Paz’s Pasivo: Thinking Mexicanness from the Bottom

Abstract

This essay reads Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950) as a fundamental text that describes the tensions between modern expressions of Mexicanness and sexual behavior. Taking seriously Paz’s anxiety about sexual positionality, in which he proposes that Mexico can either assume the position of the chingón (top; fucker) or the chingado (bottom; fucked), this article asks: What is at stake in localizing and reading national narrative literature through the figure of the bottom? Paz’s anxieties about sexual practices are marked by death-dealing assumptions about the longevity of the nation. This article thus offers a close-reading of risky allegories made about sex between men in the work of Paz to propose queer frameworks, what the article describes as “pasivo ethics,” that engage with nationalist narratives that underscore that gay sexual practices are constitutive of nationalist discourse.

Keywords:

• Octavio Paz
• Mexico
• queer theory
• nationalism
• masculinity
• sexuality
• passivity

In the chapter “Hijos de la Malinche,” from his seminal nation-building text El laberinto de la soledad (1950), Octavio Paz reflects on the category of lo mexicano, or Mexicanness, through the multiplicity of meanings that lie in the verb chingar (to fuck), professing, “To the Mexican there are two possibilities in life: either he inflicts the actions implied by chingar on others, or else he suffers them himself at the hands of others” ([1950] 1985, 78).¹ Moreover, “The person who suffers this action is passive [pasivo], inert and open, in contrast to the active [activo], aggressive and closed person who inflicts it” ([1950] 1985, 77). Paz’s colourful description of the Mexican as a national subject, through the sexual imagery rendered by the action of chingar, operates to sexualize nationalism; at least insofar as he perceives there to be a cultural crisis in twentieth-century Mexico warranting a reassessment of what it means to act Mexican to compete with other modern nations. The dichotomy of lo chingado (the fucked) and the chingón (fucker), or “open” and “closed” as Paz describes, resonates with the activo (active; top) and pasivo (passive; bottom) binary present within gay male sexual positionality in Spanish. In this sense, Paz’s own reflection on the positionality of the Mexican subject compels us to read Mexicanness not only sexually, but penetratively.

This essay attends to lo chingado—the fucked one who is always already present and yet underexamined in national narratives—to ask how sexual positionality both determines and describes the national myth. In other words, I ask how the bottom is rhetorically positioned as the site through which authentic and divergent ideas of Mexicanness are both imagined and represented. In this essay, I problematize and extend the term pasivo (passive; bottom) and his penetration as, on one level, a nationalistic gesture, but also, as a queer, ethical mode of engagement that analyses that live wire crossing nation and sex. Here, “queer” describes the capture and conversion of sexual acts and identities into political structures. That is, through queer reading practices, I narrow in on the sexual structures being deployed in the construction of the Mexican national consciousness, as well as the non-normative attachment to and intimacy with these structures of sex. As such, this essay necessarily wrestles with the messiness of chingar (to fuck) and ser chingado (to be fucked) as they are attached to the construction and critique of Mexican sexual cultures and the national imaginary.

My interest in examining the centrality of the bottom to conceptions of Mexican sexual cultures, Mexicanness, and nationalism more broadly, both builds on and departs from queer Latin Americanist scholarship. The fantasy of male sexuality has always been present in the search for modern expressions of Mexicanness. These representations are loaded with the imagery of men wielding their penises as an expression of their “authentic” Mexicanness.² This imagery is coupled with the charge to forcefully command this penis power over other men through dominating relationships. Queer Latin Americanists have long argued against the obvious phallocentric and misogynist nature of these narratives, in favour of thinking about sexuality beyond sites of penetration. Yet, even critiques of phallocentrism still highlight the penis as the sexual organ sine qua non, leaving holes behind and untouched. I propose that it would be more generative to enter into these sites and to linger in their political and theoretical possibilities. By lingering, anality is read as a critical example of what Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui describes as “the predominant models of (sexual) subject formation in Latin America” (2002, 7), in its ability to address the positionality of bodies and the impact of material relations in philosophical and cultural thought. Moreover, this turn toward the bottom examines how these penetrative acts become essential contours of the nation-building project. Thus, my use of queer critical analyses necessarily exposes the limits of current scholarship that dismisses or overly simplifies the act of penetration in Paz’s work.

The trace of nationalism in Mexico, Claudio Lomnitz tells us, persists in studies of the modern nation as “a hegemonic, commonsensical, and tacitly shared cultural construct (…) a kind of cultural successor to the universalism of premodern (European) religion” (2001, 3). Yet the rhetorical mechanisms by which such tropes operate are often obscure, and different analyses result in divergent versions of what Mexican nationalism might be. In other words, what makes one feel Mexican is heavily influenced by the political climate and indoctrinating narratives that surround them.

