Beyond Essence: Performing Gender and Sexuality in Ena Lucía Portela's Cien Botellas En Una Pared

Abstract

AbstractSet against a backdrop of the chaotic, crumbling Cuban capital and the multiple crises of the Special Period, Ena Lucia Portela's 2002 novel Cien botellas en una pared portrays both consequences of economic collapse and the breakdown of traditional paradigms of gender and sexuality. In the text, the connection between biological sex and gender performance appears to be arbitrary; virtually all of the female characters are lesbians, while the male characters are either gay or emasculated heterosexuals. This essay argues that Portela's novel problematises the (hetero)sexist norms that have persisted in Cuban society, dismantling patriarchy in favour of a fluid, amorphous social structure in which power itself becomes ephemeral. While the image of La Habana presented in Cien botellas en una pared is far from utopian, the text nonetheless questions rigid hierarchies of gender and sexuality to a degree that is trailblazing in Cuban fiction of the Periodo especial.Keywords: Special Period, Cuban fiction, gender, sexuality, heterosexism, powerThe second half of the twentieth century in Cuba was marked by political, social, and economic transformations with wide-ranging consequences. The first of these transformations was initiated by the 1959 Revolution; the second, by the 1989 collapse of Cuba's principal trading partner, the Soviet Union. In one of his official proclamations, Fidel Castro named this crisis El periodo especial en tiempo de paz. The devastating implications of the Special Period for the Cuban economy - and the Cuban people - have been the subject of volumes of writing since the early 1990s. These publications, both scholarly and creative, include a significant body of literature devoted to the deterioration of Havana. Odette Casamayor Cisneros' 2004 essay on 'las ruinas habaneras' is exemplary of this focus on the decaying capital and the transformation of its social structure as a result of the crisis. Casamayor Cisneros asserts that in novels of the Periodo especial, the image of the city in ruins serves as a reflection of the social and ethical changes that began to permeate Cuban society (73). Likewise, in an essay on fiction produced by Cuban women writers during and immediately after the Periodo especial, Maria del Mar Lopez-Cabrales (2007) highlights the recurring portrayal of 'una Habana decadente y deprimente' and of characters 'que tratan de subsistir a diario con el estomago vacio... y buscando a diario con una jaba cualquier cosa para conseguir la alimentacion basica' (181).While such widespread shortages affected virtually all Cubans during the Periodo especial, Cuban women arguably bore the brunt of the catastrophic economic adjustments occurring in the 1990s. Economic restructuring caused many professional women to be redirected into part-time, temporary, low-paying service sector occupations with limited opportunities for mobility, and in general 'many of the gains women made in the labor force as a result of the Revolution have been severely eroded' (Toro-Morn et al. 2002: 33). Furthermore, it is debatable to what extent the increased entry into the labour force by Cuban women in the decades following the Revolution was paralleled by a shiftin societal attitudes and social structures. In 1975 the Family Code went into effect to replace pre-Revolutionary laws on marriage, divorce, adoption, and alimony; included were articles that stipulated that men and women should have equal roles in marriage, housework, and child-rearing. In addition, the code stated that within the family, men and women should support each other's pursuit of education and jobs. Researchers have shown, however, that such Revolutionary government mandates were insufficient to bring about true gender equality in the home. As historian Johanna Moya Fabregas (2010) affirms in 'The Cuban Woman's Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State's Gender Ideology, 1950-1976', the Family Code was not supported by plans for enforcement, '[leaving] Cuba's patriarchal social structure largely unchanged. …