Political asylums: Locating mental illness in Latin American literature (1980–2000)

Abstract

This study contemplates the representation of asylums and psychiatric hospitals in a diverse selection of late twentieth-century Latin American texts, finding that these literary spaces are involved in contemporary mental health care reform movements and changing social conceptualizations of mental illnesses. A disability studies approach illuminates the interdependence and mutability of both the human body and subjectivity. Postulating that all people undergo variations in mental functioning that can be accommodated within society, I advocate replacing essentialist categories with a fluid model of mental experience. Through their portrayals of mental health care institutions, the selected literary texts examine where to place mental illness in relationship to other aspects of human existence.

The first chapter uses Michel De Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life to look at the tactical negotiation or "reading" of asylum spaces in the historical novel Nadie me verá llorar (Cristina Rivera-Garza, Mexico) and the work of text and photography El infarto del alma (Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz, Chile). Chapter two examines how the novels Exílio (Lya Luft, Brazil) and El portero (Reinaldo Arenas, Cuba/United States) utilize a liminal genre---the fantastic---to explore the liminal spaces and subject positions associated with the states of mental illness and exile. The final chapter analyzes the concepts of mental illness at work in two literary representations of psychiatric hospitals within the context of a life experience---the play La mujer que cayo del cielo (Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, Mexico) and The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets (Irene Vilar, Puerto Rico)---and in written reader responses to these two pieces.

Although the individual works vary greatly, I find that they all highlight multiple possibilities for interpreting mental illness and for negotiating or reconfiguring established structures. Through the innovative combination of a disability studies approach with a focus on mental illnesses and the Latin American context, my study contributes to our understanding of the individual texts, representational and interpretive strategies, and the interconnected questions of the body and subjectivity.