“But how to speak of such things?” : decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997)

Gräbner, Cornelia (2014) “But how to speak of such things?” : decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997). Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 20 (1). pp. 51-74. ISSN 1470-1847

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually, I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval’s methodology of the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender, at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love” a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession. The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case studies.