For this week, I choose to read My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel. With a strong narrative about nameless interpersonal relationships that are tangled with a greater cause that is attached to the characters identity.
I enjoyed the political question of identity it seemed to be asking throughout the book but also around the use of a character from the queer community as the main protagonist who embodies a sense of compassion, among other things, while society doesn’t reciprocate the same feeling towards her. I would like to say that I found a lot of cliches in the book but that may be of my own point of view. One that can be mentioned is a love story in a revolutionary story. An overused theme but I guess this love story was unique.
The scene with Pinochet and the attempted assassination was one part that really stuck out for me as it probably did for others. The scene was seemed more comedic than I originally thought it would be, but it also drew me to imagine what that era might of been when there was so much state control in response to eliminate anarchists or revolutionaries and how through that logic, dictators were so fuelled by their own justice that they were almost capable of doing anything. But then that’s where the comedic part happens because since after Pinochet goes into cliche rant about Chile never falling into delinquency, he gets shot at and gets ends up getting shook like want-to-be gangster.
The book makes you think of what those times must of been like with all the check stops and identification calls. What it would be like to constantly hide your identity or to create a new or true identity to serve your best life. Tie that in with a bit of love and historical events and you have a book that is rooted in the playful version of historical interpretation with serious connotations.
I think towards the end of the book when La loca had to exile and the narrator talks about her never owning any papers, I think that must of been my favorite part of the book. I’m not entirely sure why but I think it was a great poetic little character trait that holds a lot more value than I’m getting at here.
For my question, I’d like to ask everyone about the topic of identity and its relation the political of society. Do you think identity, even if you are a non partisan, is political?
“The scene was seemed more comedic than I originally thought it would be.” Of course, Pinochet is portrayed as pathetic and lacking the necessary attributes to be a “strong man” of the Chilean homeland. This from the outset is already a twist with other narratives about the dictatorship. The tone of the narrative changes between chapters. Pinochet is still a dictator, but he plays a theatrical role, almost self-parody in front of the other generals. One of the virtues of this novel by Lemebel is that it tells us a playful version of those years, as you say, without falling into vanity.
I also found the assassination attempt more comedic than I would’ve expected. Especially with the focus on Pinochet shitting himself, it showed that while he thought he had control, he really didn’t and was as human as the people he was oppressing. For your question, I think identity is political. It’s especially evident with everything happening in the States where trans people are having laws passed against them. Identity affects the way someone interacts with the world, whether it be the way they see society or the way the society sees them. It’s intertwined with oppression and discrimination, meaning it’s an important factor to consider when discussing politics.
Identity is always political insofar as it is a way of fitting complex, fluid subjectivities into stable, demarcated categories for the purposes of social control. The Queen on the Corner is a great case of somebody who really can’t be adequately defined by any preexisting identity category, and that is her revolutionary power. This political side to identity is brought out in a book like this, set in times when conformity to imposed identities was clearly a matter of life and death, but it remains true today.