Spanish Ph.D. candidate Andrew Holzman shared his research about contemporary Mexican literature and the War on Drugs.
"In The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), Mauricio Lazzarato posits that the debtor/ creditor relationship is universal and does not discriminate. Nevertheless, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2018) refutes this premise and reveals that women and trans subjects have been forced to use and sacrifice their bodies to pay a debt to the “universal equivalent” of masculinity in a system in which they have been excluded from participation. This presentation reunites the concept of debt with the body and reinserts women and trans subjects into narratives on the War on Drugs to shed light on their high degree of victimization and prove that it is not a conflict strictly “between men” as commercial narratives portend. Departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory in “Forms of Capital” that capital disguises itself as solely economic, I expand the definition of capital and debt to their “embodied state” to examine the social practices that act as a mechanism of direct surveillance and discipline on the body. Finally, because she does not acknowledge any literary debt to her masculine predecessors, Melchor’s novel functions as a first step to refuse to pay debt and invites women and trans subjects to devise other methods to avoid paying unjust debts." -Andrew Holzman
