Ileana Rodríguez (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego) is Professor Emeritus in Humanities and Distinguished Professor from The Ohio State University. Her books deal with the intersection of gender, politics, and sexuality, with a particular focus on sexual abuse, male perversion, and state collaboration on these issues. She also argues the culture as the basic support of the political.

Research line:

The Prose of the Counterinsurgency.

'The Political' during the Neo-Liberal Restoration in Nicaragua (Counterflow. North Carolina UP. 2019) is a reflection on different vanishing points of the Sandinista revolution, in particular, those referring to women and youth. The work dismisses the idea of ​​a sutured structural totality and replaces it with the concept of articulation and identities of the social subject in constant flow. It also notes the dilemma of revolution or war in transition to socialism, social democracy, or neo-liberal democratization.

Research Project as a fellow of CALAS

Title:  Modalities of memory and affective archives: What is preserved and what is forgotten

Abstract: The impetus for this proposal is the fear that the political provokes when all social forces are disorganized. Never it is the sense of the collective more decisive, nor is the mooring of the community more vital. I call this communion of all with all popular intensity. Under such circumstances, we are all hurtful and vulnerable; feelings arise instinctively and politics becomes bio and necropolitical. Horror disturbs the subject who loses the sequential sense of the facts; he mixes event and interpretation and confuses his own voice with that of others. Thus, the memory is obscured and the narrative displaces its order of accentuation. Hence the modalities of memory, what is preserved or forgotten.

This research returns to the cultural text that masterfully captures this broken and elusive gesture and stores Central American transitions in affective archives. In them there is a germinal feminine-masculine watershed that blurs the armed to fix its attention on the defenseless; it de-emphasizes the bravery and the weapons and concentrates on the force of affection. I start from the concept of trace or track and I question whether by event is meant a real event or an interpretation of it, or both. I consider psychoanalysis the founding science of memory processes but I follow the displacement of the individual psychoanalytic trace to collective historical processes. I choose a central event as symptomatic and with it, I return to the trauma scene guided by the cultural text as an archive. If on the surface we find fear, at the bottom is the desire that runs through the texts as a spectrum. The consideration is regional. Each transition is accompanied by specific narratives.