11

The return of Gonzo through

the female body: Gabriela
Wiener and the journalist
as a sexual vortex

Pablo Calvi

Gabriela Wiener is the first writer in Latin America to claim the style
popularized in the United States during the 1970s by Hunter S. Thompson.
She also developed a unique form of Gonzo in her pieces for the Peruvian
magazine Etiqueta Negra, the erotic Spanish magazine Primera Línea, the
Spanish weekly Lateral, and at least four books. Wiener’s writing resorts to a
unique element that has been foreign to other Gonzo journalists: the female
body and its sexuality. This approach immediately raises a few questions: if
Gonzo in the United States has predominantly been associated with male
narratives about masculine endeavors, can Gonzo assume a purely female
state? Why and how did this style carve its way into mainstream Latin
American journalism? And finally, what are the underlying aspects of female
Gonzo that we can learn from Wiener’s approach, and how do these aspects
speak to both Gonzo in the world, and literary journalism at large?

Until the arrival of Gabriela Wiener in the publishing world, the territory
of Gonzo journalism in Latin America had been long unclaimed.1 Wiener
was born in Peru in 1975, but became feverishly active after she relocated
to Barcelona (2003–11), and then Madrid, where she lives today. She has
been a Gonzo pioneer in Latin America and one of the first journalists to
claim the style popularized in the United States during the 1970s by Hunter

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S. Thompson. She has also developed a unique form of Gonzo that we will
discuss in this chapter, while continuously publishing her pieces in Peruvian
magazine Etiqueta Negra, the erotic Spanish magazine Primera Línea, and
the defunct Spanish weekly Lateral, together with at least four books.
Wiener’s writing possesses a certain theatricality that, at first, makes
her stories read closer to “camp,” and Bette Midler, than to Hunter S.
Thompson. Her approach resorts to a unique element that has been
foreign to other Gonzo journalists: the female body and its sexuality. This
approach immediately raises a few questions: if Gonzo in the United States
has predominantly been associated with male narratives about masculine
endeavors, can Gonzo assume a purely female stance? Why and how did
this style carve its way into mainstream Latin American journalism? And
finally, what are the underlying aspects of female Gonzo that we can learn
from Wiener’s approach, and how do these aspects speak to both Gonzo in
the world, and literary journalism at large? To explore these questions, we
will first try to locate Gonzo journalism in style and time, discussing its main
aspects, as described by the writers and scholars who have explored the
form. We will then analyze the specificities of Wiener’s Gonzo and, finally,
we will discuss the specificities of Wiener’s female approach to Gonzo.

What is Gonzo?
The undisputed point of departure for Gonzo journalism can be traced
back to Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 article for Scanlan’s Monthly: “The
Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” The piece was described as
“Gonzo” by Thompson’s friend and editor for the Boston Globe Sunday
Magazine Bill Cardoso. In Thompson’s own words: “I’d heard him use the
word Gonzo when I covered the New Hampshire primary in ’68 with him.
It meant sort of ‘crazy,’ ‘off-the-wall’ … But Cardozo [sic] said something
like, ‘Forget all the shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If
this is a start, keep rolling’” (Rosenbaum 1977: 47).
The name “Gonzo,” though, has been connected to other, more oblique
origins, especially the ones described by Thompson’s biographer, estate
administrator, and Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley. In
a 2010 interview with the Boston Globe, Brinkley claimed that the word
“Gonzo” was directly connected to New Orleans jazzman James Booker:
“This bit about Cardoso introducing Hunter to the word ‘Gonzo’ is just
a false story that Hunter allowed to go on because he was friends with
Cardoso,” Brinkley said. Brinkley’s account begins in a New Hampshire
motel in 1968, when Cardoso and Thompson were covering the Nixon
campaign. Thompson was listening to “Gonzo,” a 1960 recording by the
New Orleans pianist James Booker, over and over again. In one Brinkley

