THE NATURE OF HOME AND THE EXISTENTIAL TERRITORIES IN THESIS ON A DOMESTICATION, BY CAMILA SOSA VILLADA

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel Thesis on a Domestication (2024), by argentine writer Camila Sosa Villada, placing it within the context of the Latin American trans-literary scene. The objective is to investigate how the text articulates the notions of the “nature of home,” a concept advanced by Greta Gaard, and “existential territories,” under the aegis of Félix Guattari, in the process of resistance or normative adaptation of the protagonist, a successful travesti actress. Within the theoretical framework, the research also draws on the discussions of Marcos Aurélio Saquet regarding territoriality, and Stacy Alaimo regarding trans-corporeality. The methodology consists of a qualitative and bibliographic approach, based on the interpretative intersection between the narrative and these interdisciplinary theoretical references. The analysis is organized into three axes: the childhood home as a territory of oppression and trauma; the adult marital home, explored as a space of bourgeois adjustment and “family utopia”; and the body itself as the definitive home, the locus of ethical and political agency. According to our critical reading of the novel, we can infer that, although the domestic space operates as a mechanism of domestication and control, the materiality of the body and the deterritorialization of desire experienced by the character throughout her narrative journey reaffirm the impossibility of a full submission of the subject to ecologies of power—symptoms presented by literary elements and resources and problematized by interpretations that, it is hoped, will provoke further possibilities for broader readings of the artistic object in question.