Summary

Diamela Eltit’s poetics across her literary production shows transgressive forms of intelligibility that evoke a crumbling social order ruled by the powerful few. Her novels present a gendered perspective that creates a haunting and nightmarish dystopia. Language serves as the vehicle that illuminates conflictive and deprived subjectivities whose vulnerable states are expressed in disjointed linguistic utterances. The characters inhabit the outskirts and cling to what is left of a collective epic that has been dismantled by an all-encompassing system of power. These are personifications of omniscient power structures with multiple and pervasive iterations that control and discipline human bodies. Eltit focuses her gaze on individuals that the system exploits, expels, exiles, or leaves homeless, turning them into uprooted and nationless migrants. In this context, women have a leading role, acting as a vital force that organizes dissent and pushes back to create solidarity.