This session was inspired by the need to study the magical realism literary mode in women’s writing and in the increasing reputation of what is called “The New Latino Boom” (Naida Saavedra), which has a notable group of women writers at the forefront. Nonetheless, despite the apparent novelty, there have been several attempts to renovate Latin American fiction, such as the McOndo and Crack literary groups that rejected the exoticism and formulaic style associated with magical realism in the nineties (Carbajal, Shaw). Instead of a replacement of magical realism or its claim as a yet hegemonic tendency that marginalizes others (Ordiz, Ajuria), we support a more dynamic assessment of fluid juxtapositions between the gothic, magic realism, and the fantastic (Ajuria). We assert that the work we study and their engagement with the magic build a critical language for violence illuminating new meanings for Latin American women’s writing.

This session responds to the endeavors in our field to trace conversations on gender and genre related to magical realism’s influence on cultural history. Considering scholars such as Lois Parkinson Zamora, Ignacio López-Calvo, and Josefina Ludmer, we address how feminism, historical trauma, and the gothic dislocate an oversimplified vision of magical realism, how their reflections on anti-coloniality and political and historical issues still underline the power of fiction aesthetics, and how the merge of the unreal and the factual underscores a present full of transhistorical pending debts.

We propose three formal presentations of 15 minutes each, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. First Azar’s paper “Mobilizing Affect: Performances of Care and Sadism in Rosario Ferre’s ‘The Youngest Doll” analyzes Ferré’s magical realism through a feminist framework, particularly her use of bodily horror. It argues that Ferré narrativization of bodily vulnerability and gendered violence locates the author within a genealogy of Latin American women writers who have employed elements of magical realism to decry gendered violence. The study builds upon the idea of “the vulnerability artist” (José Muñoz) and notions of sadism and power (Amber Musser) to study how affect circulates through performances of care and sadism. Azar's paper traces a genealogy within magical realism, of feminist interventions that opened the magical and utopian through everyday sites of violence and vulnerability. Second, Tabutol’s paper, “Motley Maps of Death’: Geographical Location and Trauma of the Gothic Mode in Latin American Literature,” grounds in trauma studies and the concept of “layered colonization” (Patricia Stuelke) to compare Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez to examine the persistence of generational trauma and exploitation of women and indigenous people. The paper states that the magical realism style glosses over an undercurrent of generational and group trauma, intersecting into one location and intentionally burying one atop the other, showing that time has not erased the traumatic experiences. Finally, drawing on the poetics of Gothic (Anne Williams) and the concepts of the “ideological state-apparatuses” and “ideological subjection” (Louis Althusser), Barja’s paper “The Oblation of Ideology: Bloodlines, Violence, and the Magic in Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez” explores how motifs such as terror, family decay, and lineage curse intertwine the Argentinian dictatorship’s crimes, capitalist exploitation, and violent worshiping practices while inquiring how effective is to revisit historical trauma through the gothic form. Her paper proposes that Our Share of Night examines complex ideological systems of violence to uncover the shared complicity of knowledge, cruelty, capital accumulation, and neocolonial power.