Everything That Rots Forms a Society: Ampuero Takes on Institutional Family Violence in Latin America

Everything That Rots Forms a Society:Ampuero Takes on Institutional Family Violence in Latin America Antonieta Carpenter-Cosand "Everything takes place in the Family (the Holy Family: The Family is in essence Holy), 'God will recognize his own in it,' i.e., those who have recognized God, and have recognized themselves in Him, will be saved." —Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 122.1 "Todo lo que se pudre forma una familia." —Fabian Casas, "Hace algún tiempo", Tuca, 19. With the first epigraph, Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero warns us of the violence in her third book, Pelea de Gallos (Cockfight). Each of the thirteen short stories in the anthology presents the institution of the family as a space characterized by atrocious acts of violence: sexual assault, domestic violence, and even incest. As a subversive strategy, Ampuero opens a window into this private space from the perspective of vulnerable characters from a nuclear family, such as girls, teenagers, or women, who are generally housewives. All the protagonists are female, except for one teenager, who is nonetheless vulnerable. This essay focuses on four of these stories: "Passion," "Mourning," "Auction," and "Pups." This essay argues that "Passion" and "Mourning" are the foundational texts of the entire work and that the latter ("Auction" and "Pups") exemplify Ampuero's voracious criticism of social group dynamics in Latin America. This essay uses the affective mapping theory established by Jonathan Flatley in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (2008) and Louis Althusser's concepts of state apparatus and interpellation2 to analyze these stories. The essay demonstrates the affective mapping of each story or character, which consequently shows how violence is normalized and replicated. Thus, this End Page 150 essay argues that Ampuero makes visible the hidden and normalized violence that often occurs within the Latin American institution of family. In psychology, affective mapping is the mental process in which an individual acquires, stores, and reminisces information experienced in their environment and daily life. It is a process or space that hosts the individual's affective life history and historicity. Both types of processes (interpellation and affective mapping) guide and form us in our environment. Affective mapping begins in childhood, when parents define the first affective spaces of their children, which are later developed through new social spaces through adulthood. These maps adhere to a range of intentions, beliefs, wishes, moods, and affective attachments toward every activity a person makes (Flatley 77). However, they are not stable and can be reversed and modified by acquiring new information and becoming exposed to new environments and affective connections. In addition, due to these mental and affective processes, common social formations, such as patriarchy and capitalism, remain attached to each person's emotional life (Flatley 79). Thus, there is a more effective process of interpellation because one can find an effective link between affective mapping and all the assigned ideas we often internalize (which Flatley refers to as the "structure of feeling"). Different concepts of state ideology are closely intertwined with Flatley's affective mapping. According to Althusser, the state apparatus contains two bodies. The one treated here is that of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Ampuero seems to be self-conscious about the structural apparatuses that are the foundation and the force of the development of Latin American violence3, hence she uses the short stories "Passion" and "Mourning" to fictionalize them, thereby echoing Althusser's argument about ISAs. Althusser's ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationships among individuals and their real conditions in a material existence (109). That is, ideology is a disruption of existence, which is interpellated on individuals who function as actual subjects in society: "to say that someone is fully interpellated is to say that he or she has been successfully brought into accepting a certain role, or that he or she has accepted values willingly" (McGee). This process can only proceed when individuals turn into subjects (Althusser 115). The notion of subject is something that has "always-already" existed simply by "noting the ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a 'birth'" (Althusser 119). For example, taking religious aspects into consideration, naming individuals "transforms...