Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead - by M Elizabeth Ginway (Paperback)

About the Book

Unexpected approaches to the body in the science fiction and fantasy of Mexico and Brazil

Book Synopsis

Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects--and ravages--of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body.

In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría's "baroque ethos," which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between "political life" and "bare life."

This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.

Review Quotes

"[Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead] will be of use to scholars for years to come. The book's engagement of many of the most canonical writers of the Mexican and Brazilian literary traditions, coupled with its expansive scope, mean that, beyond speaking to scholars of speculative fiction, this book will be of great interest to Brazilianist, Mexicanist, and Latin-Americanist scholars at large."
--David S. Dalton, author of Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico

"An extremely useful contribution to the field. It builds on existing scholarship on the literature of national identity, monstrosity, gender studies, critical race studies, disability studies, Latin American science fiction and horror, and posthumanism, drawing on an incredibly broad corpus from the mid-twentieth century to the present."
--Persephone Braham, author of From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America

About the Author

M. Elizabeth Ginway is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Florida.