Market and Nonconsumer Narratives: From the “Levity of Being” to Abjection

The astounding commercial success of the literary boom femenino since the 1980s combined with a highly active female readership has dramatically reshaped the Latin American literary landscape that traditionally relegated women to the sidelines. However, even though bestselling women have gained visibility in the publishing industry, the association of the bestseller with “light,” trashy lit has produced a ghettoization of all publications by women to the reductive parameters of “women’s literature,” perpetuated by the critical oversight of innovative texts written by women. This article examines how the accelerating transformation of literature into an industry has produced a commodification of feminism, difference, and the eroticized female body into promotable concepts, and how contemporary experimental women writers have called attention to this process of market-driven co-optation, and responded by reworking these sites. Writing against marketable figurations of feminist girl power and the Allendian “levity of being,” the turn to abjection, cynicism, and anesthetized disenchantment by many women authors complicates the facile consumption of fiction as entertainment.