the way in which the texts study reflect on the potential of the fractured or fragmented selves’ crevices and open seams as points of departure for reconstructing or transforming a subjects’ sense of gendered identity. More than any of the other essays, these explore the advantages of positing a more versatile or fluid sense of gendered identity in order to optimize a subject’s sense of agency. The volume would have benefitted from a concluding reflexion, one in which the author summed up her own trajectory as a Latin American feminist critic as she looked back both at the authors she studied and at discoveries she might have made about her own changing perspectives as she compiled, re-edited or re-wrote many of the essays included here. But this is a minor criticism. Lagos’ previous publications on related topics include En tono mayor: relatos de formación de protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica (1996), and her edited volumes Creación y resistencia: la narrativa de Diamela Eltit, 1983-1998 (1996), and La palabra en vilo: narrativa de Luisa Valenzuela (co-edited with Gwendolyn Díaz, 1996). As noted earlier, some of the essays in the new collection appear, with some variation, in

these earlier volumes. Yet the value of Hechura y confección. Escritura y subjetividad en narraciones de mujeres latinoamericanas, lies in the impressive breadth of the material studied as well as in the historical and critical depth the essays display. No students of feminist criticism, or of contemporary Latin American women authors, can afford to ignore this book.