Dissonant Voices in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory and Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One

Abstract

With the publication of Days of Obligation and, more recently, Brown, Richard Rodriguez's scholarship has begun to recognize the theoretical import inherent in the Hispanic writer's autobiographical essays. Juan de Castro most clearly makes this point as he states that [t]oday, like Gloria Anzaldua or Jose David Saldivar, Rodriguez can be classified as a of the borderlands (102). This positive assessment of Rodriguez concerns mainly his two latest works which are often read as representing a radical rupture with his first autobiographical essay, Hunger of Memory} In what follows I take de Castro's assessment of Rodriguez as a theorist seriously by uncovering the theory of borderland identities, which I consider to be already implicit in his first and most controversial book.2 More precisely, I compare Rodriguez's epistemology of in-between identities with the theory of subjectivity advocated by the French feminist poststructuralist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One. If on the one hand, Hunger of Memory can be read as a literary text with theoretical implications, then on the other hand, Margaret Whitford one of Irigaray' s most informed American critics affirms that we should treat Irigaray's work as (23).3 By cross-reading these two literary/ theoretical texts I begin to delineate the points of divergence and the points of convergence of two epistemic models of subjectivity. Put differently, Rodriguez and Irigaray's theoretical opposition and proximity, I will argue, can be found at the complex intersection between literature and theory. Thus, implicit in this double-reading strategy is an attempt at once to theorize and to interpret. It should first be noted that Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is based upon epistemic, cultural, and political premises that are inimical, if not