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version, Cardoso was driven crazy by the music and started calling Thompson
the “Gonzo man.” In another version, co-written with Johnny Depp (who
played Thompson in the adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”),
Cardoso appeared in Thompson’s motel room, wondering what the word
in the song meant, and phoned a “smart friend” who told him it was Bronx
slang for “last man standing” (Baker 2010).
Despite the multiple accounts of the name’s origin (Bowe 2012: 93; Hirst
2004: 5; Perry 1992: 142; Whitmer 1993: 168), authors seem to agree when
they describe Gonzo as a journalistic style that “draws its power from a
combination of both social critique and self-satire,” in which immersion and
a subjective point of view are the dominant forces (Bowe 2012: 92). In many
cases, Gonzo also has been considered a sub-class of the American New
Journalism, with a higher dose of self-reflection and involvement (Bowe
2012: 95). But the question of immersion in Gonzo can be summarized by
a comparison: if the narrative journalists before Thompson tried to become
the fly on the wall at a dive bar, after Thompson these same journalists were
eager to become the obnoxious drunkard who threw the first punch that
started the brawl at the bar.
An example of Thompson’s personal engagement in his reporting is the
“Ibogaine rumor,” which started in a 1972 story during his coverage of the
presidential campaign for Rolling Stone magazine, and contributed to end
Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie’s presidential aspirations:

Not much has been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor
in the presidential campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin
primary race—about a week before the vote—word leaked out that some
of Muskie’s top advisers called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be
treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug” that nobody in
the press corps had ever heard of. (Thompson [1972] 2011:179–80)

In 1977, during an interview at CBC, Thompson admitted to have

singlehandedly started the rumors: “I never said he was [taking Ibogaine],”
Thompson said, “I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was,
which was true when I started the rumor in Milwaukee.”2 Starting a rumor
and reporting on that same rumor goes beyond the standard reportorial
engagement with a story that any professional reporter would be allowed
to act upon. It displays a type of commitment which walks the line between
professionalism and political operation, and could be deemed irresponsible
at best, or unethical at worst. But this intense connection that Gonzo
proposes between journalist and story requires not only a vigorous first-
person narrative style, a personal point of view, and a direct emotional
involvement with, and investment in, the story; Gonzo also demands that the
physical body of the journalist be in direct contact with the story, physically
entangled with it in some order or capacity.

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In Hell’s Angels, Thompson’s character is also a body at the mercy of the

motorcycle rebels and this is apparent at every encounter between him and
the bikers:

While I was reaching in my pocket for some beer money I was nearly
knocked off my feet by a flying body that wrapped itself around me
before I could see who it was. Everything went black, and my first
thought was that they’d finally turned on me and it was all over: then I
felt the hairy kiss and heard the laughter. Ronnie, the Oakland secretary,
seemed offended that I hadn’t caught him in mid-air, as he’d expected,
and returned the kiss heartily. (Thompson 1966: 197)

The body in Gonzo acts as the epicenter of the story:

On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly
stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage
of them … The first blow was launched with no hint of warning and I
thought for a moment that it was one of those drunken accidents that
a man has to live with in this league. But within seconds I was clubbed
from behind by the Angel I’d been talking to just moments earlier. Then I
was swarmed in a general flail. (Thompson 1966: 272)

In more than one way, the marks on the Gonzo body operate as a narrative
record, and proof of what’s been told on paper.

The use of the body in Gonzo

Modern journalists, no matter whether they follow the information or the
story models described by Michael Schudson, write about facts, “[which
are] assertions about the world open to independent validation” (Schudson
1978: 5). For historical and sociological reasons, modern journalists have
traditionally operated under a mandate to write about what happens in the
world around them.
“Distance” from and “factual verification” of the object, have been
two of the main tenets of factuality in journalism, arguably until the post-
Vietnam era. In a sense, like most products of modernity, journalism in the
twentieth century (both in its informative and narrative iterations) fell under
the influence of what Martin Jay has called a “visual” or “scopic” regime:
“Cartesian perspectivalism” (Jay 1988: 3–23). Jay offers the example
of the Dutch painters who, like Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 11.1), used a
grid and a point of view to replicate reality in their canvasses: “Cartesian
perspectivalism was thus in league with a scientific world view that no longer

