Patricia Laurent Kullick and Liliana Blum are two Mexican women writers that they published in 2015 The giantess and Pandorarespectively. This pair of novels describe the reality of two unfortunate women.
Patricia Laurent Kullick Born in Tampico, Tamaulipason January 22, 1962. She is a narrator, member of the SNCA, 2004-2007, winner of the Nuevo León Literature Prize 1999 for El camino de Santiago, a novel that was translated into English and published by the Peter Owen publishing house in England.
For its part, Liliana Blum Born in Durango, Durangoin 1974. She has lived in Tampico since 1997. She is a narrator and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Kansas, and a Master’s degree in Education with a specialization in Humanities at ITESM. She has won several literature awards and has been a scholarship recipient of state and federal institutions that support literary creation.
The giantess It is the story of a family made up of an Oaxacan mother, a French father and their ten children. They live between poverty and the innocence of their children. The mother (Giganta) has two obsessions: drinking too much tequila and eliminating her children’s lice with DDT, or killing herself and them.
Pandora is the story of an obese woman who lives with her mother and has a sister. The former refuses to love her because of her physique and the latter more than meets her mother’s expectations. The father, who loved and accepted her, is dead. A handsome and successful doctor enters the equation: he seduces her and fattens her to unsuspected limits. The doctor (Gerardo) has a wife (Abril) who fights fiercely to stay thin.
The obese and dispossessed woman suffer. Their bodies and their shortcomings put them in the worst position: in a corner of horror. Salvation is closer to death, never to hope. The kilos will not go away and the money will be taken by others. A fat woman, alone, weak, who misses her father’s love. The other, a big, indigenous woman, seduced by white skin. With alcohol in her head. Fertile like her land. Tired. These are the protagonists of: Pandora and The Giantess.
A man who feeds his anastimaphilia (attraction to obese people) with the grams he adds to a woman’s abdomen. He looks for them between her legs, the more he finds, the better.
A foreigner. A conqueror out of date who breeds mixed blood and does not take care of it. That’s how his men are.
They are just trying to survive.
Both protagonists are trapped in their terrible reality.
In one case, body shape is the disadvantage; in the other, skin color and ethnicity. Pandora is socially discriminated against for her excess weight, and when someone values her precisely for that, she is willing to even lose her life. The Giantess falls in love with white skin because she believes it is better than her own. All these attitudes are to please a man or to comply with the dominant discourse that determines what is aesthetic and what is not.
There are many names of violence in these stories, including domestic violence, property violence, psychological violence, etc.
It is clear that the three female characters in these two stories are not happy. The plot revolves around that search. Many, like them, never achieve it because they live in a society where violence is normalized. In addition, women live trapped in stereotypes of what is considered beautiful. A woman’s body must be slender, and if her skin is white, even better.
And to top it off, the monsters take on the bodies of men and the women become frightened.
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