In Guadalupe Nettel’s narratives, the representation of disability deconstructs various Latin American paradigms of 'normalcy', within a global context. Drawing primarily from her novel, Después del invierno (2014), this study focuses on the processes that confront the restrictive and oppressive notions of 'the feminine' and 'the masculine'. Following theoretical postulates that define disability as a social construction, as well as contemporary theories on gender and masculinities, this essay seeks to uncover the ways in which...

This article aims to build the biographical narrative of Aslan, a Jew from Aleppo origin, who immigrated to Mexico at the beginning of the 20th Century. In this story, personal, family, community, local and national aspects converge, whose organizing axis is the economic itinerary in the context of the growth of the urban capitalism in Mexico City. It seeks to characterize the ethos of the life world of Aslán, that is, that cultural nucleus that...

Ana Clavel’s second novel, Shipwrecked Body (2005), focuses on the identity crisis experienced by Antonia, who awakens one morning in a man’s body and asks herself if she continues to be the same or if her new body has made her into a different person. In contrast to novels that chart identity through the exploration of the past, Antonia’s search for selfhood gravitates around her current physical, social and cultural circumstances. The present study analyzes...

The present essay examines the place of Ana Clavel in critical studies on contemporary Mexican fiction. Instead of situating her production vis-à-vis female contemporaries in what has been labeled the Boom Femenino, I argue that Clavel’s novels embody the ethos of a queer literature. A queer literature unpacks, decenters, and disobeys norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, and favors the posing of questions versus the providing of neatly packaged answers. Moving away from the subject,...

The present article offers an interpretation of Alberto Chimal’s first novel, The Slaves, published by this Mexican author in 2009, a novel proposing an analysis of sadomasochistic sexual relations. In the center of the narration, we encounter two couples, both homosexual, acting out various sadomasochistic practices ‒ some of them of an extreme nature: On the one hand, two women, one of them already older (Marlene) and (supposedly) the director of pornographic movies, and the...

This article employs Igor Primoratz’s ethics of sexuality to analyze the incestuous relationship between a thirteen year old girl and her uncle in the novel El lenguaje the las orquídeas (2007), by Adriana González Mateos. My critical inquiry starts with a basic question: What hides behind the multiple ways in which incest is represented here? The obvious answer would be: the disintegration of the family. By analogy, if the family falls apart, so does the...

Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, was part of a large Converso family that moved from Spain to New Spain (Colonial Mexico) in 1580. While some members of his family, like his brother Gaspar, a Dominican friar, and his uncle, Luis de Carvajal, el Viejo, a regional governor, were devout Catholics, Luis and most of his immediate family were passionately devoted to crypto-Judaism. Luis crafts a powerful narrative of religious sacrifice and creativity in his spiritual...

This article aims to give an overview of the life of an Irish accused by the Court of the Inquisition in Mexico, in the seventeenth century, considered a heretic and a rebel seeking independence from New Spain. His captivity for 17 years, from 1642 until his death in 1659, made his prison known to the Viceroy and the King in Spain. In it he found the Judaizers who had arrived in that city from Portugal...

The construction of the memory of immigrants from the Middle East went through several stages. Lebanese Maronites and Jews from the region left their places of origin to "make America" without a national identity; the latter emerged in exile. It developed with the events that took place in the territories that expelled them.

Much research has been done regarding male queer narratives in contemporary Mexican literature. However, lesbianism has been greatly neglected by criticism. Although works such as Rosamaría Roffiel’s Amora (1989) or Sara Levi Calderón’s Dos mujeres (1990) have garnered some academic attention, little has been written about subsequent narratives. This article moves beyond those works whose main focus is lesbianism in order to understand how peripheral same-sex desire serves to undermine heteronormative patriarcal notions. I analyze...

Journey through the work of the Mexican writer Margo Glantz in search of the influence of her family and cultural environment –as a child of Jewish immigrants in Mexico City at the end of the second decade of the last century– in her ample literary production, considered from the perspective of one of her distinctive features: her constant trips through the world and the narrative emanated from them.

Figures and images of Colonia Condesa in Todo aquí es polvo (2010), posthumous book of memories by Esther Seligson, as well as in other fiction texts where she recovers moments of her urban family life during childhood and adolescence, but without the intention of writing ethnic neighborhood literature, nor to compose a city-text of Mexico City. In the second part, the Seligsonian strategy of revealing a deep and open Mexico in a syncretic semantic field...

The trial of the Inquisition against Margarita Moreira allows us to see the fascinating world of the groups of Crypto-Jews in New Spain in the 17th century. As a consequence of political and historical developments, a large group of conversos from the Iberian Peninsula settled in Brazil, Peru or Mexico at the time and immerse themselves in several economic activities that brought prosperity to many of them. In the first half of the 17th century,...

En las primeras dos décadas del siglo XXI, los estudios en torno al género y la sexualidad han proliferado de manera notable en toda América Latina. En el caso específico de México, grandes aportes han surgido en los últimos quince años y en diversas disciplinas con respecto al estudio de la sexualidad, la orientación sexual, la elección de género y las políticas sexuales con respecto a una multiplicidad de comportamientos que se salen de la...

Mi propuesta es que la poesía de Maricela Guerrero (1977) permite visualizar cuáles son algunas de las estrategias discursivas que propone la lírica mexicana del presente, y en qué medida la autora mencionada sugiere un descentramiento ya de los discursos heteropatriarcales o falogocéntricos, ya de los usos amorosos, estableciendo con ello lo que propongo llamar una nueva política de escritura y un nuevo horizonte de lectura en el contexto de la poesía mexicana actual. Esto...

Provoked by the outbreak of femicides in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s, a wave of socially critical narrative has circulated in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. Taking into account this broader corpus of literature, the article contextualizes Antonio Ortuño’s 2014 novel La fila india within a unique sector of this critical narrative, which highlights the interaction of gender violence and migration. The violent novel exposes an expansive social hierarchy that has developed...

¿How does one re-member the histories of those whose sex has been denied by History, or, in the words of Judith Butler, "the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity" (Butler 1999: 13)? This essay explores this question in the two poems annexed to “El retablo de sodomitas novohispanos” and incorporated into La sodomía en la Nueva España (2010) by the Mexican poet, Luis Felipe Fabre: 'Villancicos del Sto. Niño de las...

The present essay examines the semiotics of Djudeo-Espanyol in the novel Tela de sevoya (2012) and the poetry collection Ansina (2015) by Myriam Moscona. While in some of her previous volumes of poetry Moscona explores her Sephardic identity –in part through language– in these two recent works Djudeo-Espanyol takes center stage not only as a marker of identity, but as integral to the process of liteary creation. In both the autobiographical novel and the volumen...