Ruin & Want interview excerpts, pt. 6
Continuing sharing excerpts from my Sundress Publications interview with Izzy Astuto. This time around, I’m discussing the juxtaposition of sex and violence. As always, it comes back to trauma and T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Same thing really.
Do consider preordering Ruin & Want!
[CW: talk of violence, sexual abuse.]
Izzy Astuto: Can you speak more on the juxtaposition of sex and violence in this book?
José: What’s that Tolstoy quote? “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s not enough to say I grew up in a dysfunctional family as every family dysfunctions differently. I grew up with the United States version of toxic masculinity fed to me through TV and school, but I also inherited machismo through my family. I was raised by two strong women, my mom and my tia, who through their love and hard work helped keep me alive, and yet, even without the presence of a man in the house, machismo crept through the sexualized, gendered teasing I’d receive and the gendered expectations of what a man should be. That’s the insidious nature of patriarchal violence; we pass it on unintentionally if we’re not careful.
There’s also the violence of systemic oppression, of growing up below the poverty line, of living with the fear of border patrol, INS, now ICE. I knew I didn’t want to perpetuate toxic stereotypes of the male gaze but more the violence and harm people cause each other through ignorance and despite good intentions (along with bad intentions). There’s also the violence of an eating disorder, a condition of self-harm tinged and/or urged on, in some part, by sexual desire, the need to be attractive.
I name all this to say that some of what I’m interrogating here is the ways in which sex and violence imply each other. That it’s not a simple thing. The first night L touched me physically didn’t have to happen; and when it did happen, there was the intimacy of sex as well as the intrusion of violence, of crossed lines. I guess I’m saying the book is messy because life is—which is something I don’t want to have to say, mainly because it’s what scholars say to excuse and justify Eliot’s Wasteland, jaja.
More tomorrow!
José