The search for national belonging dovetails with what Gareth Williams describes as a shift in “the underlying telos of the nation” (2002, 23). This shift “is not a single process of evolution but an accumulation of distinct and uneven processes of transition toward so-called globalization” (2002, 23). Such a transition is brought about, to follow Williams, by both the rise of neoliberalism and the “transnational marketplace” in Latin America (2002, 23). Citing Argentine anthropologist Nestor García Canclini, Williams describes within this process the radical fracturing of national narratives about modernity. According to García Canclini, “the great narratives no longer exist that used to order and hierarchize the periods of the patrimony and the flora of cultured and popular works in which societies and classes recognized each other and consecrated their values” (2002, 23). The narrative shifts of globalization have characterized Mexican culture and society since the early twentieth century. Yet, the role of sexuality—more specifically, sexual practices—within these new, globalized politics has often gone unrecognized.

Anxieties about sex and a history of sexual trauma are reflected in these dominant narratives of the twentieth century through attempts to make sense of the legacy of the figure of la Malinche, or as she is colloquially referred to as: la Chingada. She represents an inherited sexual history to which Mexicanness is chronically attached through the birth of a national mestizo identity. The figure of the Chingada at once refers to the violated woman, while she is simultaneously resented and regarded as a traitor because of her sexual relationship with the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. The history of her penetration, however, weighs heavily on configurations of Mexican cultural identities. Because these narratives nervously think through a violent sexual history that reveals a supposed “passivity” on the part of Mexico, this essay considers the political and aesthetic qualities that lie in the act of penetration by developing “passivity” as ethical mode of engagement.

Through a queer reading, this essay is invested in conceptualizing the extent to which representations of penetrating the bottom reveal deeper anxieties about difference and alterity. I contend that the perpetually penetrated status of lo chingado represents those populations that are continually and forever fucked (symbolically or otherwise) by the nation-building project imagined by public intellectuals like Paz. As queer theory pushes us to rethink definitions of subjectivity, I deploy the bottom and his assumed “passivity” as an ethical turn in queer Latin Americanism.

Representations of sexual acts remain folded into modern narratives of Mexican nation-building. As such, Mexican literary and cultural criticism must return to these foundational narratives in order to investigate the circulation of sexuality within the libidinal economy of the nation and its neoliberal projects. This essay asks: How do we read appeals to nation-building that depend on representations of sexuality? More narrowly, how do we account for the masculinities—and their sexual desires—that constitute these forms of nationhood?

Octavio Paz’s penetration paradigm, which Sifuentes-Jáuregui reveals to be “a starting epistemological point” (2014, 72), throws the results of this nexus of nationalism and erotic masculinity into sharp relief. Paz’s construction of Mexicanness highlights how the political discourse at the heart of Mexicanness is indelibly intertwined with the politics of sexual discourse. While the criticism of Paz’s oeuvre is extensive, I take his portrayal of Mexicanness as a starting point to interrogate the fraught crossing of sex and politics in Mexican cultural production.³ In what follows, I advocate for both a literal and allegorical interpretation of the representation of the bottom in El laberinto de la soledad that takes into the account the relevance of the sexual imagery and Paz’s sexual performativity as an allegory of his idea of Mexicanness.

This essay unfolds in three parts: first, I place my work in conversation with other bottom theorists, showing how my investment in the Mexican bottom—the pasivo—both builds on and departs from current scholarship. The second part of this article deploys the theoretical framework I develop through close readings of male sexuality in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad. Finally, I conclude by examining the implications of these paradigms in the construction and critique of nationalism from a pasivo positionality. Through this critical engagement with the pasivo, I argue for the urgent and timely need to engage with sex beyond the archival investigation of the historical conditions of LGBTQ life in Mexico that are signposted before and after Paz’s text in the current gender and sexuality scholarship. This essay contends that Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad needs to be revisited and read against the grain, even by queer thinkers, to understand the vitality of the male bottom as an integral national figure in constructions of Mexicanness.

Theorizing passivity, pasivo ethics

To think with and from the positionality of the pasivo, my work departs from what Ernesto Martínez identifies as a “fractured locus” inherent in passivity, that becomes a process of “embodied negotiation” (2014, 239). The translatability of “pasivo” into both “passive” and “bottom” generously opens up theoretical possibilities. Rather than bifurcate the term, thinking with the pasivo permits us to read how the body negotiates, contorts, straddles, and gestures with both meanings at the same time. I trace the messiness, and potential radicality, that emerges from their mutual imbrication and contamination. In doing so, I strategically interact with the work of other bottom theorists and theories of passivity to heed the pasivo’s fractured contours in transnational and transdisciplinary contexts. My work, though, is not simply employing U.S.-based queer theory as a model that can simply be “applied” to Latin American literary and cultural studies. Rather, I want to bring together seemingly disparate or contradictory works that destabilize the erotics of power associated with the structures of sexuality.

