Ana Clavel - her literary and multimedia oeuvre is marked by its queerness. The queer is evinced in the manner in which she disturbs conceptions of the normal not only by representing outlaw sexualities and dark desires but also by incorporating into her fictive and multimedia worlds that which is at odds with normalcy as evinced in the presence of the fantastical, the shadow, ghosts, cyborgs, golems and even urinals

Ana Clavel, Desire and Its Shadow, Trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Aliform Publishing, 2006.


Soledad awakes to find herself invisible, standing in the middle of Mexico City. Is she really invisible, or have others just stopped seeing her? Prisoner of her passions--to change identity, to be the object of someone's desire, to disappear--Soledad always ends up with her wishes coming true, but along with their dark, unforeseen side. This novel describes the undercurrents of the mysterious, often cruel streets of downtown Mexico City, where the blind can see, ghosts talk to those who will listen, and shadows both ancient and modern meld together to create this initiation into sex, love and madness.

Ana Clavel, Shipwrecked Body, Trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Aliform Publishing, 2008.


Antonia wakes up one day a man, or at least in the body of one. Is identity more than skin deep? Does sexuality begin with desire, and if so, what desire has left her shipwrecked on such a strange island, inside such a complicated labyrinth as the male body? Set against the backdrop of downtown Mexico City, this novel explores a very male world from the perspective of a hidden observor.


Subversive...all the secrets of seduction seen from a man's perspective...eroticism has become one of the fundamental interests in the work of Ana Clavel. --Milenio

Clavel explores masculine desire through the total transgression of the body. --Confabulario

With camera in hand, the protagonist ventures into those masculine spaces in order to capture for a moment the sensuality of those hollow white forms and subtle curves where men release their amber liquid. --El Universal


When I went to the library the other day, the New Books shelf happened to be filled with Mexican and Brazilian novels about ghosts and shape shifters, novels one or two steps over from speculative fiction - basically magical realism in contemporary urban settings. Having read reviews in Rain Taxi, I took out two novels by Ana Clavel, a writer born in Mexico City in 1961 and one of "Mexico's new literary pack" according to the book-cover blurbs. Her earlier novel Desire and Its Shadow (Los deseos y su sombra) and Shipwrecked Body were both translated and published by the same people. The earlier one is more dense, and I’m not finding it as interesting, so I haven’t finished it; but Shipwrecked Body is a wickedly funny, insightful, fast-moving riff on gender, identity, and sexuality that might appeal to readers of feminist speculative fiction.
Antonia, a young heterosexual woman in Mexico City, wakes up one morning to find that she has turned into a man. She quickly realizes that women react to her differently, and with the help of a gay friend, Francisco, and some other men that he recruits, she explores the world of men and homosociality that was previously inaccessible to her. She gets involved with several women and a man and makes discoveries about sex, love, and identity.
The prose, as translated into English, is lush but not dense, and full of witty turns of phrase, wordplay, questioning of various psychological theories, and literary and mythological allusions. I found the analysis of gender and sexuality to be fresh, with a good balance of light, playful observations and deeper, more troubling insights about how they play out in everyday life on the personal level. Nothing is hugely problematized and dissected, but I didn't think the analysis was simplistic either; maybe I didn't care because I found the protagonist really likeable and her adventures entertaining.
The one aspect of the book that readers are either going to love or hate is the photos of urinals on the cover and throughout the book. Antonia and a male photographer become obsessed with the design of urinals, with how they are shaped like a voluptuous woman’s hips or like wombs. I thought this ongoing discussion was intriguing and amusing, but it may not be everybody’s cup of tea. However, if you’re looking for something that reads like speculative fiction (it reminded me a lot of Geoff Ryman’s Lust in terms of style and content) from a contemporary non-U.S. writer, I’d recommend giving this book a try. - Carrie Devall
https://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2009/04/ana-clavels-shipwrecked-body.html

In Shipwrecked Body, a 27-year-old woman from Mexico City wakes up one morning in a man’s body and begins a journey of self-discovery. Full of doubt about her gender, she moves in a world of shadows where nothing is certain.

This sexy, Kafkaesque novel poses the question of identity: what determines who we are? Is it our bodies? No, says the protagonist, Antonia, who explains that misunderstandings begin with appearances. “Identity begins with what we desire,” she explains. Or, she adds, what desires us.

Ever since she was a child, Antonia wanted to be a man, not necessarily to have a man’s body, but to live life as a man—one that seemed to be freer and more fulfi lling than that of a woman. In her quest to explore the masculine world, she must learn to be the aggressor, “the knight who charges forward.” She must also learn how to use a space that is strictly limited to men: the urinal.

Urinals become a source of fascination for Antonia, who sees them as a sensual receptacle shaped to resemble female hips, a mouth or a vagina in which men relieve themselves. Could this be a metaphor for men who take pleasure even in the most mundane, Antonia wonders? Obsessed with this new discovery, Antonia enlists the help of a few male friends to show her the various types of urinals the city has to offer.

Antonia also sees urinals as an ambiguity —beautiful objects that must handle the ugly bodily waste. Shadows, labyrinths and Minotaurs come to symbolize the vagueness of life in the novel, that nothing is one-dimensional or so certain as to be black and white with defi ned boundaries. Life is a gray matter to be explored and enjoyed.

Desire forms our identity, Antonia believes, and those desires come from without, which we must submit to if we are to find ourselves. She offers the example of blind eels that follow their natural instinct in traveling thousands of miles to reach their home. But desire is never innocent, she explains. “As soon as it awakens, it plots, schemes, lurks.”

Antonia schemes to find herself by having sex with a woman and then a man before settling on a woman as the object of her desire. After she suffers disappointment in her relationship, Antonia learns that she must move forward amid her doubts to fi nd the person she or he really is. Like a shipwrecked person, she must swim for survival.

The writing in this compact novel of 143 pages is often brilliant and poetic, but at times it falters with unnecessary repetitive phrases and wordiness. It also doesn’t help that the translation, though adequate, is occasionally marred with faulty grammar (“No, you didn’t said …”) and awkward sentences (“Malva went off down the hallway…”).

Despite these minor flaws, Ana Clavel has created a daring book: she depicts the masculine world of Mexico with all its taboos in a convincing, intriguing, and controversial manner. - David D Medina

http://literalmagazine.com/a-journey-of-self-discovery/

JaneElizabeth Lavery, The Art of Ana Clavel: Ghosts, Urinals, Dolls, Shadows and Outlaw Desires, Routledge, 2017.
read it at Google Books


Ana Clavel is a remarkable contemporary Mexican writer whose literary and multimedia oeuvre is marked by its queerness. The queer is evinced in the manner in which she disturbs conceptions of the normal not only by representing outlaw sexualities and dark desires but also by incorporating into her fictive and multimedia worlds that which is at odds with normalcy as evinced in the presence of the fantastical, the shadow, ghosts, cyborgs, golems and even urinals. Clavels literary trajectory follows a queer path in the sense that she has moved from singular modes of creative expression in the form of literary writing, a traditional print medium, towards other non-literary forms. Some of Clavels works have formed the basis of wider multimedia projects involving collaboration with various artists, photographers, performers and IT experts. Her works embrace an array of hybrid forms including the audiovisual, internet-enabled technology, art installation, (video) performance and photography. By foregrounding the queer heterogeneous narrative themes, techniques and multimedia dimension of Clavels oeuvre, the aim of this monograph is to attest to her particular contribution to Hispanic letters, which arguably is as significant as that of more established Spanish American boom femenino women writers.