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Ella susurraba arrastrando las palabras con su voz anaranjada y me contaba las cosas que iba a hacer conmigo. Sliding around in search of me, she crashed in the dark, suddenly, and I felt her skin in contact with mine. She murmured crawling words with her orange voice and told me the things that she was going to do with me. And then I felt how she entered me, a luminous attack that lit up the sheets. It was as if I had a micro camera on the tips of my fingers that allowed me to see her inside. I advanced, I entered her.
I was in her, and she in me. In her experience of sex and pleasure with her female lover, Beatriz here is both the object and the subject of their interaction. She waits for her lover's touch, listens as Cat expresses her desire, allows herself to be "attacked," and yet also enters into her lover, examines her minutely with her fingertips, and traverses the barriers of her body, desires her actively.
It is an electric experience, an electric desire. In other words, the kind of female desire inscribed in the novel through Beatriz takes on many layers of meaning and is not a simple reversal of the dichotomy of masculine and feminine, activity and passivity.
It is instead an erasure of the hierarchy of power that is given to one desiring party over another within such a paradigm, which achieves its aim by attributing active and passive characteristics to Beatriz's desire to the point that they are simultaneous and inseparable. Beatriz's lust at times takes the form of a "ritmo salvaje" savage rhythm Etxebarria , and at others she offers no resistance, telling herself to "Go with the flow" ; italics and English in original.
Sexual craving gives her the potential for agency in the way that she embodies it and makes it her own. When describing her relationship with Ralph, she asserts authority over both her desire and the sexual act itself. In this way Beatriz subverts the traditional hierarchical image of coitus, which attributes social characteristics of masculine activity and female passivity to sexualized body parts. Beatriz takes hold of her own sexuality and agency even in a heterosexual coupling, thereby rejecting notions of female desire as inherently passive and breaking with the notion of an immutable and essentially feminine way of desiring.
In so doing, she gains a new awareness of her self and body: Ironically, however, in coming into her body by means of a multiple-partner sexuality that is neither solely lesbian nor heterosexual, Beatriz finds herself and her sexual physicality precisely at the point where her identity becomes socially ambiguous, unrecognizable within the terms of normative discourse.
This ambiguity casts a shadow of doubt over the viability of her identity, since the struggle to find agency that develops in such an ambiguous way can threaten the very existence and livability of a subject's life Butler , 3. Because if they had asked me in that moment if I were lesbian or heterosexual, and even if I were bisexual, which seemed the most convincing answer, I wouldn't have known how to respond Etxebarria , And where is it supposed that I reside?
Such a challenge that Beatriz makes to a binary notion of sexuality and gender performativity is a form of what J. Jack Halberstam calls "gaga feminism," meaning a feminism that "grapples with what cannot yet be pronounced and what still takes the form of gibberish, as we wait for new social forms to give our gaga babbling meaning" Halberstam , xxv. In the character of Beatriz we can see an answer to this question; she refuses to be defined by the parameters of sexuality labels, hinting with her rhetorical question that sexuality and desire should be more open-ended.
In this way, female desire as inscribed in the character of Beatriz becomes much more than an appropriation of both active and passive characteristics; it is expressed as fluid, moving beyond the dichotomies that are presumed in normative social structures and language. Certainly, at the end of the novel Beatriz finally wants to commit to a lasting relationship with Cat, who is painted as a positive complement to Beatriz; nonetheless, it is not because Cat is a woman that Beatriz wants to be with her.
To put it plainly, the establishment of a fixed lesbian identity does not mark Beatriz's coming of age, as though her experiences have been leading her to some kind of coming out. Her attraction to Cat has never been because Beatriz was specifically looking for a lesbian partner, but rather because of Cat's personal qualities. As a lesbian couple, they are not painted as a euphoric or idyllic pair that should supplant a heterosexual couple in some idealized gender utopia.
