| dc.description.abstract | Magical Realism, an influential style of writing in Latin America, allows the writers that deploy it, a wide range of possibilities to transgress their political, spatial and temporal boundaries. In my dissertation, I benefit from this important insight in order to explore how the character of the prostitute serves as an axis for magical-realist narratives where issues of race, gender and class intersect. I study the configuration of the prostitute identity in works of fiction from different countries in Latin America such as Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico. These narratives also reveal not only that prostitution is configured out of an unequal relationship of power, but that it also preserves heteropatriarchal structures of power in Latin American societies. In these societies, underdevelopment, poverty and political crisis produce discourses on prostitution, which stigmatize and condemn racialized female bodies in order to control and to profit from them. These narratives also shed light on the double nature of Magical Realism as a literary style that simultaneously opens a space where the history of subaltern identities is told again, but also where their voices are ventriloquized. Magical-realist narratives about prostitution participate in national debates about female sexuality, and they reveal a general problematic about gender construction as well as prostitution as related transnational issues of importance for national economies. This literary style also allows the representation of different possibilities in human relations by putting into question the social order that creates and validates legal, religious, and institutional structures and discourses. These structures and their discourses in turn help to preserve prostitution in Latin America. | |
