Horror territories and corporalities in Camila Sosa Villada's "Las Malas"

Abstract

This work intends to analyze the representation of horror in Las malas (2019) with the hypothesis that this novel addresses this concept by thematizing the immobility or paralysisthat characterize it not only in corporal terms but, fundamentally,in a territorial manner. The novel thematizes violence against the transvestite body inclose relation with the territory; there are three central spacespresented in the city of Córdoba that progressively close and expel the characters, thus eliminating the possibility of movement, escapeor refuge. These spaces conceptually oscillate between clearly defined dualities such as life-death, security-violence or interior-exterior. Consequently, as “unwanted subjects”, the characters carry with them the impossibility of both symbolic and spatial belonging and, like those three points in the city, their bodies also oscillate in dualities: between the masculine and the feminine, the human and the animal, safety and exposure. The novel presents a series of dynamic, changing bodies that are even susceptible to monstrous transformations which, at first sight, simulate a break with respectto the surrounding violence. However, these changes exhibit a close relationship with spatial limitations as they are marks that prevent access to the outside or make an irreparable distance explicit: the monstrous and animality do not lead to a rupture but to a continuation of the same horror.