About Monsters: Contemporary Literature and Feminism in Latin America

Abstract

Monsters are beings that have populated literature since the first records of the written word. Precisely because they supposedly offer a very evident counterpoint to humanity, beings that receive this nickname have served as a motto to discuss it from the most diverse parameters. In this article, we intend to explore how the narration of monstrosity in a certain contemporary Latin American literature has served as a powerful resource precisely for denouncing the constant situations of dehumanization faced by women on our continent. The monsters, or rather, the monsters, that populate fantastic texts published by Latin American authors in recent decades therefore lend themselves to readings that are quite different from those proposed by modernity. Adopting a broad corpus made up of recent short stories and novels by authors such as Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, and María Fernanda Ampuero, we intend to work with theoretical references specific to latin-american feminism and feminist criticism to point out how the uncanny, understood here as a variety of the fantastic, in contemporary literature has assumed very relevant aesthetic and political dimensions. To this end, the first part of the article revisits some of the most canonical theoretical aspects of the fantastic in literature to contextualize the production of the last two decades in this tradition. Next, excerpts from works by the aforementioned authors are analyzed from two specific aspects: the elaboration of monstrosity as a strategy to confront dehumanization and an approach to animality for this same purpose.