The Act of Been Woman: Symbolization about the Femenine in Margarita Aguirre

Abstract

This paper analyzes two novels of the Chilean Writer Margarita Aguirre –El huésped and La culpa- and proposes that both are articulated around an “out of scene event”. Slavoj Žižek, among others, postulates the event as an incident which interrupts the normal way things develop, simultaneously forcing a reorganization of the symbolic order. In the works of Aguirre, the female subjectivation is produced through a series of events –rapes, pregnancies, dishonor– that significantly mark not only the destinies of women but all the organization of the narrative text, staying, however, out of scene. The unspeakable appears in its inescapable consequences and conforms itself as the structural emptiness of the texts.