Gender, Waste, and the Uncanny Home in Única mirando al mar

  • Jennifer Abercrombie Foster University of Kansas

Resumen

In the novel Única mirando al mar (1993) by Costa Rican author Fernando Contreras Castro, a community of trash pickers make a new life for themselves within an overflowing garbage dump. I employ psychoanalytic categories to address how Contreras’s protagonists accept the normalization of disaster and decay within a neoliberal, post-revolutionary context. I complicate the notion of disenchanted normalcy (perpetuated by neoliberal policies) by exploring gender’s role within abject spaces. Within an uncanny domestic setting, ruin and abjection provide a theoretical space in which readers may see the social-constructedness of gendered roles and spheres of influence.

Biografía del autor/a

Jennifer Abercrombie Foster, University of Kansas

Jennifer Abercrombie Foster completed her Ph.D. in Spanish with a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas in 2016. She specializes in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, with a focus on gender, sexuality, and women’s social movements in Central America and the Caribbean. In her dissertation, "(Un)Natural Pairings: Uncanny, Marvelous, Fantastical, and Cyborgian Encounters in Contemporary Central American and Caribbean Literature,” Foster explores how writers employ fantastic and eerie stories to provide a forum in which artists may generate, imagine, and share creative spaces to rethink traditional gender and sexual ideologies in Central American and Caribbean society.

Publicado
2018-11-07
Número
Vol. 17 Núm. 1 (2019): Otoño 2019
Sección
Artículos / Articles