Plastic companions : posthuman intimacy in twenty-first-century Latin America
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "Plastic Companions: Posthuman Intimacy in Twenty-First-Century Latin America" examines how representations of gender expression and sexual practice in post-2000, Southern Cone literature interpolate the influence of technological advances on modern intimacy. "Plasticity" and "posthumanism" are two central, organizing principles of this research. Functioning as both noun and adjective, the word "plastic" refers to that which is easily shaped, but it can also signify something that gives shape, as in the case of plastic surgery. This bidirectional term—one that both gives and takes form—serves as a useful hermeneutic for reading posthuman intimacy in contemporary Latin American print and cinematic culture. By posthuman, I mean a way of understanding the irreversibly connected relationship between our species and a natural world that is rapidly being reshaped by technological interventions. This project is invested in both the flesh-and-blood impacts of these interventions and the symbolic influence of high-tech sexual allure on everyday intimacy. With a posthumanist perspective that shifts focus away from the human to highlight the agency of the rest of the material world, this analysis investigates how the literary expression of our growing reliance on technology reflects the more-than-human aspects of so-called "human" sexuality. From the shapely sex dolls in Ariel Magnus's Muñecas, to the thwarted, scalpel-sculpted ideals in Lucía Puenzo's XXY and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's Romance de la negra rubia, and, finally, the fluid performances of online dating in Alberto Fuguet's Sudor—the plastic companions featured in this study demonstrate not only the malleability of humans as sexually desirable objects but also the elasticity of posthuman desire, which finds intrigue and satisfaction beyond the organic strictures of the species. The present dissertation also explores how narrative, itself, can be a technology of posthuman intimacy. One unifying feature of the archive is an explicit invitation to find these alternative forms of companionship desirable and actionable. These texts generate readerly complicity in taboo sexual intimacy by instilling knowledge of and perhaps appreciation for these once culturally marginalized relations. Each of the three chapters in "Plastic Companions" thus describes one formal feature that contributes to readerly complicity, naming plaesthetics, cyborg writing, and Grindr narrativity as the narrative attributes that distinguish these stories of posthuman intimacy. In summary, the project shows that the literary ramifications of integrating modern technology into Latin American stories of love and desire often undermine humanist depictions of intimacy and widen the pool of eligible significant others.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Castillo, Anna |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Primary advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Daub, Adrian |
| Thesis advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Advisor | Daub, Adrian |
| Advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anna Castillo. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Anna Marshall Castillo
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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