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CALL FOR PAPERS NOMADIAS MAGAZINE No. 33 2024.

Special issue sex/dissident: 25 years since the decriminalization of sodomy in Chile, and 51 years since the first homosexual protest.

NOMADÍAS CUIR/QUEER/KUIR. A political/sexual dissident speech to think about the south-south.

For more information, see the following link.

A mass. ‘La tierra de en medio’ or Nepantla in Rosario Castellanos’s poetry

Authors

  • Gilda Luongo Facultad de Filosofía Y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile

Abstract

The article proposes a feminist approach to Nepantla which is a spatial figuration that emerges from the poetry book La tierra de en medio (1972) by Rosario Castellanos. Nepantla is the geography of the so-called “la tierra de en medio”, and thus it can be also its map; that is to say, a fiction that aims to visualise a unique space. Furthermore, it is a precolumbian place name, and a part of our indigenous heritage; finally, it refers to the non-feminine space linked to the language and the writing. From the latter, this poetry book builds up a border space (a suspended one), which raises a zone where women, who are in a situation of symbolic privilege, move pendularly and ambiguously. Nevertheless, for women this lack of location can come to represent a liberating potential; this, as poetic awareness and understanding are able to deconstruct, through a variety of poetic strategies, what was previously established as the female normativity. And, in this way, it can arise a constant movement, named as a mass (“un amasijo”).