Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The image of the city as body in Mexico is addressed broadly in fiction and cultural writing, especially at midpoint in the Twentieth Century and after. The gendered mapping of Mexico drawn by Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Luiz Zapata, Carlos Monsiváis and writers of the Onda generation, is revised by the later work of Angel Rama, Néstor García Canclini and others who have dedicated their writing to examining the city, usually Mexico City, as a locus for an encumbered national identity. Among these authors, spaces are delineated as feminine, masculine, queer, and colonized. Drawing from some of these big-city Mexican sources, especially Paz, and from broader psychoanalytic and ethnographic readings, and very particularly from Julia Kristeva’s authorial trajectory, Karen Rodríguez asks, what of the provincia, the “small city” of her title, and what of the city as psyche? In Small City on a Big Couch: A Psychoanalysis of a Provincial Mexican City, Rodríguez assumes the position of psychoanalytic interviewer and imagines the analysand as Guanajuato, Mexico. The “big couch” can be read twofold in Rodriguez’s scenario. It is at once the breadth of “symbolic” psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva) that facilitates and informs the interview, and, in a much more “bodied” and “semiotic” sense, the “big couch” is Guanajuato’s very layout, a non-angular bowl shape that Rodríguez casts as feminine and associates with Kristeva’s “chora,” the open site that seeks playful engagement with the symbolic order, as opposed to Octavio Paz’s image of the rajada, the scarred and shamed feminine identity that must be covered and contained.
Repository Citation
Puga, Alejandro. "Review of Small City on a Big Couch, by Karen Rodríguez." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 13, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol13/iss1/13