Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (review)

In the acknowledgments preceding her unique and valuable study, Susan Antebi rather candidly notes: "When I began this work I thought I was writing about freaks and monsters in Spanish American narrative. At some point, I began to understand that the book was, in fact, about disability in these contexts" (ix). The academic honesty of this statement is significant: Carnal Inscriptions is, in essence, a welcoming invitation to scholars who may already be working on topics relevant to Disability Studies to conceive of their work from an emerging paradigm that, with very few exceptions, Hispanists have yet to engage meaningfully.

The book directly dialogues with work by disability scholars outside of Hispanism (notably mentioning—among others—Lennard Davis, author of Enforcing Normalcy and editor of The Disability Studies Reader; David T. Mitchell, Executive Director of Temple University's Institute on Disabilities; and Sharon Snyder, a distinguished disability scholar who is, with Mitchell, coeditor of the University of Michigan Press book series Corporealities), seeking to analyze both work by canonical Spanish American authors (e.g. José Martí, Mario Vargas Llosa) and also more recent cultural products that break with traditional notions of narrative. The latter list includes performance art by Guillermo Gómez Peña and Coco Fusco, work by New York-based Mexican writer Naief Yahya, a photo-narrative by Mexican writer Bellatín, collaborative testimonial work by Gabriela Brimmer and Elena Poniatowska, and more still. Overall, even if the focus of the work leans toward the geopolitical implications of corporeal difference instead of the political discourses surrounding disability (the emphasis on the "freak show" and Antebi's notion of "disability as performance" [9] are key in this regard), there is still more than adequate cause to see this book as the first of its kind.

Chapter 1 interrogates the presence of freak-show performers in newspaper chronicles penned by Martí and by José Juan Tablada as a way of meditating on US-Latin American geopolitical relationships. Chapter 2 illuminates the treatment of female, conjoined twins in a short story by Ecuadorian Pablo Palacio and the subsequent subversion of that tale by Jorge Velasco Mackenzie in a story of his own. Chapter 3 looks at El hablador by Vargas Llosa and David Toscana's novel Santa María del Circo, using "an approach to corporeal difference in Spanish American narrative that is both specific to regional, historical contexts and unhinged from the grid of metaphors that would align bodies with predetermined meanings" (11). Chapter 4 looks at works by Yahya and Gómez Peña/Fusco highlighting the problematic representation of marked or flawed bodies. Throughout, whether taking on chronicles, short stories, novels, or performances, Antebi's analysis is insightful, her engagement with history and theory impressive, and her perspective fresh.

Chapter 5 launches a detailed reading of Bellatín's Shiki Nagoaka, una nariz de ficción (2001), a novel in which a series of accompanying photographs form a "parallel, pictorial version" (142) of the fictional Nagoaka's story. Bellatín—whose other works include Flores (2001), a novel about children with birth defects, and another about a man who affirms that "una cosa es ser un hombre inmóvil y otra un retardado mental" (qtd. in Antebi [143])—has created a complex text that Antebi convincingly contextualizes with recourse to the topic of West-East relations. The author's appropriately complex discussion allows her to stray from the familiar territory of the "freak show," while continuing to focus on corporeal difference (here, Nagoaka's large nose) as disability—although the discussion of Flores beginning on page 152 is particularly lucid, and might have been pursued further.

Chapter 6 is by far the most intriguing chapter in the book, as it focuses on Gabriela Brimmer, "a Mexican woman who had cerebral palsy and who communicated . . . primarily through the use of an alphabet chart or a typewriter, using only her left big toe" (173). Together, Brimmer and the...