The versions of sex I explore are aggressive, forceful, violent, and reactive. Virility and dominance are deployed in national narratives that, like Paz’s, are preoccupied with the search for modern expressions of Mexicanness as a means of minimizing or rejecting an image of inferiority that Mexicans project onto their self-image. However, within Latin Americanist sexuality studies, attention is overly given to the top’s aggressive and problematic behaviours. In effect, the bottom in these narratives is either neglected or too quickly pitied because he is often read as a violated body: “symbolically” fucked by the top through a losing encounter. Alternatively, I propose there is more to be gained if we think beyond the symbolic, and take a more literal reading of the forceful penetration in question. By doing so, we may redirect our attention to the conceptual contours and logics of Paz’s invocation of sexual positionality as an allegory for Mexican national power dynamics in order to think about the investment queer theory has in the political and collective consciousness.

I use the word “reactive” to describe the inherited sexual history of the Conquest I describe above. This historical sexual act factors into the reactionary sexual practices that rely on the primacy of domination through the tropics of penetration. The construction of a universal male sexual archetype within these narratives responds to anxieties about being los hijos de la Chingada. Virility, then, overcomes an always already penetrated identity forcefully imprinted on Mexicanness. Men must aspire to become the skilled and masterful gran chingón. The expression of virile masculinity is one that acts on the impulse to continually try to overcome the conquest of Mexico through the assertion of a charged dominant sexuality—literally, through men fucking everyone and everything.

As Robert McKee Irwin rightfully points out, these men are not the conquistadors (2003, 194). They are not Hernán Cortés. And the men they fuck are not Malinche. Yet, those being penetrated are read as inferior, defeated, and violated—most particularly penetrated men. If traditional understandings of Mexican masculinity necessitate constantly overcoming the Conquest through sex, then, I suggest re-examining how we read positionality. Instead of casting the bottom into the position of inferiority, there would be more at stake in considering the possibility that he may, perhaps, accept his Conquest. I advocate for a pasivo reading to problematize and extend the image of the bottom being violated and violently ripped open. It would be too simplistic and reductive to dismiss these narratives on the basis of their “mistreatment” of the bottom. Contrarily, I am interested in how the pasivo fills and occupies larger narratives about male sexual desire and Mexicanness.

Continuing to neglect the broad strokes of anal politics and rectal discourses present in the Mexican national consciousness only reifies heterosexist understandings of the nation and sex. Rather, it is imperative to think not only theoretically about sex, but also about the tether that anchors sexual acts (anal penetration) in the discourses of cultural crises wherein Paz anchors his text. In this sense, the bottom—who comes to stand in as the embodiment of anal penetration—becomes the object onto which national and collective anxieties are projected and performed.

Black queer studies scholar Darieck Scott recognizes the bottom’s double occupancy of sex and politics. For Scott, the bottom signifies “the nadir of hierarchy (a political position possibly abject) and as a sexual position: the one involving coercion, cruelty, torture, and so on, the other involving sexualized or erotic consent/play which references the elements of the former” (2010, 28). The oscillation between politics, violence, and sex creates the space wherein the bottom percolates.

My own queer conceptualization of the bottom necessarily reads violent forms of sexual practices against the grain. Addressing the aggressive acts performed on the bottom, Scott asks, “Is the object also a subject (much less an agent) in his or her own violation, or only despite the fact she or he is being violated, or neither (meaning that the very notion of subjectivity—or agency—must be revised, because it is in crisis)?” (2010, 162). As I will demonstrate in the subsequent section, this question becomes intelligible through an examination of Mexican sexual culture in more contemporary contexts, wherein certain sexual practices may shed light on these penetration models that demand that the bottom to be turned out and defeated, while still participating within larger narratives about Mexicanness. In that realization, the bottom’s acceptance and consent to his Conquest becomes a locus for pasivo ethics. This reconceptualizes Paz’s description of lo chingado as “passive, inert, and open” as a radical practice of subject formation that reveals the willingness of the bottom to allow his subjectivity to become undone, to be conquered. These practices conceptualize a sexual politics that destabilize the power of masculinist discourse by underscoring the embodiment of sexual alterity as a threat to the national and public imaginary.

Bottoming, in this sense, employs sex as a rejection of the norms of subjectivity. Scott describes this invocation as the utilization and conversion of pain into pleasure “for an experience of self that, though abject, is politically salient, potentially politically effective or powerful” (2010, 163–164). This speaks to an embrace of a positionality that is always already marked by death, thus underscoring the political gestures of the bottom in Mexico as a national figure that comes to represent the concatenation of contemporary expressions of Mexicanness.

A pasivo ethics describes the aesthetics of the political and sexual performance that is projected onto the bottom. Hoang Nguyen’s concept of “bottomhood” captures this dialectic as “a novel model for coalition politics by affirming an ethical mode of relationality” (2014, 2). In this sense, we could think of the bottom, or more precisely the pasivo, beyond sexual positionality—not erasing it, though—and account for the affective encounters, political affiliations, and social classes that constitute his embodied reality. If this essay preoccupies itself with the representations of sex and Mexicanness, then, I seek to explore the limits of these representations.

