Passivity and Nonhuman Absorption in Julieta Campos's "Celina o los gatos"

This article examines how Cuban-Mexican writer Julieta Campos reevaluates passivity as a transformative force in feminism. Unlike contemporaneous authors such as Rosario Castellanos who define feminism as productive activity, I argue that in her book of short stories, Celina o los gatos (1968), Campos takes an inverse trajectory, deploying nonhuman material passivity in order to unravel the logic of the self-actualized liberal subject. Rather than articulate feminism as empowerment—directed toward reform and positivity—Campos imagines withdrawal, silence, and motionlessness as non-normative ways to resist prescribed purpose. In the titular story of her book of short stories, "Celina o los gatos," Campos imagines depression as an affective mode that figures the Mexican bourgeois housewife. The gendered construction of the pet—a sentimental and non-utilitarian accessory that inhabits the domestic space—is used to invoke the commonplace that the housewife is a similarly domesticated creature. While on the one hand, the housewife's negative feelings of depressive domesticity manifest themselves as inaction and withdrawal, I argue that Campos reconfigures passive negativity into a critique of the productivity mandated by traditional femininity as well as by the Women's Liberation movement.