“El cuerpo de verdad”: the bodily, bodilessness, and the feminist body politic

How does one represent a real woman’s body? How does one communicate the experience of inhabiting that body? A body that sweats and bleeds and excretes and defecates. In Mexico City in 1984, poet Carmen Boullosa and artist Magali Lara attempted just that in their collaboration De la misma, la misma habitación (Of the same, the same room). Responding to a poem by Boullosa, Lara created a series of metal engravings that depict scenes of bathrooms that appear hauntingly just-evacuated: a squat toilet, its lid propped up; a roll of toilet paper, ripped askew; a still-smoking cigarette, freshly ground into an ashtray next to the sink. Lara’s images catch hold of a specific type of quotidian moment—moments of solitude and interiority, private moments of being utterly oneself. Without ever showing a body, Lara’s images illustrate moments of going about one’s business of being a body, of having a real body. My paper, drawn from a chapter of my dissertation, explores the ways in which Magali Lara’s artworks of the 1980s present a unique, affective approach to politics. Focused on the aforementioned series, my paper will examine Lara’s images in the context of the Mexican feminist movement (with which she was engaged beginning in the late 1970s) and the feminist art scene in Mexico City (with which she was and has remained deeply involved), arguing that reading such artworks as political invites broader reconsiderations of what constitutes political art and political efficacy, especially in the history of twentieth-century Mexico.