FEMALE TRAUMA AND TABOO - Latin American ….pdfVIP

FEMALE TRAUMA AND TABOO: INCEST IN SILVIA MOLINA’S CIRCUITO CERRADO Andrea Byrum Professor of Spanish Edgewood College byrum@edgewood.edu Prepared for delivery at the 2000 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Hyatt Regency Miami March 16-18, 2000 “Female Trauma and Taboo: Incest in Silvia Molina’s Circuito cerrado” (Paper presented at LASA 2000 by Andrea Byrum, Edgewood College) In her article “Inventions and Transgressions: A Fractured Narrative on Feminist Theatre in Mexico”, Kirsten Nigro states that a history of feminist playwrights in Mexico is by necessity “fractured” because of long periods of silence, either because women were not writing or they were unable to stage or publish their plays (137). She puts this story in the larger context which Jean Franco outlined in her book Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, which describes the plight of women in modern Mexican culture as “a master narrative where women either are not emplotted at all, or are emplotted according to an experience or definition not their own.” She says that Franco’s book focusses on those “momentary deviations or eruptions that briefly open up spaces in that other story that works so hard to keep women out” (137). Nigro’s analysis then goes ahead to concentrate on the 1976 staging of Rosario Castellano’s The Eternal Feminine as a new direction for Mexican women playwrights whereby they “dissect and deconstruct the institutions and social practices that ‘make things the way they are’, ... to open up spaces where women can position themselves as agents of action and social change” (138). This is the cultural context for Silvia Molina’s first and only drama, Circuito cerrado, published in 1995 and performed in 1996