“The vixens, the she-wolves, the birds, the witches”

Travesti (sur)realism in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls

Abstract

In Las Malas (2019), Camila Sosa Villada presents the feminist fantastic through the portrayal of joy within impossible bodies: the politicized travesti identity. By claiming and reclaiming it as a fantastic body, Sosa Villada performs a subversive narrative experiment that transgresses the perception of the desirable. Thus, the author proposes a new way of existing as bodies beyond the biological and patriarchal binary, plays with the myths, folklore and oral traditions of the marginalized classes, framing the experience in the context of the Argentine provinces of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel expands what Gloria Alpini has called the “poetics of perversion”: its representation of impossible bodies centralizes a unique (sur)reality that, though violent, still allows for love, hope and desire.