UC Irvine

This dissertation studies the re-presentation of the body subjected to violence in Latin American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The three instances that I examine are immigration, prostitution, and torture under fascist repression. In order to comprehend the importance of the body in the development, or loss, of a person's subjectivity and identity, I use Phenomenology that at the beginning of the twentieth century distanced itself from the dualism of body versus mind, to focus on the body/subject as a lived experience in the world.

The first chapter focuses on the re-presentation of personal and gang violence directed towards Central American citizens migrating north, through Mexico, fleeing poverty, social inequality, and political instability. I analyze the process of dehumanization that these bodies/subjects undergo in the borderlands after having paid a coyote to help them cross the border. In the second chapter, I concentrate on the evolution of the literary re-presentation of the prostitute who sells her body to a customer to use as a sexual object. The third chapter of this dissertation examines the literary re-presentation of torture in exchange for a confession, during the Chilean and Argentinian dictatorships in the "Cono Sur" during the 1970s and 1980s.

Since transactions are central to all of the events that I look into, the three chapters can be seen from an economic perspective, a market driven perspective of supply and demand. But the market is dirty and the profit driven transactions often result in extreme physical violence perpetrated on objectified victims. That is what makes it particularly abject and horroristic.