Humoring Resistance

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

By Dianna C. Niebylski

Subjects: Latin American Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies
Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Paperback : 9780791461242, 204 pages, July 2004
Hardcover : 9780791461235, 204 pages, July 2004

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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

Analyzes the explosive connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in fiction by Latin American women writers.

Description

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.

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.