Transcendence through Illumination: Marginalized Identity Re-valued as Art and Literature

Abstract

I provide a critical analysis of the female identity of E. Luminata, written by Chilean writer, Diamela Eltit. This essay will examine how E. Luminata fits into the world of autobiographical feminism, with ties to multiculturalism, and world literature. Her series of artistic scenes in the town square allow her to challenge standardized notions of beauty’s ephemerality and permanence. Within the text, E. Luminata uses her art to protest Pinochet’s military government during the 1980’s. E. Luminata actively uses art, aesthetics, and her sexualized identity to create an argument against the “grotesque” nature of the military regime. As such, her artistic protests, read within a piece of translated literature, help readers to define the nature of the aesthetic experience of womanhood and contemplate personal agency, desire, and cultural possessiveness. Her identity is manifested through the contradictory binary of the natural and the artificial, since she presents herself as a spectacle, for others to perceive. By doing so, she deconstructs her own objectification within the novel.