La vida es pornografía igualitaria. <em>Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia</em> de Juan García Ponce

Abstract

The work of the Mexican writer Juan García Ponce is considered one of the most important examples of erotic literature in the Spanish language. However, none caused as much controversy as his 1989 novel, Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia, due to its patent pornographic nature. There are critics who defend Inmaculada, arguing that it is not really pornographic, but rather intensely erotic, and therefore, it is another work of great artistic quality by the Yucatecan author. However, in this article, I use of some ideas from feminist theory to question the critical validity of the “erotic” as a measure to determine the artistic. This in order to bring up what some researchers have determined as the historical tradition of literary pornography, which I introduce as the new critical and philological measure to study Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia. Given that the novels Justine and Juliette by the Marquis de Sade are the models of literary pornography that García Ponce followed for the writing of Inmaculada, in this article I carry out a comparative analysis between the three works to establish the key differences between them, and the contributions of the Yucatecan writer to the historical tradition of literary pornography. Finally, due to the fact that the protagonist of Inmaculada is female, I compare her experiences in the novel with feminist theory on female sexuality, as well as with general ideas of feminist theorists and pornographers who seek “egalitarian” models of sexual production.