The Queer and the Ominous: Lina Meruane's Poetics of Degeneration

Since the adventures of her Infantas up to the ‘illness involountary trilogy’ (which is where her two major novels Fruta podrida and Sangre en el ojo are framed), Lina Meruane has developped a ‘degenerated’ poetics, charectarized by an insistence on ‘bodies in progress’, i.e. obsessively thematising a metamorfosis which works both as a disturbing element and as a platform for anarchy: an inscrutable source of both fear and pleasure. In fact, the body –which she inflects in a meticulous and hallucinatory inventory of variations, excesses and abjections– operates in her oeuvre like a ‘de-identifying machine’. This essay aims at focusing on the peculiar intersection which seems to explain effectively the unstable living forms that inhabit her texts, one where queer discourse (in all of its rhizomic ramifications) mixes with fantastic and gothic features. If, on the one hand, Meruane’s political agenda clings to the refusal of the disciplinating mould and the objection to any request of identity accountability, on the other, insouciantly flirting with the narrative codes of the ominous, the Chilean writer counterbalances her revolutionary theoric drive, as it is illustrated by the estranging, almost ‘horror’ staging she intends for every one of her ambiguous, amorphous creatures.