Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow
About
"Dissecting Carne: The Politics of Meat and Flesh in Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction"
My project, titled "Dissecting Carne: The Politics of Meat and Flesh in Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction", examines the literary trope of “carne,” Spanish for both “meat” and “flesh”, in recent Southern Cone and Andean fiction. It argues that in these regions, where predominant meat industries reinforce material and symbolic violence against human and nonhuman flesh, contemporary women writers use potentiality and speculation to reframe carne as an ambivalent textual signifier that oscillates between subject/object, victim/victimizer, life/death. Bridging close reading with postcolonial theory, my project presents carne as a conceptual and creative threshold that unsettles national, subjective, and bodily identity, therefore reshaping concepts of body politics, corporeality, and embodiment. By moving carne beyond its traditional allegorical function, my project places literature as a creative force that critically engages the social, ecological, and economic effects of neoliberal capitalism. Ultimately, Dissecting Carne demonstrates how, by challenging hegemonic narratives of carne rooted in a patriarchal literary tradition, women writers enact cultural transformation through political imagination.
Fernando Valcheff-García is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures.