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 THE RETURN OF GONZO THROUGH THE FEMALE BODY 209

FIGURE 11.1 Albrecht Dürer, “Draughtsman making a perspective drawing of a

reclining woman,” woodcut (c. 1600). Public domain, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/366555 (accessed February
6, 2018).

hermeneutically read the world as a divine text, but rather saw it as situated
in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects
that could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the
neutral researcher” (Jay 1988: 9). An extreme version of this model in
narrative journalism is the scene conjured up by Washington Post’s reporter
Henry Allen when describing new journalist Gay Talese’s writing method:

Sometimes, writing on deadline for magazines, he would pin the

typewritten pages to a red felt wall behind his desk, then walk to the
other side of the room and with a pair of his father’s opera glasses (later,
after a theft, he would use David Halberstam’s binoculars) he would read
his own words, the watcher watching the watcher watch. (Allen 1980)

The image of the reporter looking at his notes across a distance through
a “neutral” vision-enhancing device operates not just as a metaphor for
Talese’s approach to his own reporting and writing, but also is telling of
a more general way in which the reported world was supposed to have
been perceived by the journalist. In that view, the world is a separate entity,
distanced from the observer; the scene shows a disembodied third-person
eye which captures, neutrally assesses, extracts, and objectively describes.
The modern reporter, just like the Dutch painter in Jay’s essay, parses
experience; segments it to analyze, classify, and quantify it, to make it able
to be sourced; and finally represents it, making it manageable for social
consumption. The ultimate goal of the modern journalist, in that vein,
is to break down experience into discrete pieces of information, and to
organize them into a narrative made of facts, a narrative of the “real.” In
this formula, the body of the journalist appears incomplete, because it is
mostly unnecessary. In its position, as a centripetal vortex—a lens—the only

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part that the journalist requires for reporting is the receptor (eye, ear, nose,
etc.): the distant fly on the wall through which experience is funneled to be
then reprocessed and shaped into a coherent narrative.
Applying Jay’s approach, and understanding the descriptive limits of any
theoretical model, it could be argued that Gonzo broke the lens of journalism,
introducing a fragmented perception that was based on a different approach
not only to writing, but also to reporting. Yes, narrative journalism had
already incorporated the immersive techniques of a good ethnography into
its toolbox (Sims 1995, 2009), but Gonzo put the entire perceptual body—
and not just the disembodied eye—into the flow of the world. In Gonzo, the
eye alone is inadequate; the body becomes the perceptual membrane. The
world (with its images, people, smells, drugs, alcohol, cities, bars, readings,
and experiences) ebbs and flows into and out of it. Talese’s binoculars are
replaced by an “osmotic” organism, closer to a turbine or a tree than to a
lens, which is able to process a multi-directional current of experience, and
then represent it in the same fragmentary manner as it was received. The
body of the Gonzo journalist is there not only to perceive and report, but
also to be affected and transformed by the world it reports about, and to
affect it through its own transformation.
There are socio-historical arguments that accompany this change in
narrative journalism models. Gonzo appears in the 1970s, together with
a strong shift in the perceptual regime of modernity (from print to TV,
newspapers to magazines). After the failed coverage of the Vietnam War,
the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and the American interventions
in Latin America (starting in 1954 in Guatemala, then 1961 and 1962 in
Cuba, 1973 in Chile, and 1976 in Argentina), mainstream, “objective”
journalism seems to have lost its grip on reality. The breakdown of
Cartesian perspectivalism (the distant, mathematical, and abstracted way in
which to understand and parse reality) leads to more personal, fragmented
explorations and representations. Jay and other intellectuals have called this
new regime Baroque, sometimes neo-Baroque (Calabrese 1992; Jay 1988).
Jay notes:

In opposition to the lucid, linear, solid, fixed, planimetric, closed form of

the Renaissance, or as Wölfflin later called it, the classical style, the baroque
was painterly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple, and open. Derived at
least according to one standard etymology, from the Portuguese word for
an irregular, oddly shaped pearl, the baroque connoted the bizarre and
peculiar, traits which were normally disdained by champions of clarity
and transparency of form. (Jay 1988: 16)

