Orificios, protuberancias y cuerpos desobedientes: monstruosidades abyectas en la narrativa breve de Guadalupe Nettel y Lina Meruane

About the Contributors

This study is an analysis of the role of intellectual activism in the emergence and institutionalization of women's/gender studies in Taiwan, within the context of the broader feminist project that has shaped this nascent academic field worldwide. The key motivation for doing this research was the crucial need to understand the interplay between feminist identity and action, and between action and structure. The primary issue of the study concerns the strategies of action that have been used by feminist scholars to attain the institutionalization of women's/gender studies in Taiwan's universities. I employ a microfoundational approach to explore the interplay of identity, action and structure, and to scrutinize how, and by what means, feminist scholars have created networks, formed identities, strategized action, and transmitted as well as produced feminist perspectives and knowledge. The form, scope, and degree of the institutionalization of women's/gender studies is the result of the multifaceted efforts of these people whom I call pathfinders. The emergence and growth of women's/gender studies denotes a movement involving scholars who identify with a dynamic, socially grounded feminism, and construct specific strategies of action to pursue women's/gender studies while being theoretically concerned with the interplay among identity, action and structure.

We take this opportunity to reflect on the first year of publishing LALVC , plan for the future, and thank all of the contributors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, subscribers, and other supporters. The enthusiasm for LALVC 's content, as revealed by submissions, subscriptions, mentions on

This article provides a contemporary feminist autoethnographical account of my lived experiences of reclaiming my pregnant, birthing, and maternal bodies through intimate abuse and coercive control and beyond. Drawing from contemporary and culturally diverse feminist perspectives, I unpack the over-medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and how it operates on a continuum of the systematic, institutional, cultural, and patriarchal gaze, surveillance, and control of women’s bodies. The paper will unpack the Battered Woman’s Syndrome as a problematic example of this clinical and medical patriarchal gaze and control and its prevalence in contemporary medical, psychological, and legal discourses relating to women living with intimate abuse and coercive control, and their bodies. I draw from my own personal experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering through intimate abuse and coercive control, the practice of zuò yuè zi, and the mythology of the Goddess Metis as sites of resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness that challenge the Western patriarchal gaze, surveillance, and control over women’s bodies. The paper will offer three alternative and counternarratives and ways of rethinking, reframing, and reimagining the pregnant, birthing, and maternal body as sites of resistance and resourcefulness through the ancient Greek mythology of Metis, the ancient Chinese practices of zuò yuè zi, and homebirth.

Putting a Collective Finger on the PulseThe New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers Veronica Esposito (bio) Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet's mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. OVER THE PAST DECADE or so, a new cadre of female Latin American writers has emerged in English translation. Although each is distinctive in her own right, these writers share enough overlapping themes, approaches, and styles that we might refer to it as a "school," if not a "movement." On their common ground are the misogynistic violence that pervades the lives of Latin American women; bodily autonomy, especially around access to abortion; the ongoing definition and redefinition of gender; internet culture and how it mediates identity and personhood; and brushes with the existential. These writers have responded to such themes in common ways; most notably, by embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. Their literature speaks particularly to a younger, female audience, and these authors seem to have a collective finger on the pulse of their readers' lives. Although I cannot pretend to have an exhaustive list of the writers in this group, I can name off the ones that currently stand out to me in English translation. In no particular order, they include Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Melchor, Liliana Colanzi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, Nona Fernández, and Lina Meruane. Certainly there are more currently at work in Spanish as well as others emerging in English translation. A good example of the prototypical novel of this group of writers is Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda's 2018 novel Mandíbula, published in 2022 as Jawbone in Sarah Booker's translation. It tells the story of a schoolteacher for an elite preparatory school for upper-class girls who goes mad, kidnapping one of her students and subjecting her to experiences of body horror. On one level, the book captures many of the central concerns of Latin American writers like Ojeda—body autonomy, the socialization of girls within Latin American society, mental and physical horrors perpetrated against women of the continent—yet it also communicates on levels that are detached from a Latin American context, as it speaks in languages comprehensible to young women throughout the developed world. Specifically, Ojeda speaks in the language of true crime podcasts, streaming serials, creepypastas, and the world of therapy. Regarding some of her literary influences, Ojeda told me: "I have a thing for true crime documentaries. I don't like to like them because they really hurt me, but I keep going to them. And creepypastas, of course. Not all of them, but some are so very powerful." One of the striking things about Jawbone is how it comes across as something along the lines of a true crime podcast or a creepypasta—did you ever hear the one about the teacher who went mad and tortured her own student? It converses with the media resonating with young women across the globe, giving it a currency that transcends its Ecuadoran context. Yet even as Jawbone feels very of the moment, it also connects up with deep-rooted aspects of the Latin American tradition. For instance, the book includes chapters that read as though they are transcripts from one of the main character's therapy sessions, the speakers only denoted by a Q or an A, and the questions asked by Q not included in the transcript. This tracks back to the powerful psychoanalytical writing that was a core aspect of twentieth-century Latin American literature, [End Page 18] reminiscent of Manuel Puig, in particular. In addition, the suggestion that the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is involved in the school weaves in a political aspect, staying true to the propensity for Latin American authors to let politics infuse their narratives in subtle and unexpected ways. It also brings to mind canonical Latin American writers like...

