(Animal) Becomings and trans*formations of Salón de belleza among Mario Bellatin’s artistic project

Abstract

Although the becoming-animal (in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation) is one of the most frequently used topics in Latin American animal literature, the use
that the Peruvian-Mexican writer Mario Bellatin makes of it (re)situates his artistic project in a present signed by the changes in the functioning of the publishing market, the transformation of the role of literature and the exhaustion of the globalizing project and the consequent crises (political, economic, environmental, etc.).
From a perspective that combines philosophical analysis (animal studies and studies of animality) with sociological analysis (materialist analysis of modes of production, circulation, and reception), we propose a critical intervention that allows us to elucidate not only the function of becomings-animal in the Bellatin’s writing system and their entanglement with trans*, artistic, and literary languages, but also their place within Latin American literature of the 21st century.