Autocross Blogs - Estelle Jacken

This tension between biological sex and gender performance leads him to categorize her as 'una equivocación de la naturaleza' (962), whom he transgenders into someone 'in-between' the 'natural' gender categories. This same tension raises the question of embodiment as discussed by Elizabeth Grosz (1995: 83-84), who asks 'whether subjectivity, the subject's relations with others [...], and its place in a socio-natural world [...] may be better understood in corporal rather than conscious terms'. In Palma's narrative, the subject's behaviour cannot be divorced from her corporal reality. It is the positioning, the dressing and the handling of this female body within masculine spheres of activity, where, as the narrator claims, 'se encontraba como en su centro', (Palma 1968c: 962) that forms the premise of silver cufflinks the narrator's assessment that his subject is an aberration of nature who, in contrast to the quintessentially feminine Campusano, earns his respect but not his sexual interest.

The final aspect in which Palma compares Sáenz to Campusano is in each woman's preferences in reading material. With this description, he situates each subject in relation to intellectual spheres that, as implied by the comparison, are heavily gendered. Palma himself had entered into theoretical debates about the relationship between history and literature, defending his tradiciones as literature when silver earrings they were criticized as lacking historical rigour (Denegri 1996: 33). History was seen as rational, factual and academic, and was thus considered to be a masculine intellectual endeavour.

On the other hand, literature was seen as light, seductive silver key rings and enchanting - appropriate reading material for women, according to gender norms of the time, and particularly consistent with Rousseauean concerns about female political and intellectual activity. In the light of this debate we see that Palma represents Campusano's readings as harmless and non-political; her reading of the romance novel Eloísa y Abelardo and of 'libritos pornográficos' were enough to earn her a place on the registry of the Holy Office of Lima, but according to the tradicionista, such books were read all over Lima and did little more than give prudish readers something to mention in the confessional (Palma 1968c: 962-63). While her readings may transgress social or religious norms of decency, they limit her intellectual activities to the feminine, non-political sphere of literature.