Headless Bodies: Abject Corporalities and Bare Life in Temporada de huracanes, by Fernanda Melchor

Abstract

Based on the notion of the «concentration camp» articulated by Giorgio Agamben as a paradigmatic space of modern biopolitics, Temporada de huracanes stands out as a representative literary benchmark of bare life in a liminal Mexican region, where characters embody the figure of the homo sacer, whose existence is reduced to a logic of bodily exploitation and where people are born and die within the liminal dynamic of inside/outside as victims but also as aggressors themselves. Thus, the «headless bodies» are a metaphor of these bare lives whose heads are torn away, that is, dispossessed of any possibility of reformulating their own existence. Along these lines, the text itself works as an abject object throughout the space/time configuration of the novel.