The farewell body: aesthetics of sickness and torture in finisecular Chile

Abstract

“Body is always an inconvenient”, writes Susan Sontag on the conviction that it is an space of suffer rather than pleasure. The alternatives of illness trace a taxonomy in which the responsibility of the individual seems choice the organic failures. On the Chilean transvestites’ irresponsive and passionate behavior, Pedro Lemebel establishes in Loco afán a catalog of body degradation articulated with baroque language. AIDS’ effect in the 80 and 90 on marginal bodies is a “colonization by the contagion” that moves the torture imposed by Chilean military dictatorship since the 70 to the suburban chronicles that Roberto Bolaño makes performances gore in the discarnated narrative Estrella distante. There the gothic aspects of decadent corporality find a futurist formulation in which cruelty is encouraged. In complementarity and distortion of aesthetics, the body is disintegrated in a show combining the grotesque and the funeral.