Bodies Becoming Pain: Unusual Strategies of Dissent in Some Transnational Latin-American Women Writers

This paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use monstrosity and theuncanny to investigate the concept of the HomeSpace with dissent. An important groupof unusual creatures in the contemporary fiction of Latin American women authorsseem to «crawl out of their skins» (Himani Bannerji). This essay tries to analyse thesespeculative narratives which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblancefrom the north to the south of the continent, for different political and traumaticreasons, focusing especially on their cinematic deployment of the HomeSpace horror,childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to ourancestors’ memories. We will try to examine a range of subversive metamorphoses ofthe female body in recent speculative fiction by Cecilia Eudave, Socorro Venegas, MarianaEnríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Florencia del Campo, AgustinaBazterrica or María Fernanda Ampuero. These writings could be read as poetical andpolitical strategies of dissent that innovate within the genre of speculative fiction.