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

Abstract

This 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 Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Florencia del Campo, Agustina Bazterrica or María Fernanda Ampuero. These writings could be read as poetical and political strategies of dissent that innovate within the genre of speculative fiction.

Keywords

• memory
• the unusual
• transnationalism
• dissent
• the neofantastic
• monstrosity