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- Title
El género de la burocracia: El libro vacío de Josefina Vicens.
- Authors
Torres-Rodríguez, Laura J.
- Abstract
This essay argues that the novel El libro vacío by Josefina Vicens represents a literary fiction rooted in the political problem of bureaucracy. El libro vacío systematically interrogates the bureaucrat’s writing, in the face of a social environment that renders it unproductive in advance. Nevertheless, instead of mobilizing a definition or a predetermined vision of bureaucracy, it appears in the novel as a critical and aesthetic terrain that allows the dis-sedimentation of distinctions and hierarchies that have been established between different forms of work (i.e., literary, bureaucratic, domestic). Finally, I argue that the bureaucrat’s incessant questioning of the status of writing in the novel has, as critics have observed, gendered consequences. However, rather than revealing the bureaucrat as feminine, the novel stages the constitutive gender instability that characterizes the representations of the bureaucrat in the Mexican mid-century. Already in the 1950s, the hypersexualized or emasculated figure of the office worker seems to operate as a conflictive signifier of Mexican modernity. But if the representations of the bureaucrat endorsed by official culture aim to fix the ambiguity of its political function through its gender, El libro vacío tarries with that ambiguity, which runs through the figure of the bureaucrat, and presents a reflection that is committed to the instability of gender as the political principle of its interrogation.
- Subjects
FEMINISM
- Publication
Latin American Literary Review, 2023, Vol 50, Issue 101, p2
- ISSN
0047-4134
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.26824/lalr.399