Through the pasivo’s duality of bottomness and passivity, his conversion into a rhetorical object in the national and collective imaginary complicates, unsettles, and disengages with normative theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Through his acceptance of being penetrated, open, and dominated, the pasivo represents a passivity that as Jack Halberstam describes is “a performance of (…) the subject to actually come undone, to dramatize unbecoming for the other so that viewer does not have to witness unbecoming as a function of her own body” (2011, 139–140). This willingness embedded in the pasivo reflects what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, posits as that which precedes even the possibility of acceptance. This form of passivity expresses the idea that I am acted upon before I have the opportunity to act or passively accept the action of others. In the relationship between the subject and the other, the fact that I am “for the Other” is true “prior to activity and passivity” ([1974] 1991, 114–116) This creates an ethical relationship predicated on the subject being taken hostage by the other.

This approach to passivity within the construction of pasivo ethics illuminates the revelation of passivity in the subject as an undoing or rupture of subjectivity in queer terms. Levinas characterizes this splintering as part of ethical experiences: “This being torn up from oneself in the core of one’s unity, this absolute noncoinciding, this diachrony of the instant, signifies in form of one-penetrated-by-the-other” ([1974] 1991, 49). Passivity in this sense offers an idea of antisociality that, as Halberstam describes, “dictates an unbecoming, a cleaving to what seems to shame or annihilate, and a radical passivity allows for inhabiting of femininity with difference” (2011, 144). In this sense, passivity deconstructs the reading gaze of the duality of the activo-pasivo (active; top-passive; bottom) binary to posit a passivity that undoes both partners prior to any engagement.

Through sex, reading passivity in the pasivo reveals the critical repetition of the antisocial drive that makes passivity the radical process that it is. During sex we are open to somebody else, whom we cannot seize or fully grasp in our own consciousness. In other words, sexual practice is not an amalgamation of bodies or a coming-together-as-one. Rather, sex is a destabilizing relationship that underscores that which will always remain unknown and inaccessible. In sex, everybody is rendered passive through their inability to wholly grasp the situation. It is a passivity that performs a rupture and rejection of identitarian-based politics. Sex renders all partners as passive in their encounter. I consider the inhabitation of being penetrated with the radical passivity of the unbecoming of the subject from the positionality of the bottom. Thinking through the framework of pasivo ethics, the invocation of passivity annihilates the penetration paradigm through the willingness of either subject to become undone by their imprisonment to the other. As the result of pasivo ethics, such annihilation is an embrace of the unintelligibility and messiness of sex deployed by Paz as a central allegory for Mexico’s cultural and social prosperity.

Re-reading Paz

As one of the most widely read texts in the Latin American canon, El laberinto de la soledad reflects Octavio Paz’s investment in re-examining the concept of Mexico as a nation within a literary framework. The poet writes these essays as a response to what he perceives to be a cultural crisis in Mexico, underscoring how language and literature make legible the body of lo mexicano as a locus for modern conceptions of identity. In “Máscaras mexicanas,” Paz elaborates on gender roles within Mexico. He maintains his argument that the Mexican is closed off and impenetrable: emotionally, spiritually, and, of course, physically. He posits, “The Mexican can bend, can bow humbly, can even stoop, but he cannot back down, that is, he cannot allow the outside world to penetrate his privacy” ([1950] 1985, 30). It is through the masculinized ideal that the Mexican remains an active agent, protecting himself from being penetrated. Instead, it is the woman who is always passive, inferior to the man, and desexualized in her representation: “Women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals” ([1950] 1985, 30). For Paz, there is nothing redemptive about being ripped open and penetrated.

The critical moment in this essay comes when Paz reflects on the body, female sexuality, and romantic relationships, which he extends into a brief conversation about male homosexual behaviour. Paz considers the modesty and nudity of the human body, in relation to his larger arguments about solitude and the role of decency as protection from penetration. Nonetheless, he argues, “We are not afraid or ashamed of our bodies; we accept them as completely natural and we live physically with considerable gusto (…). The body exists, and gives weight and shape to our existence. It causes pain and gives us pleasure” ([1950] 1985, 35). The body is something to be celebrated—an embrace of the affective experiences placed upon it: trauma and sexual pleasure. The Mexican is to protect his body, so as not to expose too much of himself, unlike women, who are not in tune with their own sexuality and desires. Rather, female sexuality appears as always in service to men; women are consistently portrayed as passive in relationships and heterosexual sexual encounters with men. On the other hand, while the woman passively serves men, she also represents the continuity of the Mexican race.

Paz neither describes sexuality on the basis of sexual desire—he favours sexual objectivity—nor does he claim to be an authority on homosexual interactions. Rather, Paz references heterosexual encounters as a template for how to read sexual interactions between men. While I understand the necessary pushback from scholars against taking Paz’s arguments about gender and sexuality seriously, I suggest there would be more at stake in revisiting Paz’s proposals about sex, in order to open the possibility to think queerly about Mexicanness.

