The subversive psyche

This is an exciting and original study of the links between gender and politics in the work of six important contemporary women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. Through detailed and theoretically sophisticated discussions of texts by six key writers - Luisa Valenzuela, Marta Traba, Sylvia Molloy, and Reina Roffe (Argentina), and Cristina Peri Rossi and Armonia Somers (Uruguay) - Geofrey Kantaris shows how their writing of the 1980s, including their own critical and theoretical work, engages with, and often challenges, Western theories of the construction of gender and its relation to identity politics (notably psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism). By situating their work within the political turmoil of the period - the brutal military dictatorships and the necessity of political or cultural exile - Kantaris is able to show how these texts signal a shift of cultural perspective in the Southern Cone, in which gender is no longer ignored in the construction of national and political narratives.