But even if Gonzo embodies the transition to a new model of representation

more attuned to the Baroque, the changes in the product are telling of an
even bigger shift. In Gonzo narratives, the reportorial stance, which begins

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prior to writing, requires the body of the reporter to submerge in the world
on which it will report, to be not only a participant observer, but an agent
of change and disruption of that very same world. And, in many cases, the
resulting story is a fragmented narrative accounting of the transformation
of the reportorial, osmotic body and the world in which it was embedded.
It could be argued that Gonzo journalism, unlike narrative journalism, aims
aims at the precisely at transformation of the outside world through the modification of
the physical body of the reporter. If the beating that Thompson took at the
end of his immersive stint with the Hell’s Angels not only changed him and
his writing, but the entire dynamic of the counterculture motorcycle group,
Wiener’s approach to swinging and maternity aim in the same direction: by
subjecting the Gonzo body to physical changes, it modifies the world on
which she is reporting.

Wiener and the Gonzo heritage

In the introduction to Sexografías, Javier Calvo traces the first connection
between Wiener and Gonzo. The book is an anthology of Wiener’s best
stories, some of which appeared in Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra,
one of the hubs for the new narrative journalism in Latin America. In
his introduction, Calvo describes the book as the breaking point between
Wiener’s racy voice and the dispassionate Etiqueta Negra magazine style:
“[Wiener’s] reinterpretation of Gonzo … goes beyond subjectivism and the
purely journalistic Gonzo, to adopt some aspects of pornographic Gonzo:
the transmission of the unchaste, for instance, or the use of your own body
as a vehicle for someone else’s arousal” (Calvo 2008: 8).3 Calvo proposes
that the first-person narrator in Wiener’s most groundbreaking stories for
this volume, the ones appearing in the third section of Sexografías, which
is titled “Mi Cuerpo” [“My Body”], expose the “I” of the narrator to a
level of intimacy and identification with her themes that eventually reveals
and unmasks the real author (and not just the narrator) before the readers
themselves. This approach, he argues, goes against the grain of Etiqueta
Negra’s style, and its “playful interest in the most extreme or grotesque life
forms in Latin America, [looked at] mainly through a distant and usually
tongue-in-cheek gaze on its subjects” (Calvo 2008: 8).
Julio Villanueva Chang, editor and founder of Peruvian Etiqueta Negra,
reviewed Wiener’s book for the Spanish daily Público, describing Wiener
as the “grand heiress of Gonzo, that reporter who not only accompanies
the characters from a prudent distance, but also lives in flesh and blood the
world she’s set to narrate” (Chang 2008). That “prudent distance,” however,
almost doesn’t appear in Sexografías. In one of the stories, “Dame el tuyo,
toma el mío” [“Give Me Yours and Take Mine”], originally published in

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Etiqueta Negra, Wiener tells how she and her husband joined the practice
of swinging in Barcelona:

Tonight we follow an inter-generational, multi-racial and multi-orgasmic

promise. Unlike other clubs like “Limousine,” which is full of wealthy,
over-the-hill people in their sixties, “6&9” is popular for its openness to
host middle-class youth—whom I can’t see anywhere yet. In a survey the
club had been ranked as “hygienic,” a grade I had initially ignored due to
my belief that sex is dirty only if it’s done right, but this attribute ended
up being a plus for “6&9” when we decided to come.

On touring the club, Wiener writes:

If you do not want to hook up with someone, you just touch their
shoulder.
This is the password at “6&9.” Each club encourages customers to
convey their limits to others in a delicate manner.
“And what is this room?” I ask.
It’s the room for orgies. Here, anything goes.
I don’t rub my hands, I don’t gulp. I just glance at J with a question
mark on my face. This is just the beginning. (Agudelo 2012: 453–63)

The reporting places the narrator so deeply into the action that the focus
of the piece becomes not the swinging scene anymore, but Wiener’s and her
husband’s own transformation.
In “Trans: A Love Story,” the transformation is palpably corporeal
(incidentally, bodily transformations are at the core of this piece). As Wiener
reports on two transsexual lovers in Paris right after giving birth, changes
in the bodies (hers, and her subjects’) are a constant presence in the story.

