The strength of coming together. The slum as a queer party in La Virgen Cabeza by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Abstract

This article analyzes La Virgen Cabeza, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s first novel, especially addressing the transformation of bodies and subjectivities, the configuration of affections, of the familiar and of maternities, and the construction of modes of the common, which come as alternatives to the neoliberal rationality. It postulates that the lives of the protagonists are affirmed as “politics of the crossing” (Preciado), which make of the transit a mode of subjectivation, by changing their identities and their bodies, becoming dissidents of the sex-gender system and of the fiction of normality. The slums are configured as queer communities, which favor the flow of subjects in mobile and changing positions, where it is possible to invent with others a new organization of the forms of life, in dispute with the hegemony of the market and with the individualizing management (Butler, Lorey). The novel relates the experience of mourning for the lost community, a cemetery of expendable, residual and precarious bodies. Memory becomes a choral and multiple narration; the traffic of affections is combined with the gift of words.