The Physical and Textual Bodies in the Works of Ángeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska

Abstract

In this paper I will examine two Mexican women writers, Ángeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska, whose works offer a radical revisionist history of the Mexican Revolution (1910) and its aftermath and are representative of the New Latin American Feminist fiction which questions dominant ideologies and seeks to redress the gender imbalance. My treatment of 'physical' reality leads to a consideration of the 'body' of the text, highlighting the links and parallels between these literal and metaphorical bodies. There are obsessive references to the body, sexuality and masturbation throughout Mastretta's and Poniatowska's texts which serve as a powerful metaphor for the re-mapping and rediscovery of female bodies and sexual identity. The (text)ure of the skin features prominently: the skin of the body can be associated with the skin of the text. The link between these two can be made through reference to Barthes' analogy of the text as corporeal tissue where the 'text is made, worked out in a perpetual interweaving'. Textual fragmentation as a metaphor for the female body/self in the texts of Mastretta, and more so Poniatowsk, produces what Barthes calls an 'erotics of reading'. Mastretta and Poniatowsk both offer an alternative vision of women, whose bodies elude knowledge and control, and a textual body whose proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis.