Breaking the Gender Binary: Feminism and Transgressive Female Desire in Lucía Etxebarria's Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes and La Eva futura/La letra futura

• Main Author: Lauren Applegate
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth 2013-06-01
• Series: Journal of Feminist Scholarship
• Subjects: Etxebarria (Lucía); Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes; La Eva futura/La letra futura; postfeminism; feminism in Spanish literature; contemporary Spanish women's literature; sexuality; desire; gender studies; Constitutional Spain
• Online Access: http://www.jfsonline.org/issue4/articles/applegate/

The popular texts of Spanish author Lucía Etxebarria have created a polemical social phenomenon in contemporary Spain for their blatant depiction of a world of violence, drugs, and experimental sex of the late-millennium youth culture of Generación X. These topics, along with Etxebarria's public persona and feminist ideology, have fomented much public criticism and given rise to discussion of the current status of feminism, gender norms, and women's authorship in Spain today. This article analyzes Etxebarria's novel Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes and her collection of feminist essays La Eva futura/La letra futura, demonstrating that Etxebarria's depiction of female desire and sexuality within their cultural context challenges the notion that feminism has no more to achieve and breaks the gender binary by imagining a gender-anonymous world. Beatriz delves into the life of the title character, a young woman whose experience with a dissolute social culture and her attempts to understand herself cause her to question stereotypical standards of womanhood and eroticism and to declare that she fits into no such preconceived notions. Beatriz is a literary inscription of Etxebarria's feminist ideology as posited in La Eva futura, insofar as both these texts blur the line between feminism and postfeminism and engage with consumerist culture and identity. Moreover, they construe a philosophy that pushes the boundaries of normative discourse by misciting hegemonic notions of femininity and sexuality and creating the potential for change through such mis-repetition of hegemonic discourse. Ultimately, Etxebarria's work strives for a transgressive, unbound, and fluid female desire that is in continuous reconstruction and defies heteronormative definition.