The Grotesque Body and Women’s Embodied Ethnography in Denise Chávez’s Fiction

Year 2006, Issue: 23, 36 - 48, 01.04.2006

Jelena ŝesnić

Abstract

Rocío Esquibel, a protagonist of Denise Chávez’s regional short story cycle The Last of the Menu Girls, harbours to say the least, contradictory feelings for her surroundings. In a gesture exemplary of adolescent exasperation and her attempt at individuation she professes: “Everything is wrong! … I hate this house, it’s so junky and messy and crammed full of crap… It’s crowded and dusty and dark…” The Last of the Menu Girls, 140 . If we continue to trace the roots of this fierce disavowal of her native dwelling, her birthplace, we may well wonder at the girl’s sense that the home space is potentially claustrophobic and essentially unknowable. This is, however, not the only sentiment Rocío voices with respect to familiar places and spaces; when further down she addresses the local landscape of her region, the New Mexico Southwest, she paradoxically exalts the familiar and soothing images of the semi-wild nature marked by “the arid tension of the desert’s balance,” “energetic cries of locust and coyote,” disturbed by “stormy wonder and wind” The Last…, 152 . It would seem that the narrative logic proposed by the girl-narrator, whose voice echoes through the cycle, suggests a very specific spatial semantics proceeding from her location, but that she also deliberately creates and sustains tensions arising from the material conditions of occupying and living in circumscribed places. The received wisdom would, in this case, mandate that the homely space be evoked in canny ways, while the outside would presumably be marked as the source of the uncanny. This, as we have seen, is often not the case with Rocío, or for that matter with other women in Chávez’s texts.

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