Monstrous Motherhood: (In)fertility and Reproduction in Valeria Correa Fiz’s Short Stories

Abstract

The objective of this work is to offer a tour of the various representations of motherhood in the stories of Valeria Correa Fiz. In the texts under study (“Una casa en las afueras”, “El invernadero de Eiffel”, “Hotel Edén” and “Criaturas”), non-maternity, negligent motherhood, and monstrous motherhood question common places around the maternal experience. They make it more complex, underlining its many contradictions and paradoxes. All these narratives reject mimetic representation as a way of symbolizing the most indirect way possible the attraction and repulsion that pregnancy and motherhood can inspire. From the fantastic, the dystopian and the unusual, the exploration of the sinister and the abject allows us to investigate the unspeakable and problematize the normative discourses about reproduction.