The body as space for writing subjectivity in Beatriz y Los Cuerpos Celestes (1998) by Lucía Etxebarría

The past decades have seen the growth of Hispanic fiction characterized by the adoption of a gynocentric vision focused on the body as a space to write subjectivity. This tendency opens the possibility to speculate that, perhaps, this substantial textual corpus designates the emergence of a literary trend that questions, through the subjective body, the categories of gender and sex established in societies. The second novel of the controversial writer Lucía Etxebarría explores the sex-gender system as a symboliccultural construction materialized in women´s bodies impeding the construction of subjectivity. The novel subverts different discourses that confined bodies denying them the possibility to exist and self-perform outside a system of closed gender categories established in the environment surrounding women.