Paz discusses transgressive gender behaviour that resists the normative trajectories of gender and sexual performance. For Paz, such behaviour is anything that resists the masculinist ideologies he outlined as an ideal for the resilience of the Mexican people. Paz sets up his reference to male homosexuality by contrasting different examples of gender deviance. While female passivity is necessary for men to become the macho, Paz acknowledges that there is a class of women that resist such a passive female position: the “mala mujer.” He writes, “The mala is hard and impious and independent like the macho. In her own way she also transcends her physiological weakness and closes herself off from the world” ([1950] 1985, 39). The macho serves as a false universal, an idea against which everything is compared, or in resistance to, and thus deviant. There is a minimal, yet questionable, tolerance, nonetheless, for women who raise themselves up to the more honourable status of machismo.

Following this point in the essay, Paz arrives at a moment in his writing in which he is attempting to make sense of sexual transgressions. Following his description of the “mala mujer” and her gender deviance, he describes male homosexual acts as follows:

It is likewise significant that masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent [activo] is concerned. The passive agent [el pasivo] is an abject, degraded being. This ambiguous conception is made very clear in the word games and battles—full of obscene allusions and double meanings—that are so popular in Mexico City. Each of the speakers tries to humiliate his adversary with verbal traps and ingenious linguistic combinations, and the loser is the person who cannot think of a comeback, who has to swallow his opponent’s jibes. These jibes are full of aggressive sexual allusions; the loser is possessed, is violated, by the winner, and the spectators laugh and sneer at him. Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on the condition that it consists in violating a passive agent. As with heterosexual relationships, the important thing is not to open oneself up and at the same time to break open one’s opponent ([1950] 1985, 39–40).

This reference in “Máscaras mexicanas” demands a closer reading, and sustained attention to how the text employs sexual, specifically homosexual, allegory to make claims about Mexicanness, thereby performing a queer gesture without any presumed queer authorial intentionality.

For Paz, homosexual acts between men are overly indulgent, or a matter of excess. By extension, such acts are promiscuous, and promiscuity takes us into a semantic space where the original definitions of “mixing” and “third gender” can come into play. There is an otherness to the act of sex between men that is not innately wrong, just different. Moreover, it is indulgent only as far as the activo is concerned. Paz does not condemn, nor discourage the practice at all. Rather, it is discussed as a normal, almost common, act that he is attempting to make sense of for the reader, and most likely, for himself. The bottom, in this description, however, unlike the top, does not indulge himself by participating in these sexual acts. Much like Paz’s description of the woman, he is desexualized and his sexual pleasure is neither accessible, nor necessary. Paz continues and describes the sexual partners, in Spanish, as “interlocutores.” Etymologically the word “interlocutor” is derived from the Latin “interlocut-,” the past participle stem of “interloqui” meaning “speak between” or “interrupt.” An interlocutor is one who speaks through dialogue. This exchange is best understood then as an act of verbal negotiation, suggesting that what Paz describes is a process or form of consensual practice between men. The mapping of power dynamics onto words and physical sexual negotiation can be seen as a form of foreplay and sexual teasing. The Mexican concept of the albur, that he references, recognizes this erotic act of negotiation and is both uniquely Mexican and queer. The exchange usually results in a sexual encounter between men, acting as a verbal process by which the two men playfully figure out who will bottom, in a manner that transgresses not only the doxa of masculinity, but also the normative conventions of language, which are called into question and re-codified to become loaded with sexual content. This is an active and deliberate engagement between both men. Moreover, the act of dominating a submissive partner is not foreign to some consensual sexual practices: which leads to one man, or sometimes both, being penetrated and assuming the position of the bottom. For Paz, this is the man who has lost the battle of negotiation. This being the case—and just here is where the text veers into the radical—he concludes, “Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on the condition that it consists in violating a passive agent” ([1950] 1985, 39–40).

I read this statement as advocating for sex between men being acceptable as long as there is a bottom. Read this way, homosexual sex is bottoming, which may be problematic by definition, but enables a deeper theoretical engagement with the rhetorical gestures and politics of bottoming.⁴ In this sense, homosexual sex would be an indulgent act for both men since the act of bottoming is the sex itself. Without the bottom there is no top. While Paz, in Spanish, describes the act of bottoming as “una violación,” most commonly translated as rape, it is still described, in this instance, as an act resulting from sexual negotiation. It is in the final sentence of this passage that he equates this same-sex relationship with that of heterosexual couples. Paz asserts that any penetration, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is an act of violation. In fact, the person being penetrated almost seems irrelevant since the sexual act is only supposed to be in the interest of protecting the top from being opened up. Such an erasure of the distinctive identities of the chingado becomes important because it assumes a conflation of gendered receptive positionality that does not distinguish between male and female passivity.

