15 - Dissident Cosmopolitanisms

Summary

Especially from the latter half of the twentieth century, writings of Latin American women variously reckon with dissident cosmopolitanisms, as they give way to political and aesthetic contestations of liberal and elitist cultural agendas of modernization that are usually associated with cosmopolitanism. The history of feminism abounds with examples of what one might call a planetary imagination. Produced by contests over citizenship and limited participation of women in issues of national politics, feminist struggles have persistently pointed toward transnational, international, or internationalist horizons. This chapter focuses on the ways cosmopolitanism destabilizes gender/sexual normativity, producing alternative imaginaries of community and affect. It describes the extent to which cosmopolitics reconfigures the threshold and the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, through the lenses of Clarice Lispector's writing. Lispector places at the center of her writing project an interrogation of the relationship between gender and belonging, paying special attention to the ways in which spaces are articulated through a gendered grammar.