Content area
Full text
Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2002. xxix + 269 pp. 0-8166-3963-9; 0-8166-3964-7 (paper).
All mothers are queer, or seeming makes it so. A Queer Mother reminds us that queerness is always on display, that the spectator need never come face to face with the perceived object, and that massification of the visual image ensures that the encounter will still be staged. Constructing the "scavenger methodology" to read Gabriela Mistral's figure queerly, the author profitably draws from the swirl of anecdote that surrounds Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a.k.a. Gabriela Mistral, "one of the chief architects of Latin American nationalism" (xiii). Such insights proposed and then related to twentieth century intellectual history constitute a primary contribution, along with this text's exploration of racial stereotypes.
The "queer" assertions of this text have been wildly misunderstood in the Chilean national press, where interviewees have predictably ignored the assertion that "there are no hard documents of Gabriela Mistral's heterosexuality." Fiol-Matta works credibly in the very difficult task of writing about unspoken, unprinted, omnipresent innuendo. She links sexuality with attention to race and thus to nation in assertions that are most convincing when most specific, following Freud's observation that love involves "greatly confusing the difference between one woman and another" and Benedict Anderson's that nationalism involves "irremediable specifics."
The approach is to interweave materials and topics. An early chapter draws from pieces of correspondence and a reference in an essay to assert that Mistral celebrates the indigenous...