Critique of normative motherhood and of nature as an object of appropriation in Libertad Demitrópulos’s dictatorship and post-dictatorship novels

This dissertation examines the representations of motherhood and nature in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship novels of Argentine writer Libertad Demitrópulos, focusing on the literary strategies through which her work challenges patriarchal, colonial, and extractivist discourses. Although recent literary studies have increasingly recognized Demitrópulos’s contribution to Argentine literature, critical approaches have largely concentrated on Río de las congojas, leaving unexplored the broader development of her corpus, the complexity of configurations of motherhood, and the role of non-human nature as an active force.

Through an analysis of her novels from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods, this research argues that Demitrópulos performs a subversive reappropriation of dominant narratives by constructing alternative forms of motherhood and by representing nature beyond its reduction to a passive resource. Drawing on feminist, ecofeminist, and decolonial perspectives, the dissertation explores motherhood as a heterogeneous and culturally constructed category that ranges from non-normative to openly dissident forms, while also examining nature as a dynamic, resistant, and multiple entity.

The study argues that Demitrópulos establishes symbolic and political correspondences between the exploitation of women and the appropriation of nature, while simultaneously imagining forms of care, memory, and coexistence that disrupt hierarchical models of domination. Ultimately, this dissertation positions Demitrópulos’s literature as a project with a strong decolonial orientation that expands contemporary debates on gender, ecology, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world.