Erica Durante (Brown University)
This panel examines how 21st-century Latin American women writers mobilize animality as a speculative practice to rethink the limits of the human. Moving beyond metaphor or allegory, these texts stage multispecies intimacies—zones of proximity in which human–animal lives become entangled across bodies, affects, and environments, unsettling stable distinctions among species, subjectivities, and forms of agency.
Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and posthuman frameworks, the panel explores how animal figures—domestic, feral, or monstrous—participate in reconfiguring gendered embodiment, vulnerability, and power. These narratives construct forms of coexistence marked by interdependence, contagion, and cohabitation, while engaging Indigenous and Afro-descendant ontologies that challenge Western anthropocentric regimes of knowledge and value. In doing so, they reimagine the boundaries of the body, the household, and the environment, opening alternative modes of relationality across human and nonhuman worlds.
At the same time, the panel asks how speculative modes enable these texts to articulate new ways of sensing, knowing, and inhabiting the world. What forms of relationality emerge when the human is no longer a stable category but a shifting threshold? How do these narratives reconfigure the political and affective stakes of living with and as other forms of life? Together, these questions situate speculative writing as a key site for rethinking the human through multispecies entanglements.
We welcome papers engaging narrative, visual, and hybrid forms, as well as comparative and transmedial approaches. The panel accepts presentations in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
This panel explores how 21st-century Latin American women writers mobilize animality as a speculative practice to rethink the limits of the human. As more than metaphor or allegory, these texts stage multispecies intimacies in which human–animal lives become entangled across bodies, affects, and environments. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and posthuman frameworks, the panel examines how such narratives reconfigure gender, embodiment, and power while engaging Indigenous and Afro-descendant ontologies that challenge Western anthropocentric perspectives. Presentations are welcome in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.