Bio-Politics and the ContamiNation of the Body in Alejandro Morales' "The Rag Doll Plagues"

Abstract

With the rise of the modern nation-state during the eighteenth century, power, discourse, and knowledge have constituted central elements controlling the populace. Especially the West, the nation-state has governed the lives of its people, creating the mirage of and external security, economic growth, and cultural identity exchange for power, money, and certain rights. In addition, the positioning or, rather, projection of an Other as a potential threat to the nation has played a crucial role the discursive construction of national communities. Part of this construction has been the projected fear that alien elements infect and ultimately destroy the ostensible unity of the national body through racial and cultural difference. As a method of self-constitution, discourses of the nation have generally excluded marginal voices of race, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual preference and have thus desired to keep the collective body pure from radical alterity. While national narratives have been designed to level out certain differences within the ethnos, there always remains a certain degree of otherness which cannot be assimilated but is fact necessary to delimit the ideal social body from certain nationalities and groups that reside within the confines of the nation. Similar to nation-building processes the centers, the ignition of national consciousness the peripheries was also based on an imagined cultural substratum. Within many anti-colonial and civil rights struggles, those control of discursive practices have often silenced voices of alterity order to unify a people the struggle against colonial, hegemonic orders. (1) In recent years, scholars and New Americanists have focused on these topics of national inclusions and exclusions their analyses of cultural and literary texts. For example, New Americanists have introduced the term to convey a sense of opposition to the discursive constructedness of the nation cultural representations. A postnational perspective hence exposes the exclusionary practices of national discourses by debunking and criticizing the embedded patriarchal, essentialist, and heterosexual hegemonies. (2) Such a research perspective also seeks to explore critically the points of intersection between American studies and theory order to explore notions of empire relation to the US. This marks an important intervention because, the past, many literary and cultural critics have discarded the notion of the United States as postcolonial. It has often been claimed that the US had its postcolonial moment after 1776, but soon developed its own distinct colonial and imperial endeavors, domestically and abroad. (3) However, recent debates have suggested an inclusion of certain experiences the United States for instance, slavery, migration, internal colonialism, and minoritarian struggles for civil rights under the auspices of studies (cf. King). The relations between Anglo America and Mexican Americans call for an incorporation of the Chicana/o experience into the field of studies because they were historically marked by many features of proper: political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural dominance. Since the 1960s, a number of Chicana/o critics have adopted the theoretical concept of internal colonialism to account for their group's subordinate socio-economic and cultural position within US society) Supporting this claim, Fredric Jameson has suggested that in the United States itself, we have come to think and to speak of the emergence of an Third World and of Third World voices, as Black women's or Chicano literature (151). Hence, a growing number of Chicana/o studies scholars are debating and testing the applicability of certain paradigms--colonial discourses, national liberation projects, border crossings, or hybridity--to literary and cultural representations of the Mexican American condition (see, for instance, Arteaga; Aldama and Quinonez; Perez-Torres; Karrer). …