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22
uns,
en
d television now promote a serialized and prian ed re!io-ious experience which no longer needs
vanz
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to be anchored in the phys1cal reality ot the pansh
din the continuity of family hfe.
a\his process can be described as "deterritoriali.on ;, although I use this term in a sense rather
D tl '
.
different from that used by Deleuze and Guattan.
rnthelr~iew (see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
;:;;t;Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
New York, 1977), primitive society (the social machine) does not distinguish between the family and
t11efestof the social and political field, all of which
are inscribed on the socius (that is, the social mac~th~t distinguishes people according to status
and affiliations). In the primitive tribe, the socius is
rhe mother earth. What Deleuze and Guattari describe is a process of abstraction which takes place
with the emergence of the despotic state that now
inscribes people according to their residence, and in
doing so "divides the earth as an object and subjects
men to a new imperial inscription, in other words
to the abstract unity of the State." This they call
"pseudo-territoriality," and see it as the substitution of abstract signs (e.g. money) for the signs of
the earth and a privatization of the earth itself (as
state or private property). Advanced capitalism
carries this abstraction much further, recoding persons and making repression into self-repression,
exercised not only in the vvorkplace and the streets
but within the family, the one place under capitalism where desire can be coded and territorialized
(as with Oedipus).
What seems unsatisfactory in Deleuze and
Guattari's description of the family is that even
t~?_i:~g_ll~ reading these authors, we may recognize
t~-~aJ11ily's restrictive and repressive qualities, we
?_o not recognize the family's power as a space of
refuge -and shelter. What seduces us about the
home- (and what seduces some people about
the convent) is that it is_a refuge, a place for turning
~ack on the world. Max Horkheimer saw
(~it_.in an idealized fashion) that the family
c~ourish subjectivities that were alien to capi.t<!lli_;n. (Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is a
g??d example of the subversive effects of the
mother inculcating into her son all that will make
~m in~apable of reproducing the work ethic.) In
~nAmerica, this sense of refuge and the sacred~hat attaches to certain figures like the mother,
~irgin, the nun, and the priest acquire even
gr~t~r_significance, both because the Church and
~~:_home retained a traditional topography and
197
198
JEAN FRANCO
1ng.
Blacks, mulattoes, mixtures of all kinds, drunks, somnolent or frightened half-breeds, skinm Chinese, old
men, small groups of young Spaniards and Italians
walking through rhe patios our of curiosity. Thev
walked ro and fro passing the open doors of the
bedrooms, stopping to look in from rime to time.
The prostitutes, dressed in cotton dresses were seated
at the back of the rooms on low boxes. i\'lost of them
sat with their legs apart showing their sex, the "fox"
which was sometimes sha,ed and sometimes not.
(Jose .\Luia Arguedas, The Fox Abrwe and the Fox
Beloll')
In describing these spaces, I am not describing
categories of women but an imaginary topography in which the "feminine" was rigidly compartmentalized and assigned particular territories.
Individual women constantly transgressed these
boundaries but the territOries themselves were
loaded with significance and so inextricably
bound to the sacred that they were often raken
for spaces of immunity. With the increJse in stare
terrorism in the sixties, mothers used this traditional immunity to protest, abandoning rhe
shelter of homes for the public square, raking
charge of the dead and the disappeared and the
prisoners whose existence no one else wished ro
acknowledge. \Xlith the seizure of power lw the
militarY, the dismantling of political parties and
trade unions, this activity acquired a special importance. Homes became hiding places, bomb factories, escape hatches, people's prisons. from rhe
signifier of passivitv and peace, "mother" became
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le lw Rodo 1to
more dramatic tash10n
t han an arne
\'(~{1511 (an Argentine writer who would himselt
'disappear" shortly after 1niting this piece). His
daughter, who was the mother of a small child and
whose lcJ\er had already disappeared, was one ot a
group of munto!leros killed in the army attack on a
house, an attack which deployed 150 men, tanks
;nd helicopters. A soldier who had participated in
rhis battle described the girl's final moments.
1b
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199
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