Part III: Twenty-First Century – In the Beast’s Clothing
The last four chapters identify another other strong literary and cultural trend that started in the twentieth century and has been gaining momentum throughout the twenty-first: the exploration of human-animal relationships. Increasingly during this period, the categorical divides between species articulated in Parts I and II of this book are blurred, and the label for a being, or what Levinas refers to as “I” versus the “Other,” is questioned. This trend, which started in the 1960s, has been identified by Gabriel Giorgi in his 2014 Formas comunes. Giorgi argues that, as exemplified by classic works like Esteban Echeverría’s “El matadero,” the strong animal/human distinction is eventually replaced by “líneas de continuidad, contigüidad, pasaje y ambivalencia entre cuerpos humanos y animales” (29). Over time, the role of animals within culture, as well as the previously existing distinction between the human and animal that served to categorize bodies, becomes less sustainable, leaving behind an imprecise animal life “que ya no se deja someter a las prescripciones de la metáfora y, en general, del lenguaje figurativo, sino que empieza a funcionar en un contínuum orgánico, afectivo, material y político con lo humano” (Giorgi 12). The once ironclad distinction between humans and nonhuman animals is therefore replaced by the unstable categories of “person” and “non-person.” In other words, they merge to have lives that are socially and legally acknowledged, on the one hand, or that can be pushed to the margins of society (Giorgi 30).
In his book, Giorgi concentrates on animals. It is worth noting, however, that his analysis applies to the monstrous and fabulous as well as “non-persons.” Andrea Torrano’s “Por una comunidad de monstruos” argues that a complicity exists between the human and the monstrous, tracing the etymology of the word monster, monstruo, to monstrum; that is, to show, something that is revealed or forewarned. She situates the human and monstrous as the reverse of one another, a simultaneous distance and closeness that forces those thinking about one to think about the other (Torrano 1). Giorgi claims that the monstrous is not “exterior y pura alteridad respecto del hombre, sino más bien un «interior externalizado» de lo humano” (Giorgi 325). Elements of these dynamics are present with increasing frequency as our volume advances chronologically toward the present day, as demonstrated by Soifer’s chapter on werewolves.
The blurring of the human/animal and human/monster dichotomies that started in the twentieth century only deepens in the twenty-first, thereby inviting the reader to ponder what new possibilities are in store for animal studies when humans become the beast. One possibility would be to revisit history, as done in works such as Gabo Ferro’s 2015 bestiary, 200 años de monstruos y maravillas argentinas. This work is helped by images that ridicule, question, or deny historical documents spanning 200 years of national discourse through the implication that those housed in the pages – doctors, politicians, members of the aristocracy, etc. – are the animals. This approach asks the reader to imagine alternatives to both national and human-animal discourse. Another evolution of the beast can be found in “Los monstruos del futuro,” in Bestiario mágico by Jesús Callejo (2000). The Spanish writer predicts that the monsters of the future will be the natural consequence of genetic testing and therefore products of human capability and intelligence. For example, a fish named “el salmonazo,” which will be genetically modified to be five times the size of a regular salmon, so worries the author that he writes: “Este es tan solo un ejemplo de lo que nos espera. Que Dios, Alá y todos los dioses del Olimpo nos pillen confesados” (Callejo 274).
Four chapters in this final section examine the intersection and blurring of the human and animal worlds in the twenty-first century. The first of these, by Elena Campero, is titled “Animal Adventures for Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s China Iron.” In the novel, Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017), Argentinian writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara recovers José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872 and 1879) to imagine a completely different trajectory for the once silenced partner, “China,” within the tradition of gaucho literature. Instead, at the end of Cabezón Cámara’s novel, the protagonist and her group of travelers create the transhuman town of Iñchiñ on the Paraná river. This plural community promotes the equity of all its members, the rotation of work and power, sexual liberty, and the enjoyment of free time. Beings and environment fuse. The end of the novel encounters the protagonist-turned-writer of the community, the China Josephine Star Iron Tararira, a fusion of woman-man-tararira tiger. To end this subversion of the canonical text, Cabezón Cámara ties the category of the animal to her writing, recuperating the animal body to question the logic of the genre and the modern capitalist country that Martin Fierro looked to promote. The publication of this novel aligns perfectly with the recent explosion of the feminist movement and debate around the recognition of LGBTQIA+ rights. Cabezón Cámara’s project centers on popular feminisms, ecofeminism, and Indigenous cosmovisions as alternatives to the socio-ecological crisis posed by the Anthropocene.