This article examines representations of Palestine through the literary, cultural and political landscapes between the Arab world and Latin America in which Palestine has figured in new ways. It examines the connections between Palestine and Latin America, focusing on Lina Meruane’s memoir Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2013), where the Chilean writer of Palestinian descent looks back at or crosses into Palestine, and the imaginative intertwinings of Bethlehem, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the poetry of Palestinian US-based writer Nathalie Handal. Drawing on growing scholarship on literary and cultural ties between Latin America and the Arab world, this article explores the role of Palestine in Latin American literature, not only as a representation of immigrant communities and a cultural heritage, but also as part of a perception of Palestine within a broader global context.

Reviewed by: Writing Aids: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature by Jodie Parys Rhi Johnson Parys, Jodie. Writing Aids: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2012. 199 pp. While the intersection of disease and literature is both a fecund and well-mined field of research, until the last decade there was a paucity of critical material dealing with the treatment and import of HIV and AIDS in Latin American literature. In 2012, two books entered this void: Lina Meruane’s Viajes virales, which gives a theoretical and historical context to the appearance [End Page 167] of the disease in society and then in literature in the 1980s; and Jodie Parys’s Writing AIDS: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature. The latter, through close readings of a number of short works, engages with literature’s power to change social perception. It does so by analyzing facets of the relationship between AIDS and literature which move from a personal level to a societal one: from violence and eroticism, to dynamics of isolation and community. Its theoretical basis is grounded in the presentation of disease as a military attack or an apocalypse, and of carriers of a disease as inherently dangerous, which are drawn from Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1988). Parys’s first chapter, “The Body as Weapon: HIV as Revenge,” examines three short stories: “Luna negra de noviembre” (1992) by Ana Solari, “El secreto de Berlín” (1988) by Ramón Griffero, and “El vuelo de la reina” (2002) by Tomás Eloy Martínez. These works are described in terms of their usage of sexually transmitted disease as the (biological) weapon used to exact revenge in two different trajectories: a jilted lover seeking reparations for emotional trauma, and a diseased protagonist taking revenge on a healthy population in an attempt to reclaim control of his body. The treatment of both the disease and the diseased in these works suggests a temporal progression that would have given the chapter a cohesive narrative, if the stories included were referenced by date or presented in chronological order, which was not the case. Additionally, Parys critiques the authors that she studies for failing to affect cultural change by resorting to “stigma-laden metaphorical language that refuses to challenge cultural stigmas” (55), and for the perpetuation of negative social perceptions through the depiction of disease as a weapon of revenge, even though that is the thematic thrust of the chapter. Departing from the previous chapter’s depictions of the negative interactions of an HIV positive protagonist and a lover, the second chapter, “Eroticism and Aids: The Confluence of Desire, Death, and Writing,” discusses works that vindicate the sexuality of similar protagonists. The two texts discussed are the poetry collection “Invitación al polvo” (1991) by Manuel Ramos Otero, and the short story “Adiós, Ten-Ying” (1993) by Andrea Blanqué. The discussion of the first of these works lauds the poet for openly expressing eroticism without focusing on the incipient doom that physical or sexual contact could incur, though it simultaneously questions the efficacy of literary representations that ignore that darkness. Through this contradiction, the poetic voice’s ownership of his sexuality, in spite of or because of the disease that he is afflicted by, is at least tentatively presented as a positive. This positivity is bolstered by the treatment of the other work in the chapter, which gives a positivist reading of a symmetrical female character. Between the second and third chapters, Parys’s focus shifts from the [End Page 168] micro to the macro, moving towards societal rather than personal relationships. The third chapter, “Isolation and Exile: AIDS and the Solitary Body” sets up isolation, either emotional or physical, as the sole outcome of the virus. In it, Parys examines “Pecados mínimos” (1981) by Ricardo Prieto, which, while it does exhibit increasing isolation on the part of the never-seen protagonist, is discussed as a revenge narrative, though a thematic connection to the first chapter is never mentioned. The chapter also treats Nelson Mallach’s short story “Elefante” (1996), which...