I’ve arrived in Paris this morning on a direct flight from Barcelona, with
my cell phone dead and my breasts full of milk. In order to come here I’ve
left my three-month-old baby behind, but my breasts don’t seem to have
figured this out; they continue their unstoppable production of food and
from one moment to the next I fear they’ll burst. (Wiener 2007: 84–105)

Wiener’s physical transformation and the transformation of her point of

view (in this text from woman to breeder, and from reporter to mother)
work in parallel with the transformation of her main characters, who also
have to adapt to a new body and a new way of being perceived by society.

“Hey, you’re not a man, are you?”

Amelia half-opened her eyes.
“You’re not a woman, either. So let me sleep.”

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Melvin embraced her and they slept.

But in the days that followed, neither of them knew what to do with
the relationship. There was no room in Amelia’s head for the possibility of
being with a man; she was a lesbian. And butch. And a virgin. Nothing fit.
For Melvin, it was almost as complicated. He considered himself
a feminine person, but he’d always liked the role of protector. At the
end of the day, he was a man. And his male hormones urged him to act
like Amelia’s husband. He’d go looking for her on the street corners of
Lima’s rougher neighborhoods, where she often gathered with her friends
to drink. He went there to fight with all the men who disrespected her.
(Wiener 2007: 84–105)

Another passage can further illustrate these transformations:

I have a headache, and possibly a fever. I need to go to the bathroom

and use my breast pump immediately, or I run the risk of infection. Over
Vanesa’s bathtub I extract several cubic centimeters of milk with my
hands, because the breast pump isn’t cooperating. Nature can be very
cruel. Right now I feel as though I’d give it all up for silicone tits, to get rid
of my troublesome feminine condition. Vanesa, meanwhile, is changing
her shirt. Her almost-perfect tits are in full view, and I can’t help making
comparisons. Curiosity is killing me and I ask whether I can touch them.
“Of course!”
“I don’t feel anything strange … ”
“They’re normal, see? They can even press together.”
“There’s something sort of hard in the back but they’re quite soft, they
seem natural … ”
“Yes, I was lucky.”
“They never grow old. They’re better than the real ones … ”
“Normally they sag.”
“Oh, so they sag, too … ”
“I’ve got a friend who looks like she’s had five puppies and six kittens
and four little pigs. But mine don’t sag, I don’t know why.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing. They say they can break, but I’ve been in fistfights, and
nothing.”
Vanesa’s medical procedures are numerous: nose, saline serum
prosthesis in her breasts, and many hormones. She once injected silicone
into her own hips because the operation was so expensive. She bought
needles at the pharmacy and locked herself into a hotel room. She filled
each hole in her masculine body with that greasy liquid and a feminine
curvature instantly appeared. The tits, on the other hand, were operated
on by a Peruvian surgeon for twelve hundred American dollars. (Wiener
2007: 84–105)

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The natural transformations that follow the pregnancy, and the artificial
ones that are the products of surgery, mark the bodies in the story (and
the minds connected to them) as narrative vortexes. But the place in which
this transformation peaks narratively is Nueve Lunas. Viaje alucinado a la
maternidad [Nine Moons. A Hallucinated Trip to Motherhood], a book that
Wiener wrote when she and her husband got pregnant for the first time. The
title refers both to the gestational period for humans in lunar cycles, and
to a porn website which features pregnant women, a site to which Wiener
sent (or didn’t, the account in the book is ambiguous) some of her own
pregnancy photographs. Many of the descriptions in the book refer to drugs
and hallucinatory trips:

Pregnancy manuals must have been written by mothers completely

narcotized by the love for their children, without an ounce of critical
distance. All of them say: you will feel a little nauseated in the morning,
your breasts will become tender and sore, you will feel sleepy, and a
constant need to pee. And, of course, “do not smoke, do not drink coffee
or Coca-Cola, don’t take drugs, stay away from the x-rays.” How the
hell can you cope with the stress without at least one can of Coca-Cola?
How is it possible that, so far, nobody has synthesized a designer drug for
pregnant women? Pre-natal ecstasy, LSD for the parturient, or something
like that. (Wiener 2009: 13–14)