They are connected by a mutual desire, by a "chemical" connection that is the fundamental driving force in the novel. Indeed, Beatriz constantly reminds the reader that she does not have set sexual preferences one way or the other, that though she had never "gone to bed" with a man before dating Cat, this was due to a lack of opportunity rather than a profound conviction against it Etxebarria , She sees Cat's resolve to only ever sleep with lesbians who had never been with a man and who were never attracted to men as absurd and unnecessarily drastic Etxebarria , Beatriz's decision to go to the lesbian bar where she met Cat was based on the desire to be free from the aggressive advances of unknown men rather than on specifically looking for a lesbian lover.
She makes it very clear: I was only looking for a beer and a little bit of music Etxebarria , In other words, Beatriz realizes that gender and power are still constructed as an unequal hierarchy wherein women are seen as potential targets of men's aggression. She decides to go to a bar without men, not because she is against being with men, but in order to avoid the social trouble that being a single woman in a public space has always caused her Etxebarria , Her, only her, recognizable in this monstrous quantum cryptogram that is the universe.
For Beatriz, then, the gender, sex, and physical form of the object of desire are irrelevant; the body of the desired one is simply a medium, a way for Beatriz to connect or unite with the Other and to experience the physical fulfillment of her desire. That there were no great differences in what we did. That physiology never determined the mechanics of love. That I was born a person, and I loved people Etxebarria , Indeed, Beatriz's desire for multiple sexual partners adds another dimension to the representation of female desire in the novel.
It defies the normative expectation of monogamy, as does the fact that Beatriz feels no self-recrimination for it. Her need to keep it a secret is more for fear of others' judgments than because of any qualms of her own. Her experiences with both lovers give her a never before enjoyed sense of happiness, a way to close the gap in the search for wholeness, even as it places her outside the realm of social normativity and signification.
This acceptance does not constitute settling into a fixed lesbian or bisexual identity; quite the opposite. Throughout the novel it is the incongruity of her "strangeness," the fact that she is a "chica rara" strange girl who does not fit into any preconceived mold of femininity or sexuality, that has been causing her much angst. She has tried unsuccessfully to hide her difference, yet that difference consists not in her being a lesbian but precisely in the fact that her desire has no name.
Now, at the end of the novel, she comes to accept herself as a "chica rara" and to recognize what she is looking for in the object of her desire and affection. La paz, a fin de cuentas. Or love Etxebarria , Invoking the image of the phoenix, Beatriz aims to rise from the ashes of the traumatic experiences of her past and move forward. The phoenix implies the notion of constant renewal, of the cyclical destruction of the old self and the rebirth of the new.
Contextualized as it is, this image reinforces Beatriz's conceptualization of the self as mutable and in a perpetual state of transformation. She has realized that she is looking for intimacy, peace, love, and desire, but it must be noted that this specific kind of desire is, from Beatriz's perspective, gender-free.
Erotic desire, for Beatriz, is the medium through which she can conduct the search for a new identity outside the realm of the definitions of normative discourse. It is a longing to return to an imagined pregendered state, to fill the void left by being forced out of an imagined equilibrium of androgyny that existed in her mind at some point before birth.
She feels split into an incomplete gender, imperfect because it is limited by social norms and regulations that do not allow for a fluid expression of self and sexuality Etxebarria , Her experience of femininity is problematic because she never felt that she fit in with the other little girls at school, and always had to pretend. She declares that femininity must be redefined, and implies that the essentialist notions of the feminine as attached to a body that is presented in a certain way with certain clothes are false.
The social constructions of masculine and feminine are at the root of most of the social angst and internal conflict expressed in the novel. Indeed, the expressions of masculinity and femininity for Beatriz are seen as existing on a sliding scale. Rather than being a question of essential characteristics, Beatriz declares that it is all a question of degree, that there are an infinite variety of "matices de gris" shades of gray Etxebarria , At the same time, she senses the restricting reality of normative discourse that attempts to break the world into two.