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...

Reviewed by: Viajes virales by Lina Meruane Mary Lusky Friedman Meruane, Lina. Viajes virales. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. 312pp. Catastrophic illness and the ways it bears upon both personal and cultural life is the emblematic theme of contemporary Chilean writer Lina Meruane (b. 1970). Her two most recent novels, Fruta podrida (2007) and Sangre en el ojo (2012), conscript in different ways her own struggle with diabetes. Now, in the elegant critical study Viajes virales, she turns to the scourge of AIDS to analyze how Spanish American writers have represented AIDS since its outbreak in Latin America in 1983. Fruta podrida, which allegorizes Chile as a diabetic teen who rebels against a coercive medical establishment, is a furiously partisan book. In it, Meruane inveighs against Chile’s sellout to a global capitalism she sees as malevolent. Although Meruane’s political views occasionally color Viajes virales, in the main she is objective in appraising the scores of AIDS-related works she surveys. Beyond bringing together this corpus of what she calls textos seropositivos, a contribution in itself, her study demonstrates how much Latin Americans’ ways of thinking about AIDS have been shaped by broader trends – neoliberalism and the consumer culture it promotes; resistance to dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the collapse of Cuban socialism during the Período Especial; and the technological revolution. Meruane finds a remarkable crossover of metaphors from ideologically fraught fields – most especially neoliberal economics and politics – into the novels, plays and autobiographical vignettes whose authors, over a period of thirty years, conceptualize the epidemic and assign it meaning. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag, she uncovers in the discourse writers use to depict the illness a complex set of cultural prejudices and beliefs. Many of these beliefs bespeak (and renegotiate) assumptions about the relationship of nation to male sexual dissidents, the group most devastated by AIDS. Meruane divides her study into two parts, the first a chronological overview of the epidemic and the second a focused look at works that exemplify [End Page 141] particular facets of AIDS texts. Although Part I, “Bitácora de un viaje seropositivo,” treats many of the same works that anchor her discussion in chapters later in the book, the two parts complement one another usefully. Among the works she examines most closely are Severo Sarduy’s Pájaros de la playa (1993), Pedro Lemebel’s Loco afán (1996), Reinaldo Arenas’s El color del verano o Nuevo jardín de las delicias (1999), and Mario Bellatin’s Salón de belleza (2000). Meruane’s title refers not just to HIV’s circulation through Latin America or to her own journey through AIDS-related texts, but more importantly to two stages in the experience of the continent’s male sexual dissidents. The first, which antedates AIDS, saw the migration of many homosexuals away from their homeland in a hopeful search for communities of sexual affinity. This flight from nation has been called by some “sexilio,” but Meruane views it as a heady, utopian impulse which, for a time, held out the promise of sexual libertarianism – globalization avant-la-lettre. Cruelly, AIDS ravaged these enclaves. It occasioned a reverse journey, the return home, in reality or in mind, of very sick victims who claimed acknowledgment as part of the nation. Even as they advocated for better medical care, writers reimagined patria as a home or clinic or hospice imprisoning the sick and hastening them toward death. Meruane identifies three distinct phases: the homosexual diaspora of the 1960s and ‘70s, the bleak period of 1983–1996 when AIDS was incurable, and the years after 1996, when a three-part cocktail of drugs turned HIV from a death sentence to a grave chronic disease. Just as writers in the first of these stages tended to associate sexual freedom with a beneficent capitalism, those who chronicled the precipitous die-off of sexual dissidents often saw AIDS, which arrived from First World centers like New York, Paris and San Francisco, as “el perfecto reflejo de una penetración poscolonial … en territories abiertos y vírgenes” (67). For many, the virus proved a convenient “arma metafórica de cuestionamiento del...