It is precisely in this book that Wiener personally claims her heritage as a

Gonzo reporter:

Soon after arriving in Barcelona I was booked by Primera Línea, a

magazine that during the eighties had been one of the artifacts of cultural
disinhibition and one that was soon riding the new wave of the times.
In sum: it was pioneering in publishing tits on the cover. My boss,
Guillermo Hernaiz, is the only authentic hedonist I have ever known.
Guillermo organizes fetish parties, spins at trendy clubs, and always has
an outlandish assignment for me. I’m his favorite Gonzo reporter, his
kamikaze, as he likes to call me. Under Ada Franela, my pseudonym, I’ve
bylined the most sensationalistic stories of each issue. For one of those,
I allowed a bloodthirsty dominatrix to flagellate me in front of a full
auditorium, before becoming her apprentice. Due to pieces like that, I
was interviewed on radio and TV shows. A couple of stories for PL could
pay as much as Lateral paid for a month’s worth of work. Writing about
sex had become profitable. But around the time when I discovered I was
pregnant, I was finishing a book.
It had started as a journalistic investigation, which had turned into
a Gonzo crónica in the process, and in the end it wasn’t more than a
testimony with some erotic novel flavoring that was destined to fail …

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The latest assignment for Primera Línea was a story titled “Quieres hacer
el amor conmigo?” [“Do You Want to Make Love with Me?”]. For the
story I was supposed to ask any guy who passed me on the street to make
love to me and annotate their reaction. I planted myself by the toilets of
Fellini’s discotheque at midnight to offer myself to any man who walked
by. A good deal of them answered that they didn’t usually go to bed on
their first date. When I got back home, I wrote that today’s men had to
be treated with flowers and chocolates. I was a month pregnant. (Wiener
2009: 22–3)4

Putting her pregnant body on the line is multiplying times two the bodily
exposure of Gonzo.
Wiener’s adoption of Gonzo is also an embrace of a perspective shift: an
inversion of the traditional points of view in which men are men and women
are women. In her texts, there are no men or women, but humans in constant
transition and change. The shift also reaches the reporter’s stance, which
also becomes fluid and non-defined. But there’s an element that appears
very clearly in this book which many of Wiener’s readers and reviewers have
failed to see, and that is the dominant force that Wiener’s body exerts on
her narrative subjects, particularly the masculine ones. Unlike the original
Gonzo narratives of Thompson, Wiener’s text creates a universe that orbits
around and permeates her narrated female body, putting it at the center but
also in constant osmosis and exchange with the narrative world she creates.
The Gonzo body in Wiener’s texts is not only the object of the external
influences of the environment, drugs, or the story (which it will, in turn,
affect). The female body of the narrator is itself a generator, a producer,
of encounters, circumstances, mind–body altering substances, and even
other human beings. But the idea of naming this type of female journalism
Gonzo (and Wiener herself said that her pregnancy was the “most Gonzo
experience in her whole life”) also requires an explanation of the role of the
body in Latin American literary journalism.

The female body in Latin American

literary journalism

“Virginia Woolf had no children. Neither did Eva Perón. How would I
ever turn into a universal character now that I had become a regurgitating
being?” (Wiener 2009: 23).

Wiener’s reference to Eva Perón is not casual. She was among the most
powerful women of the twentieth century and was portrayed in two key

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journalistic narratives in the Latin American literary journalism canon: in

“Esa Mujer” [“That Woman”], a 1963 short story by Argentine writer and
journalist Rodolfo Walsh which is considered to be among the best short
stories written in the twentieth century in Latin America; and in Santa
Evita (1995), a novelized account of Evita’s life and death by journalist
and writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, which is one of the best-selling books of
all time with more than ten million copies sold worldwide.5

