Over the past several years, I have been gathering research which has become part of a major single-author book, which will serve to compare and contrast the speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) written in the two most populous and influential countries of Latin America: Brazil and Mexico. I focus the three central chapters of the study on what I consider to be one of the most interesting and evocative aspects of the field, i.e., the ways in which Brazilian and Mexican SF conceptualize the human body in speculative or futuristic contexts: first, through transformations and manifestations of gender, second, through the amalgamation of the body with mechanical and electronic devices, resulting in the creation of posthumans and cyborgs and third, through the manifestations of the undead, i.e., the portrayal of zombie and vampires.

I have found that writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects—and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body.

The book examines these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría’s “baroque ethos,” which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and resist in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito’s concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between “political life” and “bare life.” Discussions of the body and sexuality center on queer theory developed by Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam in conjunction with Silviano Santiago’s conception of the “space in-between” genders and cultures to offer alternatives that contest neoliberal definitions of success.

Among the Brazilian authors of speculative fiction whose works are examined are Machado de Assis, João do Rio, Lima Barreto, Monteiro Lobato, Coelho Neto, Gastão Cruls, Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, Lúcio Cardoso, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Rubião, Érico Veríssimo, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Caio Fernando Abreu, J. P. Cuenca, André de Leones, R. S. Causo, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, Giulia Moon, and Aline Valek.

The Mexican authors of speculative fiction are Pedro Castera, Amado Nervo, Alejandro Cuevas, Efrén Rebolledo, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, Juan José Arreola, Manuel Acosta, Carlos Fuentes, Amparo Dávila, Gabriela Rábago Palafox, Carmen Boullosa, Homero Aridjis, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Bef (Bernardo Fernández), Bernardo Esquinca, Diana Tarazona, Karen Chacek, Diego Velázquez Betancourt, and José Luis Zárate.

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/university-press/book/9780826501172