A partir de la lectura de Volverse Palestina (2013) de Lina Meruane, Poste restante (2016) de Cynthia Rimsky y Destinos errantes (2016) de Andrea Jeftanovic, se propone un nuevo modelo de la crónica de viajes latinoamericana contemporánea: el viaje a la raí­z. Partimos de la hipótesis de que, al narrar el viaje al lejano y difuso origen familiar de las escritoras, los tres textos se alejan de las familias textuales hasta ahora predominantes e inauguran una nueva genealogí­a. En este sentido, el objetivo de este trabajo es describir su poética, al contrastar sus propuestas con las caracterí­sticas tradicionales del género. El resultado permite reflexionar acerca de la inmigración en América Latina desde una nueva óptica y confirma la maleabilidad de un género en constante cambio.

Over the past quarter-century, the production of memoirs on Palestine in Arabic, English, and, more recently, Spanish animated the genre. This article compares diasporic memoirs of return to Palestine: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s Ra’aytu Ramallah (1996), Arab-American author Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013), and Chilean writer Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina (2013). Examining the narrative of return genre across three languages illuminates how Arab, Arab-American, and Latin American writers of Arab ancestry contribute to the rise of new memoirs in Arabic, English, and Spanish within a global cultural production on Palestine.

This study examines the evolution from magical realism to what I term "somatic realism" in Chilean exile literature, focusing on Isabel Allende's In the Midst of Winter (2017) as a paradigmatic text that crystallises embodied approaches to representing political trauma. Drawing on somatic trauma theory, particularly the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Butler, and Cathy Caruth, alongside Latin American critical frameworks from Nelly Richard, Idelber Avelar, and Diana Taylor, this analysis demonstrates how contemporary Chilean women writers including Allende, Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane, and Nona Fernández have developed distinctive corporeal epistemologies that exceed Western psychological models of trauma. Through close textual analysis of In the Midst of Winter, I argue that Allende constructs "corporeal cartographies" that map the hemispheric circulation of state violence through migrant bodies, creating transnational somatic networks that link Southern Cone dictatorships, Central American civil wars, and contemporary forced displacement. The novel's interweaving of three traumatised characters, a Chilean exile with cancer as a somatic manifestation of dictatorship trauma, a Guatemalan migrant whose selective mutism embodies border violence, and an American academic awakening from affective numbness, reveals how political violence persists as embodied memory that transcends national boundaries while respecting bodily specificity. This article contributes to new studies on the somatic turn in Latin American literary studies, as it shows literature also to be an archive and a method for apprehending trauma as a material inscription on the flesh. The study's interdisciplinary approach, bridging literary analysis with neuroscience research on epigenetic trauma transmission and medical humanities perspectives on narrative medicine, offers new frameworks for understanding how bodies simultaneously witness, preserve, and resist political violence across generations and geographies.

British writer Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is praised as an epicist of the female experience. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Summer Before the Dark, published in 1973, is one of Lessing’s best-selling books. It has been mostly studied from the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, and narratology. This paper adopts an innovative perspective of space theory to analyze the work. Kate, the heroine of the novel, has long suffered from the patriarchal gaze. Kate resorts to a variety of spatial means to escape her original suffering. She tries to get rid of spiritual slavery through her exodus. In the journey, she discovers that only by establishing a firm self can she truly emerge from her spiritual dilemma. Lessing’s pioneering exposition of women’s experience continues in this novel. She points out that the private feelings of women are difficult to find expression in the male-dominated world. The story finally leads to the woman’s psychological liberation and reunion with her family.

Global Gender Research

This article puts light on the unmasking of Bertha’s unawake self in Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” published in 1918. Mansfield unlocks the shackled and entangled experiences of sexuality and femininity in the narration of the story. The phases of development of Bertha’s conscience are metaphorically parallel to the way the story unfolds. The setting of the story too plays a dominant role in the projection of her cocooned self. The unrecognized personality in Bertha is reflected when she comes across Miss Fulton, her acquaintance as a foil in the form of a mask prepared beneath. The contradictions and dilemmas in her mind are concretized when she confronts the typical feminine essence in Fulton which later she finds to have attracted her husband, Harry. Furthermore, several instances in the story establish the gradual realization of Bertha. Her quest for a self is her inward struggle to set herself free from the stereotypical constraints of the society she lives in. Mansfield breaks the paradigm of seeing women through the patriarchal gaze. Hence, Bertha remains the insipient sojourner who never knowingly dares to rebel or submit to the worldly customs.