Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by Elizabeth M. Ginway

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by Elizabeth M. Ginway Kathryn Houston Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. By Elizabeth M. Ginway, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020, p. 247, $34.95. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway reads speculative fiction from Mexico and Brazil in relation to relevant sociohistorical, political, and economic contexts of these two highly industrialized Latin American countries. In a reading of a host of notable speculative texts, the analysis spans over a century, from the late 1800s up to the present day. Ginway breathes new life into the theme of the body in literature by attending to the treatment of speculative bodies (cyborgs, zombies, vampires, etc.) in non-realist modes such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The introduction sets out to distinguish between Anglo and Hispanic speculative fiction and outlines how the body signifies in Mexican and Brazilian letters. First, she describes how gender and sexuality will be analyzed throughout the monograph, positioning that nontraditional sexualities stand as a "state between or beyond the genders" (2). She then reads the fictional body as metaphor for the nation-state in political and industrial flux, with zombies and vampires "embody[ing] the paradox of a present haunted by an embodied past" (2). The book opens with a chapter on "Gendered Cyborgs", which introduces Bolívar Echeverría's "baroque ethos"—a concept that acts as a theoretical tenet throughout the monograph—to explain how speculative fictions resist capitalism while still being a product of it. Ginway identifies different corporeal and mechanical representations of the female body and female cyborg, exploring the Latin American posthuman and "new ways of imagining the body politic" (69). Chapter Two, "The Baroque Ethos, Antropofagia, and Queer Sexualities," then broaches a century's worth of speculative fiction, analyzing noncanonical texts from both Mexico and Brazil. She engages with Echeverría's theory of codigofagia—survival strategies from the colonial period that "reformulated social and cultural hierarchies" (71)—which builds upon a reworking of the concept of antropofagia—the repurposing of "culture and tools of the colonizer in order to produce original art and expression" (13). Through these two concepts, Ginway argues that baroque and non-linear representations of queer bodies in works of speculative fiction re-imagine forms of gender that "craft new tales of nation and community" (106), thus resisting traditional divisions of gender, race, and sexuality. Shifting from machine and queer bodies to the undead, Chapter Three analyzes zombies as the "embodiment of fear and trauma," in imagined apocalyptic scenarios of the 21st century which "presage economic, political, or social chaos" (107). She returns to the "baroque ethos" to explain the virality of capitalism and how it infects both dominant and subaltern classes, applying Roberto Esposito's theories of immunity and the body [End Page 364] politic. In Chapter Four, Ginway contextualizes the history of vampire narratives, the genres of the gothic and the monstrous, and the figure of the vampire in the literature of Mexico and Brazil. She describes the defensive or immunological response towards foreign invaders in vampire literature, accounts for the challenges towards a patriarchal order, and identifies a new vampire figure who re-configures communities to "reverse colonization and resistance" (154). A point of contention may arise from the way in which queer bodies are positioned on par with "cyborgs" and "zombified and vampire bodies" (167). The latter mythical bodies are powerful metaphors for temporal and social periods of change, yet locating the queer body next to those of monsters and machines might be misunderstood as a conflation of these real and metaphorical bodies. Perhaps analogously, the topic of sexuality as it relates to gender studies is well developed, but the inclusion of more queer theory would have complemented Ginway's thorough and insightful readings of the body in Mexican and Brazilian speculative fiction. Finally, despite the care with which theoretical terms are explained, the text does not provide a clear definition of speculative fiction. Although Ginway initially defines speculative fiction as a more general category than science fiction, which "includes fantasy and horror" (1), any further...