Behind masks and avatars: the incarnated and connected voice of Remedios Zafra in her texts

Abstract

Based on ten essayistic, autobiographical and/or fictional books by Remedios Zafra published between 2005 and 2021, we study the function of the reversible metaphor of the mask, the nebula of concepts that surround or precede it (such as the "avatar") and the intensification of its use in her latest works. From cyberfeminism, Zafra proposes to think about the anti-authoritarian games about an identity often hidden behind screens, electronic artefacts and mask-characters. She shows how they account for a proteiform, vulnerable and travelling self, but from an embodied materialism, the rejection of the imposition of the neoliberal order in a precarious cultural sector and from the awareness that our viscera and flows determine us as much as the smiling face that women have to present to the world. It also analyses how, by removing herself and the other from the mask, authorising and disavowing those who hold power, the author opens the door to a poetics of obscenity, of affection and of sisterhood in the literary field in order to inaugurate a new regime of intellectual representation.