Evita (as Eva Duarte de Perón was widely known in Argentina and the
world) was a tremendously charismatic figure in politics and gender politics.
The wife of political caudillo, statesman, and Argentine president Juan Perón,
Eva was the force behind the sanction of the Argentine women’s suffrage
law of 1946—thirty-four years after men’s secret and universal suffrage
had been passed in that country. She was revered by the Argentine working
classes, whom she called the “shirtless,” and to whom she dedicated the full
attention of her charities and governmental activities. She rose from poverty
to become the most influential woman in politics of her time, and one of the
most revered political figures in the history of Latin America. But, in both
accounts, Eva becomes objectivized and desexualized to the point of being
reduced to a “body” or a “corpse.”
In the final year of her life Eva was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
Although she agreed to a potentially life-saving hysterectomy, she did so
only reluctantly and, as it turned out, too late. During her final months, as
her health deteriorated, her husband Juan Perón used Eva’s support during
the campaign for the 1951 presidential elections. Eva died shortly after
her husband’s landslide victory and, after her death, Perón had Eva’s body
embalmed. The saga of the embalmment and the subsequent kidnapping
of Eva’s body by a military commando, which is the narrative force behind
both Walsh’s “Esa Mujer” and Martinez’s Santa Evita, lays at the core
of Wiener’s quote at the top of this section. Wiener avoids becoming an
objectivized body by hypersexualizing her narratives, and by giving her
sexuality full agency, both narrative devices which are removed from Eva’s
narrative body.
To understand to what extent in Walsh’s and Martinez’s narratives Eva’s
body was deprived of its female sexuality, let’s turn to a few examples. In
his novel, Martínez excerpted full passages from embalmer Pedro Ara’s
published diary and notes. In one section the author renders the full
dialogue between Ara and Juan Perón (who calls Ara a taxidermist—an
animal embalmer—but is readily corrected by Ara himself). At the time Eva
was still alive, but in agony. Ara, however, asks Juan Perón to let him start
preparing “the body”:

“Tell me what you need and I place it at your disposal. My wife’s illness
scarcely leaves me time to do everything I have to do.”

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 THE RETURN OF GONZO THROUGH THE FEMALE BODY 217

“I need to see the body,” the doctor answered. “I fear that all of you
have called upon my services too late.”
Indignant at the carelessness with which a woman who was so
venerated in public was treated in private, Ara demanded that the torture
of the radiation therapy be suspended and gave a blend of aromatic oils
with which her body was to be anointed three times a day. No one took
his advice seriously. (Martínez 1997: 21)6

After Eva died and her body was embalmed, a military commando kidnapped
the corpse and hid it in an “undisclosed location” where it remained until
the de facto president, Pedro Aramburu (by whom Juan Perón had been
deposed in 1955), gave an order to return it. Eva’s body had grown to the
stature of a myth, thus becoming a problem for the military factions who
opposed Perón’s return to Argentina from exile. Eva’s body was both an
emblem and a saintly figure which had transcended death:

“That woman is even more dangerous dead than when she was alive. The
tyrant knew it and that’s why he left her here, so she’d make us all sick. In
any and every hovel there are photographs of her. The ignorant worship
her like a saint. They think she can come back to life any day now and
turn Argentina into a dictatorship of beggars.”
“How, if she’s only a corpse?”—the Colonel managed to ask.
The president appeared to have had enough of all the wild fantasies;
he wanted to go to bed.
“Every time a corpse enters the picture in this country, history goes
mad. Take care of that woman, Colonel.”
“I don’t quite understand, General. What do you mean, ‘take care
of’ her? Under ordinary circumstances, I’d know what to do. But that
woman is dead already.”
The vice-president gave him an icy smile:
“Make her disappear,” he said. “Finish her off. Turn her into a dead
woman like any other.” (Martínez 1997: 16)

By referring to Eva’s myth, Wiener suggests that, in order for her female
character to become universal in the current literary canon of Latin
America, motherhood and sex have to be extirpated from the female body
of her narrator. Her stance as a Gonzo writer, however, defies that notion
by modeling a character who enacts and hyperbolizes all the traits of a
sexualized female. And, in a daring step against the grain of the foundational
narratives she is confronting, Wiener removes from her literary body the two
central traits that the Latin American imaginary has established as central
for its females: asexuality and holiness.
Wiener has read that Eva’s body was manipulated in life and death, her
female traits ablated literally (all her reproductive organs removed due to

