Abstract
Women in Latin America inhabit the margins of society. Latin American literature reflects the consequences of marginalization, expresses trauma, and shows the different scars that society has incorporated into its narrative of identity. These novels talk about violence and rape, silence and fear, and the way that society overcomes social problems. In this process, we can see, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the gendered reconstruction of the body image. Contemporary literature shows how the boundary of the body is stretching in the dyad between male and female. On the one hand, “extreme masculinity” frames violence as part of normal behavior (Franco, Cruel Modernity, Duke University Press, 2013, 15). On the other, extreme female-body construction entails exaggeration of form and hyper-sexuality in line with the aesthetic of television models and narco values.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of liminality —etymologically traced from the Latin word līmen, meaning threshold—has been used in multifarious areas of knowledge. One example of liminality is the passage between rituals expressed by the ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep and the anthropologist Victor Turner; for these researchers, the liminal state refers to the moment when participants no longer hold their preritual status but have not yet acquired a new status. In postmodern theory, Gianni Vattimo proposed a concept of liminal space. In feminist theory, the liminal has been framed as the inseparability of a pregnant woman, who is one person though simultaneously on the cusp of being two people: the limit between I and Other becomes a fundamental relationship in Luce Irigaray or Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger’s concept of “matrixial borderspace.” The idea of the liminal has also been used in the socio-political apparatus, per Michel Foucault’s analysis in Madness and Civilization. Homi Bhabha expands on this argument, positing the third space of enunciation from the perspective of postcolonial theory. In literary criticism, Yuri Lotman considers the limit between center and periphery, namely spatial limit’s importance as a way of creatively transforming culture. More recently, Hein Viljoen, in Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature (2007) uses liminality in regards to isolation, with humans viewed as living between imperial and nationalist discourses.
- 2.
See, for instance, the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [Le Deuxième Sexe] (1949).
- 3.
In the words of Jean Franco : “The terms “feminicide” and “femicide” are both used, and different definitions are given. Johanna Ikonen of the Human Rights Unit of the European Parliament defines “feminicide” as the killing of woman and girls with brutality. In a discussion of the terms, Rosa Linda Fregosoand Cynthia Bejarano write that “femicide” has been defined as “the murder of women and girls” because they are female,” whereas they define “feminicide” as “the murders of women and girls founded on the gender power structure; it is both public and private, both systematic and a crime against humanity” (Franco 2013, 92).
- 4.
In “Apuntes sobre la crítica feminista y la literatura hispanoamericana,” Franco writes: “Gender, therefore, is not an essential limit but an imagined one. Derrida’s deconstruction implies an examination of the institutions that strongly support the aforementioned hierarchies, such as genders—an examination that the American disciples of the French critic have not furthered. This underscores the need for a feminist theory that studies genders of discourse , the relationship between genders of discourse and hegemonic institutions, and delves into the study of the resources used to establish textual authority, as in the case of evaluative terms, for example, ‘mastery of language’ or ‘professionalization of writing,’ etc.” (my translation; 33).
- 5.
To differentiate among classes of homicides, experts have defined femicide or feminicide as including (though not limited to) intimate-partner femicide, serial femicide, and lesbicide.
- 6.
For more on this, see Beatriz L. Botero’s “El Yo ideal y el Ideal del yo en Cobro de Sangre de Mario Mendoza.”
- 7.
For more on this, see Beatriz L. Botero’s “La increíble historia de Memoria de mis putas tristes y de Mustio Collado el abuelo desalmado.”
- 8.
For more information, see Armando Silva’s Imaginarios Urbanos.
- 9.
- 10.
From there came the concept of malinchismo , a pejorative adjective that applies to those who prefer a lifestyle different from their local culture and are more influenced by foreign culture.
- 11.
In Pedro Páramo (1955).
- 12.
“In Colombia, more than 350,000 plastic surgeries are performed each year; that is, 978 procedures a day, forty an hour and three procedures every five minute … Plastic surgery is one of the most profitable branches of medical services in the country … The demand for cosmetic procedures responds to a massive need, fed by the hyper-sexism of the Colombian society which limits the professional and personal opportunities for women. Often, ‘being pretty’ is the only way forward for a Colombian woman” (Ruiz-Navarro).
- 13.
Santa Teresa, it must be pointed out, is none other than Ciudad Juárez.
- 14.
Other such spaces include hospitals, funeral parlors, or any place where we avoid spending more time than absolutely necessary on account of mixed feelings, anxiety, and the irreducible power of sensing destiny’s hand. Liminal spaces go hand in hand with transformations (internal, external, or even both).
- 15.
Freud’s fascination with Greek mythology is well documented. He derived some of the most important terms from the Greeks. Case in point: Empedocles mentions two basic human forces. On one hand, Eros is one of the primordial gods, the god of Love, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, lust, beauty and reproduction. On the other, Thanatos is the god of Death. In psychoanalysis, Eros is not only the drive responsible for sexuality, union, and sexual relations. Eros encompasses much more: Eros is responsible for creativity and construction, and it is constantly at work when the subject places interest in growing and projecting him or herself onto life. Thanatos , too, is always in the subject who always operates under the tension of these two forces. Freud relies on the life drive (Eros ), with its libidinal energy, and the Death drive, with its Thanatic energy, to explain the ego’s reactions to this tension. In both the Spanish edition of the Biblioteca Nueva and the English edition of Strachey (editor of Freud’s complete works), the life instinct and death instinct are used to refer to Eros and Thanatos , respectively. In this book, we opt for the concept of drive instead of instinct.
- 16.
In the Cuban novel Cecilia Valdés , the female character urgently needs to erase the violence linked with slavery and its related corporeal punishment. For more on this see: Schulenburg, Chris T. “‘Cecilia Valdés’: The Search for a Cuban Discursive Control.”
- 17.
For more on this subject, see Miss Representation (2011), a documentary produced and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Siebel Newsom’s project arose from concern for her children, who were growing up in a culture that values men more than women; it explores how television, advertising, models, and movies affect young people and their self-image.
- 18.
For more on this, see Gustavo Bolivar’s Sin tetas no hay paraíso. The novel’s opening line is: “Catalina never imagined that the prosperity and happiness of the girls of her generation would be a function of bra size” (my translation; 1).
- 19.
For more on language as part of identity, see Nancy Bird-Soto’s “The Playful ‘i’ in Tato Laviera’s Poetry: An ‘Arte Poética.’”
- 20.
For more information, see Paula Amad’s “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies.”
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Botero, B.L. (2018). Introduction: Liminal Females in Contemporary Latin-American Novels. In: Botero, B. (eds) Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0_1
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