This session traces the growing international recognition of Latin American women authors, whose work explores challenging themes through experimental narrative techniques. Their writings, prominent in academic and public domains, have drawn renewed attention to how literature reflects and reimagines the conditions of late capitalism, gendered violence, and ecological crises. By presenting compulsion and repulsion as two opposing yet interconnected aesthetic and bodily modes, this panel offers an innovative framework for understanding how literary production challenges the anthropocentric divide between nature and culture, along with associated binaries such as subject/object, one/multiple, inside/outside, and life/death.
Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and psychoanalysis, papers engage with ongoing discussions about the role of literature in critically addressing contemporary crises. The session intersects with recent trends in cultural criticism, such as Body Theory –Vicky Kirbi’s Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997)–, Food Studies –Sarah Sceats’ Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction (2009)–, and New Materialisms –How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction (2020), situating the Latin American case within broader transnational and interdisciplinary debates about consumption, extractivism, and power.
The panel also builds on and contributes to existing Latin American scholarship in postcolonial studies by integrating feminist theory and environmental humanities with critical discussions about literature and the arts, following recently translated prominent works such as Maristella Svampa’s Neo-extractivism in Latin America (2019), Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Dissappropriation (2020), and Gisella Heffes’ Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (2023), among others.
The panel balances focused presentations and group discussion. Each participant has agreed to deliver a 10-minute paper, resulting in approximately 40-45 minutes of presentations, including brief introductions. This structure ensures 15-20 minutes of discussion at the end, led by the session presider, who will promote audience engagement and cross-disciplinary conversation.
Together, the four papers demonstrate how compulsion and repulsion function as dynamic cultural signifiers that reframe literature as a site of political engagement. By highlighting the interplay between attraction and disgust and the acts of incorporating and expelling, they show how Latin American writers respond to and reshape the conditions of the present.
Nicolás Aguia Betancourt’s “Transhuman Desires: Violence and Metaphysics in Nefando by Mónica Ojeda” examines the novel’s depiction of extreme desire as an assault on the body, mediated through digital environments. Drawing on theories of abjection, it argues that the Ecuadorian writer constructs a transhuman (dis)utopia in which desire exceeds biological limits, revealing the destructive potential embedded within fantasies of absolute freedom.
“Exhibited, Consumed, and Sullied: Alienated Bodies in María Fernanda Ampuero’s Short Stories,” by Lucía Sánchez-Gilbert, analyzes how the Ecuadorian author constructs the body as a site of tension between production, consumption, and waste. Through the lens of body alienation and grotesque aesthetics, it explores how hypervisibility and marginalization intersect in representations of gendered and racialized violence.
In “The Mother, the Daughter, and the Unholy Spirit: Samanta Schweblin’s ‘Unruly’ Eating in ‘Pájaros en la boca,” Rebeca Oliva Peralta reads the Argentine writer’s short story as a critique of normative consumption and gendered embodiment. By mobilizing abjection and the monstrous feminine, it shows how the narrative destabilizes boundaries between human and animal, exposing the violence underlying everyday practices of consumption.
Finally, Fernando Valcheff-García’s “Mariana Enríquez and the Metamorphosis of Carne” examines two short stories by the Argentine author, exploring their contrasting yet equally transgressive depictions of necrophagic consumption (“Carne”) and surgical extirpation (“Metamorfosis”). Using close reading, the paper explores the porous limits of the (post)human body and how Enríquez reimagines it as an unstable, constantly evolving process rather than a fixed, unified entity.
The panel’s composition demonstrates a commitment to diverse perspectives across gender, institutional affiliation, and career stage. Participants include an equal number of male and female early-career scholars from four universities working across various subfields and methodological approaches. Additionally, the panel’s emphasis on women writers from the Global South aligns with our dedication to highlighting perspectives that have historically been underrepresented in literary scholarship.