Of sacrifice, torture and hope: representations of the body in Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas

Abstract

This article analyses the physical and emotional portrayal of the women living in the Casa de la Hermandad Sagrada in Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Las indignas (2023). Drawing on André Le Breton’s (2010, 2018) notion of the body as a sensitive and material space, and Sara Ahmed’s (2015) political perspective on affect, we examine the figures constructed by Bazterrica to explore the coexistence of a community of women isolated from the rest of the world amidst a post-apocalyptic context characterised by a hierarchical, violent and misogynistic structure. We propose, on this basis, that Bazterrica develops a variety of recurring symbolic images that form a circuit of affects, in the style of Vladimir Safatle (2015), where the women of the Sacred Brotherhood survive through bonds arising from fear, hatred and envy. According to our hypothesis, these images, which we have termed ‘figures of the body’, are constructed from the symbolic characteristics of the characters and provide depth to the representation of the corpo-affective networks that emerge in a dystopian world marked by sacrifice and violence.