Autofagia: consumo, escritura y autodestrucción en la narrativa de escritoras latinoamericanas y caribeñas

Abstract

The representation of female subjectivity in Latin America literature reflects a tension between the patriarchal dominant discourses that has shaped the imaginary of female subjects bodies and women writers that seek to control and change those dominant textual representations. The term autophagy gives rise to a conceptual framework for analyzing the visible (bodily) and the symbolic effects of writing and representing female subjects within authoritarian contexts. In my dissertation, through the analysis of women writers figurations of hunger, consumption, body image, and the writing process, I illustrate how female authors confront and respond to the mechanisms that have historically defined and constituted feminine subjectivity. The women writers studied include Alejandra Pizarnik, Clarice Lispector and Edwidge Danticat. In my analysis of their texts, I explore the way in which these authors have relied on a linguistic self-consciousness to confront the patriarchal discursive systems and the oppressive imaginary that is, at times, internalized. In exploring the symbolic field of female subjects, I show how eating disorders as defense mechanisms are part of the symptoms that serve to expel the internalized symbolic violence that hinders and often destroys the sense of completeness in women.