Resumen de Gender, Waste, and the Uncanny Home in Única mirando al mar
In the novel Única mirando al mar (1993) by Costa Rican author Fernando Contreras Castro, a community of trash pickers make a new life for themselves within an overflowing garbage dump. I employ psychoanalytic categories to address how Contreras’s protagonists accept the normalization of disaster and decay within a neoliberal, post-revolutionary context. I complicate the notion of disenchanted normalcy (perpetuated by neoliberal policies) by exploring gender’s role within abject spaces. Within an uncanny domestic setting, ruin and abjection provide a theoretical space in which readers may see the social-constructedness of gendered roles and spheres of influence
