The Mysteries of Academic Publishing; or, on the need for interdisciplinarity

I've read the following passage, in an article entitled Performing the Political; Encapuchados in Venezuela, about three times so far. And each time I'm both more disturbed and yet, somehow, more intrigued. The article was published in the academic journal The Drama Review in 2002, by Fernando Calzadilla, at the time a doctoral candidate at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

As points of reference, Encapuchados are political protestors who perform regularly in Caracas; Calzadilla (himself a self-identified Venezuelan) focuses the article on interrogating their motives, tactics and strategies.

The children in most cases bear the mother's maiden name and their relations as siblings is maintained through the mother's side of the family, including grandmother and aunts, because in most cases the siblings are only half-siblings, each with a different father. Hence, the Venezuelan family is matri-centered. In fact, as I will show, while society is organized around the mother, the state is organized around the father. Therein lies a fundamental contradiction: the law does not recognize the authority of the mother, but inside the family, it is she who exerts authority. The loved/feared father is missing. Instead of a father, there is the mother's lover (or lovers). Having no father to love and fear, the son develops a conflicted relationship with the person in charge, the one who ultimately represents the law.

…In Venezuela, the absence of the father produces sons whose strongest inter personal relationship is mother-son. This results in the axis of social organization being emotional (feminine) rather than contractual. In Venezuela, sons remain sons and seldom grow to be fathers. Machismo, often mistaken as the hyperdisplay of patriarchal values, is in reality produced by the fissure between a matrilineal organization of the family and the patriarchal institutions of the state. The patriarchal state denies credibility and power to the mother. The mother and her family are always "illegitimate." This contradiction produces sons who are macho, in perpetual conflict with authority figures, even as they are in love with action and danger as proof of their distance from and independence from their mothers' world. It also produces a cult honoring the mother's saintliness and a desire to fight for her and be martyred in her defense. The arms of the state, the police, are the hated absent father; the nation which the Encapuchados desire to liberate and protect is comprised of the loved mothers.(119/120)

Okay, so this is what I see…

• 1.a claim that 'the nation', in Venezuela, is feminine-identified;
• 2. a localized refutation of an Anglo-American-European conception of the nuclear family, that offers what might be the basis of an interesting source of political disaffection;
• 3. what I assume is a crude reading of psychoanalytic theory (no father = problems);
• 4. an interesting theory of machismo;
• 5. a conflation of the feminine mother with the feminine nation;
• 6. a distillation of protestors as 'Male' that might be oversimplifying.

And I'm sure I'm missing some stuff. But is that the gist of the theoretical account being advanced? Because, in case this didn't come through in the list above, I'm a little skeptical – on all counts.