Paz’s sexual ideologies are hence dependent on masculinist understandings of power and domination that affirm the indulgent right of men to fuck whomever they want without guilt, repercussion, or fear. For Paz’s construction of Mexicanness to become realized, though, someone has to be the chingado. The bottom is the truly necessary part of that vision. In this regard, Paz penetrates gay male sexual discourse, opening up the inherent importance of bottoming within that discourse. Even more so, he enables a reading of the political act of bottoming as a man, and its inherent power. If the construction of lo mexicano is dependent upon someone being the chingado, then the bottom has a stake in the masculinist politics of national consciousness. In order to fully account for gender and sexuality within Mexican politics, it is necessary to consider the signifier of the bottom in a reading of Mexicanness.

Paz gives great currency to the sexual act in his conceptualization of Mexicanness and the future of Mexico as a modern nation. While I neither condemn nor defend Paz’s observations on the Mexican construction of homosexuality, I question his investment in chingar (fucking). Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba reminds us that “the male body claims its centrality as the hero figure, this centrality makes his body an object of desire.” That is, in constructing this idea of extreme machismo through sexuality, “if virility is prestigious, effeminacy is dishonorable” (2007, 65). National aesthetics thus become dependent on an idea of machismo performed through a man’s sexual acts. In this sense, all aspects of male sexuality, including bottoming, are fundamental to the aesthetic representation and allegorical construction of the nation. It is through a chingar-based political construction of Mexicanness, that Paz generates a homosocial understanding of nationalism that depends on a sexual relationship of domination between men. What Paz actually proposes, then, is a non-reproductive nationalism that holds onto a futurism, which itself alludes to a narrative of totality of the nation. This narrative of totality in the nation-building project is not only masculinized, but hypersexualized, through the chingar rhetorical gestures in Paz’s writing.

Returning to “Hijos de la Malinche,” Paz describes a vision for Mexicanness that underscores the aggressive dominance of the top: “The man who commits it never does so with the consent of the chingado (…) The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains” ([1950] 1985, 77). Paz invests in the top’s pleasure and ability to fuck as hard as is necessary to exert his dominance at the expense of breaking down and de-sexualizing the bottom. The excessive imagery and descriptions of the chingón penetrating and ripping open his bottom on one level flirts with homoeroticism; on another, it presents an image of a culture in a sexual crisis. Even Paz recognizes this resonance as he reflects on the characteristics of the gran macho: “It would not be difficult to perceive certain homosexual inclinations also, such as the use and abuse of the pistol, as a phallic symbol which discharges death rather than life, and the fondness for exclusively masculine guilds” ([1950] 1985, 82).

Accordingly, this complicates how homosexuality is understood and defined in the context that Paz is creating. If the macho, who is presumably always the chingón (top; fucker), can be predisposed to homosexuality through his fascination with groping his own pistol—a desire more commonly attributed to the bottom—then the stability of the nation for which he is a metaphor, and the normative trajectories of gender on which the nation depends, are equally called into question. Through this reading, Paz opens the top up to a sexual figure of death—the pistol as phallus. That is, through the embrace of the libidinal demands of his penis, the chingón (top; fucker) gestures toward death and destructiveness. The “deadly” symbols of homosexual desire—the rectum embracing the penis—reveal a queer engagement with death in the construction of the national narrative of Mexicanness. The nihilistic qualities of death that the Mexican already folds into his self-consciousness are, thus, paired with his sexuality.

Central to Paz’s essay is an implicit conversation about the sexuality of Mexico. By employing a masculinist, heterosexist, and yet hypersexual understanding of Mexicanness, Paz constructs a narrative about the direct relationship sex has to what is considered to be a post-Revolution understanding of the nation. Paz’s anxiety about the longevity of lo mexicano is dependent upon his reading of sexual objectivity and how sexual practices gesture toward a sexualized nation. His vision of Mexico relies on a man’s ability to establish his role as the masterful chingón. However, the passive role highlights key differences in how Mexicanness is performed and read vis-à-vis the sexual body.

The site of penetration is brought to the foreground of understanding the body’s contribution to both sexual culture and Mexicanness. El laberinto de la soledad becomes a precursory text for our contemporary conversations about gender, sex, and national identity. The academic literature explicitly treating the question of sex in Paz necessarily address the act of penetration, but has resulted in divergent ideas of what Paz is actually doing in this passage. On one hand, some scholars have attempted to problematize and extend the categories of “masculine” and “feminine” based on the distribution of the penis. Brett Levinson contends, “Paz (…) breaks down (no doubt unconsciously) the sex/gender binary by making what is traditionally liked to biology, to sex—the hole—a cultural matter, a matter of gender. In other words, Paz’s ‘hole’ is the intersection of biology and culture, and thus of sex and gender” (2001, 200). That is, as the result of Paz’s linking male bottoming (anus and rectum) to heterosexual sex (vagina), Paz disrupts normative understandings of the gender binary that would create distinctions between men and women.⁵ The “hole” is presumed to be a liminal space where gender difference is suspended through the act of penetration.

