On disappearance and animalization: portraits of female identity through illness and the dehumanization of the body in the novel Óxido de Carmen by Ana María del Río and Lumpérica by Diamela Eltit

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how these two works, Óxido de Carmen and Lumpérica, show the mutilating patriarchal violence over women’s bodies and psycological stability, and its policing over them through feeding behaviours and inhibiting restrictions of desire. With Ana María del Río’s novel, I will dive into the identitary comunity ties established around feeding and the identity-shattering processes narrated by te author to its extreme, through the anorexia suffered by Carmen, who ends up in a Purgatory from which the only way out is by disappearing. In Diamela’s text, I will analyze the way in which the author generates identity, a way that doesn’t involve the unavoidable destiny of a silhouette blurred to its extinction, but a deformed figure, a chosen and animalized mutation of the “female” identity. In Lumpérica, then, we face the image of marginal existence and the fight for taking space, the revelation of knowing oneself in its own terms.