Imaginarios socio-sexuales en crisis: las representaciones del médico, la prostituta y la mujer enferma en las obras de Clorinda Matto, Mercedes Cabello, Aurora Cáceres y Adela Zamudio

Abstract

This thesis proposes a relational reading of four literary texts written by Latin American women and published in the entre siglos period (1880-1914). Specifically, representations of the doctor, the prostitute and the ill woman are studied in Mercedes Cabello’s Blanca Sol (1889), Clorinda Matto’s “El corsé” (1890), Aurora Cáceres’s La rosa muerta (1914) and Adela Zamudio’s “El velo de la Purísima”. Through the use psychoanalysis, feminist literary criticism and contemporary critical theory, this thesis seeks to analyze the gender and power relations in works that problematize the dominant aesthetic-ideological matrices in the literary production of the epoch, such as modernism, naturalism, and the decadent movement. That is, as the male characters of these texts start to lose their power over the female subjects, the latter obtain greater autonomy, even as they lose their life or their “decency” status in the process. In such sense, prostitutes and ill women are pictured as subjects of knowledge, and such knowledge brings to light their exclusion from the project of modernity. In contrast, doctors, once held as representatives of truth and progress for their association with science, are derided through the use of humor and their portrayal as adulterers, serial killers, and messengers of death. To demonstrate this hypothesis, this work is structured in three chapters. First, it analyzes the de-idealization of the ill woman in the four selected works to establish a critical reading of pain, shame and unhappiness derived from the affect theory. Second, it studies the representation and the role of the prostitute in Blanca Sol and “El velo de la Purísima”, considering the gender roles that operate above her and her strategies of subsistence/resistance. Lastly, in the third chapter, it will examine the crisis of the medical subject/knowledge in “El corsé” and La rosa muerta. To do this, it will be necessary to analyze the construction of overflowing masculinities, as well as the spectral and uncanny character of the physician.