«Espero que lo entienda: un ser así trae el futuro». Monstrosity and gender in the short stories of Mónica Ojeda and Solange Rodríguez Pappe

Abstract

This paper explores the return of local monsters in the narrative of Mónica Ojeda and Solange Rodríguez Pappe. In particular, it focuses on the use of the imaginary linked to monstrous figures of great diffusion in the Andean world such as the voladoras or the umas, which prove to be key figures in the process of empowerment of the female protagonists that these writers represent in their texts. Unlike other fantastic short tales of the twentieth century where the pre-Hispanic past or «the autochthonous» appears in a monstrous and therefore ominous way, fixed as radical alterity, in these authors - and in particular in some short stories of Ojeda's Las voladoras (2020) and Rodríguez Pappe's La primera vez que vi un fantasma (2018) - the female monsters of Amerindian folklore determine surprising recognitions and unexpected metamorphoses, which implie, as we shall see, the vindication of the abject power of monstrosity: in this way, not only the connotation of the monster is subverted, but also the literary archetypes that naturalize the patriarchal order of culture are questioned and rewritten from the gender.