While such a reading highlights the importance of penetration in Paz’s construction of Mexicanness, I want to direct our attention to the site of penetration as the site for cultural discourse. The site of penetration itself is the central factor in understanding the relationship between sexuality and nationhood. Paz’s explicit reference to sex between men, as an allegorical nationalist practice, demands a queer reading that does not conflate male bottoming to a form of castrated invagination. There is more at stake in reading these orifices separately and considering the implications of male-to-male penetration on its own. Critical engagements with Paz’s treatment of penetrated bodies misread the sexual ethics at stake in Paz’s nation-building project. A queer reading of Paz would localize the rectum and anus as the embodied sites of discourses on nation-building in the twentieth century.

While Paz paints homosexual and heterosexual encounters as congruent, based on a penetrative paradigm, he never directly positions the male bottom to be the same as a woman. While the woman is described as passive—the sexual other, and subservient to men—she is also respected for her conservation of Mexicanness: “She is a symbol, like all women, of the stability and continuity of the race” ([1950] 1985, 38). Unbeknownst to him, Paz creates a framework that links sex and death to Mexicanness precisely through that act of anal penetration. Inherent in Paz’s analysis of the verb chingar is a heteronormative understanding of being “fucked” as the end of the nation. His reading of Mexicanness relies on a tropics of sexual positionality, in which being penetrated involves a certain finitude of the nation-building project.

The essence of Paz’s work espouses the primacy of chingar (fucking). For this narrative of the nation to unfold, someone has to be fucked. Reacting to that fact by merely saying, “Hopefully it’s not me!” flatly rejects the radical negativity of embodied receptive positionality. In El laberinto de la soledad, any discussion of sex is marked by the thinly veiled influence of death, which is always already present in the sexual practices he discusses in the text, in the embrace of a non-reproductive sexual act through domination. When Paz describes the bottom as “an abject and degraded being,” what he is not able to recognize is that as an abject body, the body becomes the site where boundaries are meant to be blurred and crossed, when the internal becomes external. There is not only a repression of power, but also the purging of that power in a way that resists and unhinges the power relationship between top and bottom, self and other, subject and object. This I describe as an “ends” of Mexicanness through an embrace of pasivo ethics that lie in the idea of being lo chingado.

If Paz were indeed collapsing the gender binary, as other scholars have purported, then this would mean that the bottom also becomes the corporeal site for the continuity of the Mexican race. However, Paz never makes that connection across the gender divide. The relationship between the chingón (top; fucker) and the chingado (bottom; fucked) that this particular vision depends on is a non-reproductive one. It is a sexual practice that leads the nation to its own end. The rectum is where the Mexican race goes to die. Specifically, it is where Paz’s vision of a masculinized, phallocratic Mexicanness goes to die.

Toward bottom nationalism

Passivity opens the path to examine the significance of sexualized constitutions of Mexicanness. By taking the pasivo seriously as an ethical mode of engagement, we gain a new lexicon and theoretical framework by which to read not only the disruptive nature of sexual acts in nation-building literature, but also the allegorical qualities that posit a particular ethics of engaging the sexual other within the construction of these paradigms. Paz describes a culture in sexual conflict; concerned about the continuity of the nation and dependent upon male-to-male relations to protect the future of Mexicanness. These anxieties are marked by death-dealing assumptions that to open oneself up, sexually and metaphorically, gestures toward a finitude that leads the nation to its own ends.

If Mexican men are meant to top, then bottoming leads to the death of the phallacy of Mexican culture. Machismo becomes the only acceptable form of masculine behaviour because it praises the penis as the saviour of the nation. The anus and rectum, on the other hand, despite their pleasurable qualities, equal death. However, what if the pasivo becomes the figure who both affirms and alleviates the anxieties of the nation? What if the pasivo accepts their fate toward death because they are always already “fucked” anyways? Does that acceptance of death make the bottom more Mexican than the top because of an embrace of death, which is always already the embrace of life?

Paz draws the reader’s attention to Mexico’s intimate relationship with death. Death serves as the mirror for how Mexicans see life. The relationship between death and life is inseparable. Moreover, Paz writes, “Our fondness for self-destruction and death derives not only from our masochistic tendencies but also from a certain variety of religious emotion” ([1950] 1985, 23). Mexico is intimate with death. Understanding life requires an understanding of death and vice versa. Representations of sex in Paz’s work necessitate just as much of an understanding of the role of death. How does the chingón interact with death? Paz asks: “Does the Mexican open out in the presence of death? (…) He does not surrender himself to it because surrender entails a sacrifice. And a sacrifice, in turn, demands that someone must give and someone receive. That is, someone must open out and face a reality that transcends him” ([1950] 1985, 59).

