Bodies becoming pain: unusual strategies of dissent in some transnational latin-american women writers

Abstract

espanolEste articulo interpreta el modo en el que escritoras transnacionales usan lo monstruoso y lo ominoso para investigar el concepto del espacio domestico con disension. Un grupo importante de criaturas inusuales en la narrativa contemporanea latinoamericana «repta fuera de su piel» (Himani Bannerji). Este ensayo intenta analizar esas narrativas especulativas que llamaremos hemisfericas y que muestran semejanzas de norte a sur del continente americano, por diferentes razones politicas y traumaticas, especialmente en su expresion cinematica frente al horror en el espacio domestico, en las memorias infantiles, y en las barreras fisicas y psicologicas que nos encadenan a la memoria de nuestros antepasados. Trataremos de examinar algunas de las variantes de metamorfosis subversivas del cuerpo femenino en obras de Cecilia Eudave, Socorro Venegas, Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Flor del Campo, Agustina Bazterrica o Maria Fernanda Ampuero. Sus obras podrian leerse como estrategias poeticas y politicas que innovan dentro del genero de la ficcion especulativa. EnglishThis paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use monstrosity and the uncanny to investigate the concept of the HomeSpace with dissent. An important group of unusual creatures in the contemporary fiction of Latin American women authors seem to «crawl out of their skins» (Himani Bannerji). This essay tries to analyse these speculative narratives which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance from the north to the south of the continent, for different political and traumatic reasons, focusing especially on their cinematic deployment of the HomeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories. We will try to examine a range of subversive metamorphoses of the female body in recent speculative fiction by Cecilia Eudave, Socorro Venegas, Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Florencia del Campo, Agustina Bazterrica or Maria Fernanda Ampuero. These writings could be read as poetical and political strategies of dissent that innovate within the genre of speculative fiction.