Biopower, Body Commodification, and Defiance of Neoliberal Logic in Impuesto a la Carne by Diamela Eltit / Biopoder, mercantilización del cuerpo y de…

2017

This article analyses the novel Impuesto a la carne (2010) by Diamela Eltit and favors a reading that focuses on the past forty years of Chile’s history. Drawing on recent biopolitical concepts by Foucault and Agamben, this article demonstrates how the hospital setting in Eltit’s novel allows her to embody neoliberalism and account for the usually invisible bodily experiences of racialized and gendered patients/citizens, while simultaneously showing that the neoliberal model, in its quest for continuous expansion, is now colonizing the inner spaces of the corporeal body. This article also briefly shows that through her writing of the maternal body, Eltit highlights its potential for resista…