Abstract
The short story collection Las voladoras, published in 2020 by Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda, consists of eight stories that are shaped by an imaginative blend of the uncanny, violence, and the feminine. Within this narrative context, the aim is to address the assembly of women's bodies as heterogeneous constructs in relation to the violence they must confront, thus configuring posthuman subjectivities. We propose that in these stories, there are relationships between humans and non-humans that could be associated with what Donna Haraway terms "queer kinship." These relationships reveal ways of articulating women's identities with an explicitly collective and posthuman dimension, where Haraway's concept of "becoming-with" becomes paramount: "To be one is always to become with many". The reason these stories adopt this stance is because strictly human relationships, particularly those of men toward women, are highly hostile, marked by an excess of power and, therefore, violence. This motivates the need for women to generate complex, intergenerational, and vital connections among themselves and with other living entities, where such human exceptionalism can be nullified, contested, and/or transformed.
Keywords:
short stories; posthumanism; Latin American literature; agencies; gender