Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction

by Dianna C. Niebylski

Overview

Contextualizing theoretical debates about the political uses of gendered humor and female excess, this book explores bold new ways in which a number of contemporary Latin American women authors approach questions of identity and community. The author examines the connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in works of fiction by Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, Armonía Somers, and Alicia Borinsky. She shows how the interarticulation of the comic and comic-grotesque vision with different types of excessive female bodies can result in new configurations of female subjectivity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791484951
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	354 KB

About the Author

Dianna C. Niebylski is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Social Theory at the University of Kentucky and the author of The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Language and the Uses of Silence in the Poetry of Mallarmé, Rilke, and Vallejo.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Challenging Humor Theory with the Body's "Humors"

2. Incontinent Bodies, Mixed Humor:
Laura Esquivel

3. Provocative Bodies, Hard-Edged Humor:
Ana Lydia Vega

4. Torpid Bodies, Skeptical Humor:
Luisa Valenzuela

5. Sick Bodies, Corrosive Humor:
Armonia Somers

6. Mutating Bodies, Entropic Humor:
Alicia Borinsky

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index