Chapter 10, by Alba Devo Colis, is titled “Colonizing Monsters and Decolonizing Beasts: The Case of Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night.” In Our Share of Night, Mariana Enríquez masterfully traces a terrifying and allegorical world of the evil inherent to humans using beasts and monsters, either fantastic or legendary, that inhabit a world of magic, sorcery, and darkness. This chapter examines these beasts and monsters, along with their hellish lives, desires, dominations, and disobediences. To this end, the novel is an allegory of the colonial world in which the Argentinian author uses liminal subjects whose bestial or monstrous bodies are projections of the colonizer and the colonized. This reading analyzes the figures of the beasts in the novel from the perspective of decolonial theory through critical discourse analysis and hermeneutics, as they serve as projections of colonialist practices and elevate the praxis of decolonization. The colonial mechanisms presented in the novel and the fully decolonial resolution at the hands of the liminal subject highlight the important role that beasts and monsters have in inhabiting and expanding darkness: the golden God, Juan. This chapter raises the question of whether the novel can be interpreted as an allegory for decolonial triumph in the hands of a damnné, in Fanon’s words, who, through epistemic disobedience, challenges and breaks with the decolonial and ontological difference that subjugates him.
The volume’s penultimate chapter, “Forms of the Beast: The Figure of the Werewolf in Three Recent Mexican Novels,” is by Alejandro Soifer. The figure of the werewolf, from the long tradition of Gothic world literature, has been notably absent in Latin-American literature. Nevertheless, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the werewolf has become inserted into the narratives of contemporary Mexican writers. Starting with the ambiguous apparition of the werewolf in El enrabiado by Felipe Montes to the subtle construction in Perra brava by Orfa Alcarón and finishing with the phantasmal figure of the creature in Lobo by Bibiana Camacho, the monster has been converted into a flexible figure in order to express the socioeconomic tensions affecting contemporary Mexico. It becomes evident how in El enrabiado the werewolf transforms into the incarnation of the catastrophe that accepted the deindustrialization of the northern region of Mexico. In Alcarón’s novel, the figure is used to narrate narco-violence, and, in Lobo, the narrator visibly positions the figure as a phantasmal threat to recount the pervasive disappearances that have devastated the country in the past decade. This chapter proposes an investigation, using the theoretical framework of monstrosity and Gothic Marxism, to approach the direct and figurative incarnations of both the werewolf and the wolf in these works.
The final chapter, by Irene López-Rodríguez, is titled “Animal Metaphors and Gender Violence in Contemporary Spain: (Non)Fictional Narratives.” Animal metaphors targeted at women have become more prevalent in recent years due to their serious consequences on reinforcing stereotypes of male dominance and sexual entitlement. Research has shown how the conceptualization of females in the guise of beasts is often associated with sexist attitudes that justify and perpetuate gender violence. Along with dehumanization, zoomorphic tropes contribute to the sexualization of women. By associating animals as uncontrollable creatures in need of taming, the iconography of the bestial feminine often results in the exertion of violence toward women. This chapter explores the animalization of the female victim in (non-)fictional episodes of gender violence in contemporary Spain. It looks at a corpus of real and literary cases of violence toward women in which the male abuser resorts to the iconography of the bestial feminine. The study analyzes zoomorphic symbols taken from real cases, such as “la Manada” (the wolf pack), named after the WhatsApp group that five male perpetrators used to plan, film, and boast about their sexual exploitation of an eighteen-year-old woman, and novels such as Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), in which the young male protagonist equates raping his girlfriend with the taming of a young mare.
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We offer this volume of essays as a contribution to the fields of both Animal and Hispanic Studies while hoping that its varying methodologies make clear the need to deepen research in this area, particularly for its implications in a colonial and postcolonial context.