Review of Arts and Humanities

Outlandish Bodies in Latin American Narrative
Rut Román, PhD

Abstract
The most recent Latin American narratives feature the inadequacy of the body to its environment and vice verse. By doing so, it not only questions normalcy, but also enables a manner of resistance and flight. Through a constellation of amorphous bodies these narratives echo the traditional setbacks of the heroic figure, in perpetual conflict with its colonial past or its historical failure to meet modernity's expectations. While these distorted bodies bring into question the unique and standardized construction of national identities, they are also bizarre and strange to themselves by means of contagion and occupation. This paper reads the latest narrative of Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico); Lucia Puenzo (Argentina) and Alvaro Enrigue (Mexico). Placed in the intersection of bio politics and post humanism, they expose the rebellion of deformity that accentuates its own aberration so as to gain abject agency charged with unpredictable power.

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