To assume the position and identity of the chingado or the pasivo is to be in a death-dealing position. Yet there is this question about whether the Mexican submits himself to the figure of death. Here the image of the Mexican means the chingón for Paz, because only the chingón can perform the truest form of Mexicanness, which is the dominant fucking of everyone and everything. However, following the trajectory of the reading of the Mexican who opens himself up to a sexual figure of death through the phallic image of his pistol, he also opens himself up to the embodiment of death through his penetration of the bottom: who is, always has been, and always will be the sexual figure of death.

I am mindful that Paz personifies the image of death. Following this question of whether the Mexican submits himself him to death, Paz writes, “In a closed, nontranscendent world, death neither gives nor receives: it consumes itself and is self-gratifying” ([1950] 1985, 59). Paz asexualizes death and it becomes self-reflexive and self-satisfying. That is, in a world of tops (closed), the bottom (death) masturbatorially engages with himself to reflect on life in ways that are senseless, inexplicable, and illegible: it is the full realization of pasivo ethics. The relationship the Mexican has with death is an intimate one. According to Paz, death in Mexico is sterile ([1950] 1985, 59): it is non-reproductive, as in the gay sex that he refers to between the chingón and the chingado. The bottom, as the figure of death par excellence, is the corporeal site of Mexican death.

Passivity as a self-annihilating act is an embrace of the abject contours of the sexual futurity that shapes the nation-building project. Pasivo ethics are a response to the false universal ideals of heteronormativity that capture a sexual futurity for Mexico. As a non-normative ethics, pasivo ethics go against the grain of dominant narratives of national production and yet are always at the centre. The pasivo is already marked for death and a “fucked” future, but even in his annihilating embodiment, he represents the back on which modern ideas of Mexicanness are bred. Sex becomes the imperative to express not only resistance to politics, but that which the political system has already enabled through sexuality—which I describe as queer.

The idea of being “fucked” carries shame-filled baggage for Paz. He insists that being lo chingado (the fucked one) is humiliating and violating. Reflecting on the phrase, “¡Hijo de la chingada!,” which is both a rallying cry, and most importantly, an insult, Paz asks why Mexicans take such pride in the phrase. In his close reading of the verb chingar (to fuck), he remarks how chingar may also signal “failure” in some contexts. It is a failure to be the chingado (fucked). Paz’s reading of the chingado is an attempt to repress passivity and treating it as a death-dealing category. However, as I have demonstrated, there is power in the disruptive and fractured nature of the pasivo’s ability to accept being fucked over and over in the name of national belonging. So, who are los hijos de la Chingada? They are the men who assume the role of being “fucked,” to fuck back. Focusing on passivity enables current work on sexuality to consider the significance of these sexual acts as they gesture toward the gendered and sexualized constitutions of Mexicanness.

Acknowledgements

This essay that sits before my readers was certainly no easy feat, as I traversed the queer landscapes of Latin American studies to bring forth these perspectives in their current form. I owe its progress and merit to the support and generous eyes of those who have read earlier drafts of this essay: Sony Corañez Bolton, Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Erin Graff Zivin, Tara Mendola, and my anonymous reviewers. Their incisive criticism and suggestions supported me through the writing process in some of the most meaningful ways.

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Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez

Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez is Assistant Professor of Latin American literatures and cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and an affiliate of the Departments of Gender and Women's Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, Religion, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She researches and writes in the interstices between Latin American cultural studies, critical theory, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary literature. Cervantes-Gómez is currently completing her first monograph, tentatively entitled A Body Exposed: Risking the Aesthetics of Queer Mexicanness. She has also published articles and reviews in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Men and Masculinities.

Notes

1 In this article, I will cite the 1985 English translation of Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (originally published in Spanish in 1950) by Lysander Kemp, with the original Spanish bracketed when necessary. All other Spanish to English translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise.

2 This includes references from Samuel Ramos’s profile of the pelado’s virility (1934), to Paz’s gran chingón groping his pistol ([1950] 1985, 82), to Roger Bartra’s approach to the study of national identity by “penetrating the weak points and cracks” of these national phenomena (1987, 15).

3 This criticism ranges from writers such as Carlos Monsiváis who critique the representations of women in his work as misogynistic (2013, 23–24) to studies that address the complex references to homosexuality and sexual violence in El laberinto de la soledad, but maintain that the text remains important to understand male sexuality, such as Robert McKee Irwin’s history of Mexican masculinities.

4 This is in line with historical understandings of homosexuality in Latin America as being based on sexual objectivity and positionality, in which only the bottom is considered homosexual because to be penetrated is to be woman-like.

5 Levinson develops this argument through a Lacanian reading of bottoming as an act of castration, extending the idea of castration to Malinche in Paz’s argument that opens the possibility for a reading into a castrated, gender-neutralized understanding of Mexicanness.