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ABSTRACT Scholars of Latin American literature have long studied the topic of motherhood, but the paucity of literary representations of pregnancy itself has resulted in a tradition of what we might call postpartum criticism. Moreover, in most of this critical work, pronatalism (a hegemonic belief that human reproduction is always desirable) remains largely unquestioned. In this study of the antinatalist views in two works by awardwinning Chilean author Lina Meruane-Contra los hijos (2014) and Fruta podrida (2007)-I show how Meruane joins a growing cohort of writers who object to "choice feminism," a popular feminist philosophy that validates all women's choices on the basis of liberated individualism. Meruane's provocative representations of women who choose to procreate displace the sentimentality of childrearing and foreground the economic stakes of childbearing. This shift requires readers to consider the praxis of gestation, its value, and the corporal cost of production borne, always, by mothers.
Lina Meruane is an award-winning Chilean novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Born in 1970, she is widely considered to be among the best writers in Spanish of her generation, but many of her works still remain understudied. Meruane is perhaps best known for the novel Sangre en el ojo (2012), which won the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Like Sangre en el ojo, which tells the story of a manipulative and literary woman who loses her eyesight, much of Meruane's writing takes up themes of medicine in society, women's roles in intimate relationships, and the repercussions of neoliberalism on all. These themes are central to the two works analyzed here.
"La maquina reproductora sigue su curso incesante: despide hijos por montones" (11)-so begins her pithy extended essay, Contra los hijos (CLH), published in 2014. Having initiated her diatribe by characterizing human reproduction as a mechanistic, unremitting apparatus whose human derivatives are but plentiful pollutants, Meruane proceeds to carefully convey how progeny have become a neoliberal instrument of social control over their progenitors. She observes major setbacks in the realm of contemporary motherhood, despite the long struggle for women's rights and its notable achievements. The nucleus of her argument-that institutional responsibilities have been transferred to the home and disproportionately to the mother-actually first appears in Meruane's earlier novel, Fruta podrida (2007), in which a...