Her sexual desire, then, is an attempt to reconcile this division, to reach a place of infinite possibility within herself. The body becomes the problematic site wherein this search for totality plays out. Beatriz's body has been a site of discord and discontent, from the violence that she has received at the hands of her father to the self-inflicted pangs of hunger as she engages in a regimen of anorexia. Folkart indicates, the bodies in this text are attached to a notion of internal and external exile and alienation within a cold world, represented by the metaphor of space that is alluded to in the title of the novel and the constant references to celestial bodies, satellites, and outer space Folkart , Folkart uses the ideas of Elaine Scarry and her crucial work The Body in Pain , wherein Scarry discusses the way pain dehumanizes individuals, as well as the manner in which discourse can objectify that pain.
Discourse has the potential to give a subject the ability to share painful experiences with others and hence achieve some modicum of healing. From this perspective, then, Beatriz's narration of the metaphorical and literal pain of her past is a cathartic experience. In Folkart's view, the act of telling creates a stable object, the narration of past memories, through which Beatriz can measure herself as a subject by means of distancing herself from those recollections. In this way, Beatriz gains an identity and "becomes a body that talks as she struggles to create cohesive intimacy, surmount spatial chasms, and adjust her perspective to comprehend the other bodies that drift within her atmosphere" Folkart , Yet the body is not only a site of pain for Beatriz, but also a place of transformation, mutability, and of course sexual desire, although the latter is intimately connected to the search for connection with other people who surround her.
The body for Beatriz is a space that is at once a personal site for self-definition, the border between the self and the world, and the site that marks the confining social constructions of femininity she finds so detrimentally limiting and pointless. For this reason, she attempts to deny the transformation of her body from the flat angles of girlhood to the matured curves of adult womanhood through fasting.
I didn't want to be a woman Etxebarria , Her refusal to eat and her need to remain thin are a part of her struggle against a system that treats women as second class, with less dignity than a child. As Everly notes, the body in Beatriz is used to interrogate "a gender system that has in fact become outdated" by emphasizing the "impossibility of identity residing in the body or in its performative function" and in the way that the body's shaky identification "questions gender as a legitimate device in sociological relationships" Everly , Beatriz's body becomes a site of this resistance, a place to enact the desire to break free from the constraints placed upon it by normative discourse.
This is done precisely through Beatriz's attempts to mold an androgynous body for herself. While on the one hand her body is her means to express and experience her desire for sexual fulfillment, it is also a way for her to attempt to realize her desire for a pregendered self, a self that has not been socialized in a detrimental way, through the process of changing her physical form. I would take Everly's argument one step further, in that in my view it is not simply the body but rather desire acting through the body that drives this attempt to construct a pregendered or ambiguously gendered state.
The body acts as a medium, a tool, for the redefinition of a desire that challenges gender norms and the consequent expectations of heteronormative sexuality. This is not some kind of oversight in the novel, but rather a device that serves to outline even more clearly that Beatriz exists within a gendered social structure, which will not accept her as non-gendered, and that demonstrates her liminality in relation to this structure. Nevertheless, the transformative and transgressive aspects of Beatriz's attraction to and behavior with Cat and Ralph, and her cognitive recognition that she does not fit, lie in her constant refusal to perform or cite the normative expectations of her gender and its supposedly correlated desire.
In other words, Beatriz can neither fit into nor comprehend compulsory heterosexuality and its dictated connection to gender performance. The "blurriness" of her desire illustrates precisely the constructed nature of these interwoven institutions. Then again, in her refusal to adhere to culturally coded forms of femininity, and in her rejection of the heteronormative expectation that her being labeled as a female woman is supposed to entail within normative discourse i.
Gender and desire turn out to be disconnected from each other in Beatriz's performance, as is any notion of a specific box into which that desire can fit. Beatriz's understanding of her gender performance and the fluid manner in which her desire both fits and does not fit within this performance produce precisely this kind of marginal and ambiguous expression that is a new, unnamed form. This reconceptualization of a female desire that defies normative conceptualizations of sexuality, whether hetero- or homosexual, marks the way in which Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes inscribes a female desire that is inherently a mis-citation of gender and sexual norms.
