The poetic excess of Susana Thénon’s Ova completa

Abstract

In her last collection of poetry, Ova completa (1987), Susana Thénon (Buenos Aires, 1935–91) proclaims a female subjectivity from within a system designed to regulate it, and writes into being a gendered subjecthood of excess, a subjecthood that pushes against and beyond the containing frameworks of colonial, religious, and patriarchal discourse. Drawing on the work of decolonial theorists such as Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, this essay analyses the ways in which Thénon uses language and sardonic humour in Ova completa to interrupt and crack “the modern/colonial/capitalist/heteropatriarchal matrices of power.” Calling into question the legitimacy of often invisible structures in the late-twentieth-century colonized Americas, Ova completa elaborates a new feminist poetics of counternarrative, one which draws on a multitude of voices to launch a witty, sharply pointed critique of colonialism, religion, heteronormative patriarchy, and language itself.