Intersectionality in Latin American writing: fear and desire with regard to the body in the literature of María Fernanda Ampuero and Dahlia de la Cerda

Abstract

This article brings back and develops the concept of the body in relation to the duality of desire and fear in the literature of two Latin American authors: the Ecuadorian María Fernanda Ampuero and the Mexican Dahlia de la Cerda. Here it is pointed out that there are currently different ways of approaching this concept based on the development of narratives in which the body appears as a central axis in the experience of marginal characters. These bodies operate as recipients of the violence carried out and replicated over the years by cultural mechanisms of colonial nature. In this article, decolonial feminism and social literature are used as a methodological basis, since these works were written in a context of inequity, poverty and racism in Latin America. Thereby, from an intersectional view of the literary texts, the traditional idea of ​​the subject as the possessor of total control over his or her body is dismantled.