UC Riverside

Despite being one of the recurrent spaces in contemporary Queer Mexican narrative, little scholarly attention has been given to baños. Employing a critical approach to bath space, this dissertation explores the representations of bathrooms and bathhouses and their potential not only in their narrative function but also as opportunities for critical reflections on larger dynamics of power related to space, gender, sexuality and the control of bodies. I begin by making an argument for Critical Baño Studies, an analytical framework for understanding bath space narratives. In chapter one, I argue for a rereading of Ana Clavel’s novel Cuerpo náufrago with an acute focus on the protagonist’s overnight transition into a man, her new obsession with urinals, and an understudied portion of the novel that portrays masculine sociality in the bathhouse. In chapter two, I bring together a score of pre- and post-2000s films under the genre of “Bathhouse Film.” With a new approach to the iconic films Doña Herlinda y su hijo and El Callejón de los Milagros, as well as the newer films Cuatro Lunas and Salón rojo, I propose an approach to bathhouse films that regards bath space as critique. In the third and final chapter, I bring Critical Baño Studies to the sonic through the podcast CUIR: Historias disidentes to demonstrate the ways in which we can affectively occupy bath space via the auditory. In all, this dissertation brings together scholarly conversations from across Mexican Studies, Queer Theory, and Spatial Humanities to make a case for the importance of bath space as a key site of critique and knowledge production in contemporary narrative.