Women Writing and Mexican Literature’s Expanded Domesticities

Diaz-Davalos, Angel; Diaz-Davalos, Angel

This panel will debate four women writers in Mexico whose work expands ideas of domestic dwelling by bringing to bear questions of nature and the environment, non-human agencies, and the domestication processes that take place in institutional spaces like the rural school. Each presentation in this panel will address how these writers employ narrative forms to challenge, in different ways, the idea that the domestic refers to the private and intimate space of the house, and that domesticity corresponds to the place of women in modern Mexican society. Instead, these female writers question if reproductive labor is the “natural” place of women in society, explore how disabled bodies relate to objects that turn their living spaces into posthuman assemblages, debate the disciplinary pedagogical processes taking place in governmental institutions like the rural school, and dwell on the afterlives of corporate-driven environmental catastrophes that erase local communities and their homelands. In this sense, the panel will debate the forms in which these writers defy pre-given notions of domestic dwelling and women’s relation to domesticity, offering literary narratives that explore the complex and entangled forms by which state institutions, extractivist corporations, patriarchal authorities, and non-human agencies structure daily habitation, constraining certain bodies to specific social arrangements and resistance possibilities.

Barbara Pérez Curiel analyzes Rosario Castellanos’s first novel Balún Canán (1957), focusing on how the new rural school becomes in postrevolutionary Mexico a site of domestic education that displaces both the home and the private girls’ school. In dialogue with Castellanos’s indigenista work, Pérez Curiel is interested in exploring the complex literary approach Castellanos develops to portray the rural school as a disciplinary space in which local racial and class tensions are negotiated through new and allegedly “revolutionary” models of education and habitation. Based on archival research, Azucena Garza will then present on the narrative works of writer Inés Arredondo. Garza engages with ecocriticism to explain the ambivalent ways in which Arrendondo’s short stories discuss the “natural” place of women in society, particularly in relation to reproductive labor and care work. Garza claims that, by dwelling on both the desire of her characters to liberate themselves from reproductive labor and the satisfaction they find in undertaking it, Arrendondo’s work reveals profound anxieties over the changing place of women in 1970s Mexico. Similarly exploring the notion of the “natural” in relation to the female body and its social space, Kristina Stajic explores Maria Luisa Puga’s Diario del Dolor (2004). Stajic argues that Puga presents a narrative account of dwelling under chronic pain that, by giving agency to objects, defamiliarizes the intimate spaces of the body and the home. Drawing on disability studies and new materialisms, Stajic analyzes how Puga’s narrative process renders both her body and her living space posthuman assemblages through which to re-imagine the ethical connections between the body, objects, and the external world. Finally, Angel Díaz Dávalos explores Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s conceptual narrative object La compañía (2019). Díaz Dávalos analyzes Gerber’s conceptual writing and argues that the object-book in question offers an account of how corporate extractivism produces the everyday life of a community, shaping its domestic rhythms, routines, and environments. Insofar as this corporate-driven domesticity regime gears towards ecological collapse, Díaz Dávalos argues that La compañía defies the ecocritical notion of “slow violence” as an invisible attrition, showing instead how extractivist exploitations of human and non-human environments can produce extinctions for specific communities and their environmental homelands.

Overall, this panel will debate how women writing in Mexico has produced since the 1950s experimental narrative forms that move beyond notions of domesticity that limit this concept and the political questions that surround it to the privacy of the familiar household. Instead, they offer complex accounts of how domesticity is actually negotiated in connection to larger environments, spaces, and institutions, as this panel will bring to the forefront. Each participant will present for no more than 12 minutes (up to 48 minutes total). The remaining time will be used for the presider’s brief introduction, transitions/AV contingencies, and at least 15 minutes of open discussion with the audience moderated by Professor Angel Díaz-Dávalos.

553 Women Writing and Mexican Literature’s Expanded Domesticities: Calls for Papers