Deadly girls in Latin American and Spanish poetry of the 1990s and 2000s

Abstract

In this paper I study a genealogy of female poets whose lyrical subjects show traits of childishness, femininity and thanatic drives. First of all, I examine the poetry of several contemporary authors who, instead of creating poetic voices whose energy is “deadly”, generate characters whose mood tends to be optimistic. Secondly, I focus on the poetry of several authors whose lyrical subjects construct themselves as “dark little girls”, Latin American as well as Spanish. I do so by building a dialogue between some key poets of the 20th century (Marosa di Giorgio, Alejandra Pizarnik, Blanca Andreu and Pilar Pallarés) and poets of the 21st (María Castrejón, Begoña Callejón, Elena Medel, Alejandra del Río and Tilsa Otta). I
analyze in what way the nature of their “psychological darkness” is twofold, and to that end I rely on the philosophical and aesthetical category of “cuteness” (Sianne Ngai). Methodology-wise, I combine a strategy of close-reading that bonds the coincidences in the choice of tropes with a political interpretation that, using the concept of “cuteness”, dissects the the internal contradictions that affect the stereotypes against girls and “childish” women. These stereotypes are something that these poetic writings both reproduce and subvert.