Angles of otherness: Subjectivity and difference in the fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas

Abstract

Cristina Fernandez Cubas has published four collections of short stories, Mi hermana Elba (1980), Los altillos de Brumal (1983), El angulo del horror (1990), Con Agatha en Estambul (1994); and two novels, El ano de Gracia (1985) and El columpio (1995). I analyze these six works to explore the ongoing re-construction of identity in post-totalitarian Spain. In Fernandez Cubas's representation of the mediation of subjectivity she always subverts the limits of identity by problematizing the issue of difference--how the subject defines and distinguishes itself from others. She examines the way otherness is implicitly identified within the very subject that professes to exclude it; thus her works interrogate, reverse and finally erode the borders that define the self. Each of the five chapters of this study focuses on a separate theoretical issue--power relations, gender roles, discursive constructions of identity, spatial positioning, and visual constructions of desire--as it is played out in a collection of short stories or the author's two novels. These theoretical considerations illuminate the way subject/object relations are mediated and reversed in the author's fiction in order to reveal identity as a construct that can be altered. By opening subjectivity to angles of otherness, Fernandez Cubas's texts show how difference and multiplicity can expand and enrich the subject's vision of itself.