Recalling the idea that the gender and sexuality of a person are created through the constant citation or "regulated process of repetition" in the "performance" of gender and heteronormative desire Butler , , the inscription of female desire in Beatriz can be seen as a mis-citation of these norms because of the way that it refuses or neglects to conform to their standard forms. Although it creates significant angst in the protagonist, this mis-citation acts as a moment of critical agency within and against the bounds of normative discourse that, by the end of the narrative, gives Beatriz a sense of purpose and a feeling of ownership of the act of refusing to adhere to normative conceptualizations of female desire and femininity.
What is most interesting is that mis-citation within Beatriz is also iterated and reiterated constantly. In effect, as Beatriz repeatedly expresses a desire that has no name and that, like her heart, is "algo borroso, indefinible, indescifrable" something blurry, indefinable, indecipherable , she effectively performs an identity that is a mis-citation in itself Etxebarria , The difficulty lies in the fact that Beatriz exists within the boundaries of normative discourse, but her desire acts in resistance to those limits, creating a new space through the agency of desiring. Beatriz's desire pushes the margins not only of normative concepts of desire but also non-normative ones, creating the potential for an ambiguous concept of female desire that defies concrete classification.
Hence Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes is a text that interrogates normative conceptualizations of female desire and critiques the ideas of femininity, masculinity, and gender roles in general in the context of a society that is postfeminist in the negative sense, a society blind to the inequalities that exist in the established gender binary.
It is not just that Beatriz is sometimes active and sometimes passive in her desire, or rather, it is not only that she is both active and passive, but instead that the expression of desire in Beatriz as a female desiring subject is not presented in terms of a duality but rather in terms of a flowing affect that knows neither gender nor boundaries. Desire is not to be limited to a gender, nor to a specific box of femininity, masculinity, or even androgyny.
This dampening little judgment is extended to the book's protagonists, whom Byron trivializes, again through the imagery of gourmandism, as gluttons for punishment: Even the most cursory reading of El curioso impertinente would ratify Girard's claim about Cervantes' extraordinary insights into triangulation. Beatriz's body has been a site of discord and discontent, from the violence that she has received at the hands of her father to the self-inflicted pangs of hunger as she engages in a regimen of anorexia. The breakdown of these falsely constructed gender roles, in Etxebarria's mind, is necessary in order to fully achieve freedom, equality, and understanding in a just society Etxebarria , In a curiously graphic parturition metaphor, one of these even likened the work to a still-born child:
It is presented as a highly distinctive experience of sensuality and longing, and is inevitably blended with self-identity and the development of an adult individuality. The transgressive characteristic of Etxebarria's inscription of desire through the character of Beatriz resides in the fact that the "package" no longer matters, the desire is not defined in terms of the desired object's gender, which in normative terms is what determines the sexuality and therefore the gendered identity of the desiring subject. By refusing to accept a single sexuality, the character of Beatriz breaks new ground in the literary conceptualization of female desire.
As Vanessa Vitorino Ceia argues, Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes , along with the rest of Etxebarria's work, rejects binary gender categories not because they do not exist but rather because they do not represent the individuality of any person Vitorino Ceia , 9. Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review.
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Las pasiones de Eva: sexo en L.A (Novela erótica) (Spanish Edition) - Kindle edition by Kelly Irons. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC. 'Las Pasiones de Eva' contiene escenas explícitas de sexo duro, dominancia, sexo en grupo y otras formas de sexo que podrían ofender la sensibilidad de.
Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Recomendado a todos los amantes del genero. One person found this helpful.
No es muy interesante leerla, Le falto mas dinamismo, misterio y eroticidad. Lo recomiendo es bueno y sencillo. Un gran libro, lleno de erotismo y drama. Una historia bien contada que eleva tus sentidos hasta la estratosfera sin caer en lo vulgar y obsceno.
Demasiado obvia, final predecible, sexo descriptivo innecesario, y la tal eva segun es una santa pero se tira a todos. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful. See all 9 reviews. Most recent customer reviews. Published on January 2, Feedback If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us. Would you like to report poor quality or formatting in this book? Click here Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? Click here Do you believe that this item violates a copyright? There's a problem loading this menu right now.
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