Reconfiguration of the mandate of masculinity in the parental figure in autofiction texts by Marcos Giralt Torrente, Guadalupe Nettel and Jeanette Winterson

Abstract

Through the analysis of parental relationships in Tiempo de vida (Life time), El cuerpo en que nací (The body in which I was born), and ¿Por qué ser feliz cuando puedes ser normal? (Why be happy when you can be normal?), by Marcos Giralt Torrente, Guadalupe Nettel, and Jeanette Winterson, respectively, this article explores how autofiction literature, as an artistic exercise, can also contribute to reconfiguring patriarchal reality
and dismantling structural essentialism. These authors, who are relatively new to the literary scene, propose decentralized or marginal writings from a Southern perspective: literature by parental children, women's literature, and literature with homoerotic perspectives. Using a comparative literary methodology from Southern
gender epistemologies, the article highlights heteronormative customs within a capitalist context that deteriorates the identity of a relational self in a hierarchical and repressive political, social, and economic system. The article
analyses characters who break away from stereotypical ideas of family relationships, allowing for new conceptions of identity to emerge from a series of key authors on the subject of heteronormative rupture. The article argues that literature, as an art form, can provide aesthetic pleasure and also serve as a powerful means of awareness-raising and epistemic transformation—that is, the displacement of desire—through the fictional experience (laden with autobiographical elements) of a relational self that describes the vicissitudes related to the mandate of masculinity, understood as "the obligation of domination that falls on men" of some literary characters. Such obligation and
the "social investiture imposed on those who carry a male body" are questioned and even transformed in the selected texts, which, when explored in the context of higher education, can contribute to inclusive education in the global South.