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Abstract: Published in 2013, Yuri Herrera's The Transmigration of Bodies narrates the fictional story of the Redeemer, a silver-tongued fixer who works for Mexico's underworld bosses. Mafia jefe Dolphin employs the Redeemer to negotiate the exchange of two corpses: Baby Girl, a young woman who has succumbed to a mysterious plague, and Romeo, Dolphin's homosexual son who dies via hit and run. Analyzing the semiotics of masculinity in the novel reveals the violent processes that gender and sex the body during a moment in which the structures of civil society appear to be crumbling. Working as an allegory for the violence and corruption in Mexico, the novel's dystopic setting highlights the oppressive force of masculine violence and suggests that we should not reduce the city's issues to an external influence. This essay argues that the novel's treatment of bodies reveals a cultural discourse that produces nonmasculine bodies not only as commodities, or valuable objects through which masculinity can be reproduced, but as empty vessels to be imbued with masculine meaning for the continued masking of patriarchy as benevolent.
Keywords: Mexico, masculinity, violence, femicide, gender, cultural studies
A Mexican writer and US-based scholar, Yuri Herrera often explores the economic, political, and cultural repercussions of corruption and violence in Mexico. Critics at The Guardian, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have published extended reviews of his novels, characterizing La transmigración de los cuerpos (The Transmigration of Bodies) as "a response to the violence of the drug wars" and an allegory "of contemporary Mexic[a]n culture: namely, its legacy of violence" (Lasdun; Illingworth).1 However, while Herrera's fiction has enjoyed attention from media outlets, there is a dearth of scholarly attention around The Transmigration of Bodies.2 Nevertheless, the novel's central premise-the transportation of dead bodies within a dystopic Mexican city-prompts questions about the relationships between the commodification of death and the objectification of women.3
Published in 2013, The Transmigration of Bodies narrates the fictional story of the Redeemer, a silver-tongued fixer who works for Mexican underworld bosses and lusts after his neighbor Three Times Blonde.4 Mafia jefe Dolphin employs the Redeemer to negotiate and ensure the exchange of two corpses that have coincidentally ended up as pawns in the hands of rival crime families: Baby Girl, a...