\" EL RECLAMO DE LA HERIDA \" . TEXTUALIDADES CORPORALES EN LA OBRA DE DIAMELA ELTIT

Diamela Eltit is one of the most prolific and prominent Chilean writers of her generation, started to write under the dictatorship of Pinochet. Since then, she is well known for her intellectual and politically resonant writings that powerfully explore the intricate relation between ethics and aesthetics under the neoliberal turn in Chile. Her literary and visual work is a good example of “the Latin American aesthetic turn” in contemporary Chile.The analysis is focused on postmodern aesthetics through the incorporation of different theories concerning gender, visual arts, and philosophy in order to analyze a diversity of resistances to a political and a social order, to a discipline that tries to submit people to a system in order to keep them under constant surveillance. In Eltit’s work, the female body is the main tool used to cause a rupture within the persistent standardization of bodies under a rigid society. Thus, the power of the body, bio-power and its effects on the spaces, and technics will set a scenario representing the material transformation of theparadigm of power relationships and subjectivities that make her novels an allegory of contemporary Latin American society. Furthermore, the notion of space and place is fundamental to read Eltit’s work. Places are made through power relations that construct rules, which define boundaries. These boundaries are both social and spatial, and theycontrol identities of belonging and exclusion to and from a place. Because power and space are inherent to the body as movement, transformation, and individual and collective and collective practices, I focus on place and sexuality in both corporeal and discursive terms byemphasizing the sociological and historical effects of space and other geographic concepts merging on the individual and collective inter-relations working in the novels.My analysis converges on the use of language, metaphor, and representation in the definition of gender and sexuality, and on questions about subjectivity, identity and the sexed body, adopting a broad perspective from philosophy and politics and feminism as theoretical tools, aiming to analyze the criticism immersed in Eltit’s work, that aims to destabilize and transform gender relations and power hierarchies.