Biopower, Body Commodification, and Defiance of Neoliberal Logic in Impuesto a la Carne by Diamela Eltit / Biopoder, mercantilización del cuerpo y desafío a la lógica neoliberal en Impuesto a la carne de Damiela Eltit

This article analyses the novel Impuesto a la carne (2010) by Diamela Eltit and favors a reading that focuses on the past forty years of Chile?s history. Drawing on recent biopolitical concepts by Foucault and Agamben, this article demonstrates how the hospital setting in Eltit?s novel allows her to embody neoliberalism and account for the usually invisible bodily experiences of racialized and gendered patients/citizens, while simultaneously showing that the neoliberal model, in its quest for continuous expansion, is now colonizing the inner spaces of the corporeal body. This article also briefly shows that through her writing of the maternal body, Eltit highlights its potential for resistance and for meaningful connections to other human beings. Her novel thus calls for the emergence of a renewed type of activism that brings together marginalized communities to denounce the embodied nature of social injustice created and reinforced through neoliberalism and to potentially attain the social equality that democracy was supposed to deliver.Este artículo propone un análisis de la novela Impuesto a la carne (2010) de Diamela Eltit. Basándose en parte en conceptos de biopoder propuestos por Foucault, se demuestra cómo el marco del hospital donde el sufrimiento extremo y el abuso prolongado infligido sobre los cuerpos posiblemente indígenas de la narradora y su madre, le permite a Eltit remitir a la versión silenciada de la historia de Chile y especialmente a su reciente pasado totalitario. Eltit expone cómo el modelo neoliberal vigente es dependiente de los cuerpos humanos para funcionar, y denuncia algunos de los procesos usados por el estado-mercado para excluir, explotar y beneficiarse de lo que considera cuerpos marginados. Este artículo revela también cómo, en su escritura, Eltit recalca el poder de resistencia del cuerpo materno y su potencial para crear conexiones significativas entre seres humanos. En este sentido, la novela anuncia la emergencia de un tipo renovado de activismo que une a las comunidades marginalizadas para denunciar la naturaleza corporalizada de las injusticias sociales creadas y reinforzadas por el sistema neoliberal.

Flora Tristan’s Plural Identities in Peregrinaciones de una paria : Challenging and Reproducing Existing Power Structures

This article analyses the ways in which Franco-Peruvian author Flora Tristan crosses the border of her plural identities in her famous travel book Peregrinaciones de una paria (1837). It especially looks at how she performs as a male in certain situations and how these are generally associated with her French identity. It also considers her identification as a woman and how it is linked to her Peruvian identity. These examinations reveal how Tristan actually redefines herself as a pariah and how her definition differs from that of outcast imposed on her in France prior to her departure for Peru

The corporeality of trauma, memory, and resistance : writing the body in contemporary fiction from Chile and Argentina

textThis dissertation looks at the representation and impact of gendered violence in the novel Pasos bajo el agua (1986) and in the short stories in Ofrenda de propia piel (2004) by Argentine author and former political prisoner Alicia Kozameh (b. 1953), as well as in Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne (2010), two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). By examining the particular expressions of physical and psychological pain in the aforementioned texts, I demonstrate that Kozameh and Eltit write the female body to simultaneously represent a corporeality that, until recently, has rarely been expressed in literature, and reconstruct a body that has been traumatized by state-sponsored violence and by what could be considered economic violence. Both of them denounce violence, torture, disappearances, exile, and indifference to justice as painful events that not only damage the spirits of the victims, but that are also inscribed upon the physical body. I also show how each author addresses the overlapping of individual and collective traumatic memories and how these are felt in the body as well. Finally, I argue that writing the materiality of the lived body, from its vulnerability to its resilience, provides for Kozameh and Eltit valuable insight into the ways in which female bodies are able to resist and reassess the meaning imposed on them by legally-endorsed and non-official systems of oppression. Their work thus has direct viii social relevance that goes beyond feminism's countering of male dominance and women's rights. Yet, I also show that they manifest their feminist commitment by using the voice and body of female subjects to incorporate marginalized Chilean and Argentine bodies into the linguistic realm in order to provide a fuller understanding of female corporeality in Latin America.Spanish and Portugues

Gendered Violence and Corporeal Memories in Post-Dictatorship Narrative from Chile and Argentina

State terrorism during the military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-1983) and in Chile (1973-1990) dehumanized both men and women through torture and other human rights violations, yet it implicated bodies in gender-specific ways. In this presentation, I look at the representation and impact of gendered violence on the female body in post-dictatorship literature by Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit and Argentine author Alicia Kozameh. I show that their narratives provide creative and valuable insight into the ways in which female bodies and subjectivities are able to resist and complicate the meaning imposed on them by the military state. My analysis of Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) demonstrates that the narrator’s female aging body is in fact narrating the silenced version of a painful past in which she physically experienced the horror of a brutal dictatorship. Similarly, in her collection of short stories Ofrenda de propia piel (2004), Kozameh places the materiality of the insubordinate body at the core of her texts to expose past oppression, document physical acts of resistance, and testify to the challenges of surviving traumatic experiences. Kozameh and Eltit each denounce state terrorism and illustrate how its many consequences are inscribed on the physical body and thus impact women’s experience and creativity. For the above-mentioned authors, writing the female body therefore has direct social and moral relevance that goes beyond the specificity of women’s rights

Plural Identities and Contradictory Cultural Discourses in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria

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