Topologies of the body: spatiality and desire in Carlos Martin Briceño's From the Vast Skin
Keywords:
Narrative, bodily orientation, emotions, peripheral modernityAbstract
The narrative of De la vasta piel by Carlos Martín Briceño explores the intricate relationship between bodies and spaces as settings where control, desire, and affective rupture are exercised. Drawing on Foucault’s view of the body as a surface of power inscription and on the spatial theories of Lefebvre and Bachelard, this essay analyzes how domestic, urban, and rural environments shape the characters’ experiences. Building on Sara Ahmed’s contributions regarding bodily orientation and the circulation of emotions, it examines the reconfiguration of intimacy as a situated affective practice, linking loneliness and desire to the spaces that contain them. Stories such as “El cuerno de la abundancia” and “La utopía extraviada” reveal that space operates as a device that exposes the impossibility of reconciling the private and the social. The work creates a narrative map in which body and place interact to unveil the tensions of a peripheral modernity.
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