Imagology of the abject: forms of violence and barbarism in an Argentine literary tradition that resignifies itself

Abstract

In Argentine literature, we can recognize a series of abject bodies marked at different times throughout history under the heteroimagotype of barbarism: indians, gauchos, immigrants, proletarians, cabecitas negras, slum dwellers. In the imagological processes through which the abject is constructed, verbal or physical violence is usually the way of signaling, of “putting in their place” the subaltern because, as Kristeva explains: “There is in abjection one of those violent and dark rebellions of the being against that which threatens it and that seems to come from an outside or an exorbitant inside” (1980: 7). Within the Argentine literary tradition that accounts for this violence from the early days of the construction of a national identity in the nineteenth century to the present, we identify a series singled out for one of its especially abject, overwhelming and terrifying forms: “corrective” rape. In the series we track, “La Refalosa” (1843), by Hilario Ascasubi, El matadero (1871), by Esteban Echeverría, El fiord (1969) and “El niño proletario” (1988), by Osvaldo Lamborghini, stand out. We add here the story by Michel Nieva “¿Sueñan los gauchoides con ñandúes eléctricos?” (2013).