Creative Encounters with Menstruation in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Women’s Writing

This thesis explores representations of menstruation in contemporary literature produced by Latin American and Spanish women writers. The study is motivated by the need to open up the subject of menstruation, in both literary studies and wider terms, and analyses works in which authors decouple menstruation from traditional, patriarchal conceptualisations in which periods are limited to the ambit of reproduction and defined negatively, as shameful, an embarrassment or a burden. This study identifies contemporary works from across Spanish-speaking countries that engage with menstruation as well as detecting and analysing trends and approaches to menstruation and recurrent images associated with periods. This shows that menstruation, despite its taboo status, is a subject widely explored in women’s literature in Spanish. The four main content chapters explore the alternative imaginaries that question traditional representations, whether by displaying overtly subversive representations or through a more muted approach. These chapters are structured thematically around the axes of eroticism, trauma, transitions and rape, and demonstrate that menstruation can be conceptualised from a plurality of perspectives which avoid the traditional association with fertility. Moreover, the study demonstrates that menstruation plays a significant role within these texts. Therefore, this study also creates a corpus of ‘menstrual texts’, a term coined to refer to works which not only make menstruation visible but also make use of it aesthetically and assign to menstruation an important role within the narrative, including as a main theme, image or motif, plot trigger, and/or as a narrative device. The comparative chapters analyse a number of selected texts, namely: Diamela Eltit’s Vaca sagrada (1991), Andrea Jeftanovic’s Escenario de guerra (2000), Solitario de amor (1988) and other works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Marta Sanz’s Daniela Astor y la caja negra (2013), Esther Tusquets’ El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) and Ana Clavel’s Las Violetas son flores del deseo (2007).