[Re]apropiaciones: el neobarroxo como estética feminista. Trilogías de Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Selva Almada y Ariana Harwicz

Abstract

This article analyzes the poetic-political strategies of resistance to the patriarchal order in the novels of three contemporary Argentine writers: Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Selva Almada, and Ariana Harwicz. Their writing is part of the so-called “new Latin American boom” (Gallego Cuiñas, 2020), characterized by the dissemination of feminist literatures and the redefinition of the very concept of feminism. From this perspective, the article proposes a new reading horizon that considers the recoding of representations of the body, space, and subjectivity.

The hypothesis explores the [re]appropriation of the Perlonghean neobarroso within the neobaroque tradition (Calabrese, 1999), whose aesthetics of excess reveals a sensibility akin to new feminist writing. To emphasize its inclusive and anti-patriarchal dimension, the term neobarroxo is introduced, understood as a critical horizon that subverts the logos of language through diverse fictional devices. The analysis focuses on the poetized narrative of Cabezón Cámara, the violent poetics of the intimate in Harwicz, and the notion of territory and the deconstruction of Argentina’s interior in Almada. In these operations, an outside of the modern subject emerges—fluid and resistant to savage, neocolonialist capitalism—where new figurations of subjectivity dismantle fantasies about the feminine and propose aesthetics beyond the phallogocentric system.