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 218 FEAR AND LOATHING WORLDWIDE

her cancer) and narratively. Eva, described by both Walsh and Martínez
as an asexual being, was then canonized, and turned into a virgin saint.
From these narrative operations stem her “powers” over the masses, powers
which ultimately belonged to the men who “possessed” her body, and
could manipulate it: Perón, the embalmer, the Colonel, but also Walsh and
Martínez as the male writers and “owners” of Eva’s literary body.
Gonzo offers Wiener the tools to reclaim her female body—as an
instrument for reporting, as a constituent of her female subjectivity, and as
the central element of a literary corpus that breaks with the narrative canon
of Latin American literary journalism most clearly expressed by Walsh and
Martínez. The hypersexualization of Wiener’s narrator, along with the topics
of her crónicas and books, are not only valuable instruments for herself, but
also for a new generation of writers and readers who are becoming aware of
the limits and entrapments present in Latin America’s most canonical texts.

Conclusions: agency, baroque, and

the female body
Agency, power, and authority (both moral and legal) over one’s own body,
comprise one of the main prerequisites of any Gonzo narrative. But that idea
of female ownership and authority over her own body is still problematic in
many parts of the world, and especially in Latin America, which is precisely
why Wiener’s approach to Gonzo is so relevant as a social critique, as well
as a self-satire, and so profoundly unsettling still.
On April 7, 2013, the Peruvian newspaper Correo published a column
by writer Raúl Maguiña which described Wiener as the “Peruvian blogger
of pornography” and attempted to dismiss Wiener’s work by judging her
looks: “According to her readers’ opinion, unfortunately Gabriela is not
physically attractive. She doesn’t own an exuberant body, but that doesn’t
prevent her from knowing her subject, and a ‘sexual encounter’ with
her could surely be worthwhile” (Correo 2013).7 The column is just one
example of how resilient Wiener’s narratives needed to be when facing the
undercurrents and shortcomings of gender bias in the Latin American press,
media, and literary landscape. By appropriating Gonzo, Wiener doesn’t just
problematize the tenets of a style; she also reaffirms the equality between
genders in the journalistic profession in Latin America, ultimately proposing
an alternative cultural narrative that makes the female (body, sexuality and
all) a full protagonist.
If the tenets of narrative journalism in Latin America consolidated around
the Cartesian perspectivalism paradigm of observation, it is thanks to
Gonzo that these narratives can now separate themselves from the neutral,
masculine eye, and enter the more ambiguous territory of the Baroque. “The

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 THE RETURN OF GONZO THROUGH THE FEMALE BODY 219

moment of erotic projection in vision—what St. Augustine had anxiously

condemned as ‘ocular desire’—was lost as the bodies of the painter and
viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute
eye,” Martin Jay says in his 1988 essay (1988: 8). By bringing Gonzo into
the picture, Wiener not only incorporates sexuality, desire, and a powerful
female body into the canon of Latin American literary journalism; she helps
that same canon bring the body back—again Jay’s words—“to dethrone the
disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian spectator” (Jay 1988: 18).

Notes
1 Until Wiener there was no journalist in the Spanish language who had even
discussed the term Gonzo. Thompson gained popularity in Latin America with
Terry Gilliam’s 1998 rendition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s not
surprising that the term Gonzo was kept hidden for even longer. Felipe Pena, the
Brazilian journalist who started the website “Gonzo Na Cara” (which is now
down), started publishing books in 2008. His “Gonzo” piece O marido perfeito
mora ao lado [The Perfect Husband Lives Next Door] is from 2010. Wiener
predates him, and her claim to Gonzo is also prior to Pena’s.
2 In Gibney 2001.
3 Translation from Spanish for this and all other texts unavailable in English is
mine.
4 I’ve discussed the notion of crónica in several places: Calvi 2010, 2012.
5 I’ve discussed elsewhere (Calvi 2010) why the fictionalization of real events is
key to understanding the operations of literary journalism in Latin America
under totalitarian regimes. The two fictions mentioned here (but Walsh’s in
particular) are key examples of this dynamic.
6 Emphasis is mine.
7 The article has since been removed from the pages of Correo and the newspaper
issued an apology to Wiener.

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