Error and the erotic vandal: A collection of five short stories

• Main Author: Maramag, Aleck E.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2006
• Subjects: Sex in literature; Erotic literature > History and criticism; Sex in literature > History and criticism; Women > Sexual behavior; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2274
• Institution: De La Salle University

The project is a collection of five (5) short stories in English that reflects the transformations undergone by the woman-protagonists as they yield to their sexuality on outward explorations of experience that push each of them deeper into an internal journey that has its own dangers. Each sexual experience in the collection grants each protagonist a sexual realization wherein lust for the body is coupled with a lust for understanding. The collection moves along a narrative arc, similar to Luce Irigaray's Speculum in illustrating her feminist theory. The author calls it the cunt narrative , in which the relationship of the concepts, love and lust, and how they are played out in each individual story, are illustrated in a diagram. The project is aimed to contribute to the erotic literature by women in the Philippines by reviving that time in Philippine history when women spoke of sex without guilt or censorship, giving voice to the erotic spirit of a modern-day Philippine woman and how she copes with the painful/pleasurable intricacies of a woman's condition through her sexuality and sex. In order to locate the project in the context of Philippine literature, the author first traced the emergence of erotic writing in the Philippines during pre-colonial times as embodied by the baylans, and followed it through repression and censorship under Spanish colonial rule, until its current manifestation in contemporary anthologies and fiction by women. The author then proceeded to discuss the constraints of anthologizing, as well as the problem of a historicity observed in the anthology, Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic (1992) edited by Tina Cuyugan and differentiated the terms, erotica and erotic writing in that the former is a Western genre or tradition in literature while the latter is a body of writing that is closely knit to a country's folk literature. The author's coming into being both as a person and as a writer was likewise traced, parallel to the history of eroticism in the Philippines, in a narration of important life events that reflect the author's worldview and outlook on writing and the erotic, and how these were discovered, repressed, and rekindled in the author's personal struggles with her relationships with men: father, friends, lovers, strangers and her relationship with her self. The author's artistic influences, creative process, and biases were delineated, followed by the author's differentiation of erotic and pornography, as well as how the author applies the politics of erotic writing, and not pornography, in her short stories. As the result of the author's journey of coming into being, the concept of the erotic vandal, the assassin of love, is conceived in relation to Octavio Paz's litertine. The author concluded her poetics with a definition of erotic vandalism as the use of one's own body, as well as the violator's desire for it, as weapons to punish the violator for a wrongdoing caused by his very desire. In effect, the revenge done by the victim through erotic means becomes the mirror that deflects the sexual violator's wrongdoing, turning the violator into the victim (of his own lust). The original victim then, becomes the erotic vandal, who is both woman and writer.