Amor y Violencia: Erotismo en Novela Colombiana Contemporánea

Abstract

This dissertation examines the way violence in Colombia, in its multiple forms and manifestations, has shaped the representations about eroticism in three contemporary novels: Héctor Abad Faciolince's Fragmentos de amor furtivo, Fernando Molano's Un beso de Dick and Albalucía Ángel's Misiá Señora. This project specially focuses on the different forms in which violence has become a factor in the way these works represent eroticism and its discourse. Drawing from the theoretical framework of authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, the dissertation proposes the existence of an erotic violent space in which three elements intertwine. The first element, evident in Faciolince's work, is the design of a new form of urban space based on the need to be protected in a dangerous city. This form of cartography restricts mobility for the city's inhabitants, opens up new spaces for segregation based on movement and access to space and restricts erotic manifestations to the boundaries of a ghetto-type city. The second element, from Molano's novel, deals with the establishment of gender roles based on homoerotic desire. The violence in this piece is connected to family and school institutions, and the way they determine the creation of public and hidden forms of identity. Finally, Angel's novel deals with the different ways in which the female body can be used as a symbolic battlefield where patriarchal and religious discourses try to impose limitations, promoting the establishment of alienated women.I propose that eroticism is the intimate space where social, discursive and ideological violence is executed, while simultaneously acts as the sphere of individual life where resistance can be enforced. In a country where so much attention is given to the overt, material consequences of violence, such as the number of deaths, massacres and kidnappings, it is easy to overlook the importance of how violence impacts identity and intimacy.