ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Nicaraguan prisoner not only in his narrative silences, gaps and physical identifiers of blood-stained experience, but also in his ridiculing of and fascination with the effeminate other. The muerte arriba attitude is an important aspect of the performance of masculine gender identities and meanings of the body in Nicaraguan prison. In early 2009 the Sleepless Stories were presented in the city's penitentiary, located about a thirty-minute routed bus-ride from the city centre. Seeking violent, public male-male encounters to prove one's virility or dominance over other men has frequently been ascribed to the reproduction of 'machismo', above all by feminist ethnographers studying the dynamics of domestic violence and gender inequality in the region. Prison is a place unknown to the 'normal' citizen. Once heralded as 'monuments of modernity', prisons today are imagined as dumpsters in expressions involving the rotting status of the 'garbage' that inhabits them.
