Eroticism, Monstrosity, and Abjection in Laura Restrepo's The Divine Boys

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of Los divinos (The Divine Boys 2018), Laura Restrepo's most recent novel. The narrative is based on the rape and murder of Yuliana Samboním, a girl from a humble neighborhood of Bogotá at the hands of renowned architect, Rafael Uribe Noguera. Beyond the aberrant crime, the novel invites us to reflect, from a philosophical perspective, on monstrosity as a multivalent metaphor, open to a multiplicity of meanings to define phenomena as varied as animal impulse, abjectness, perversion, racism, otherness, violence, sexuality, and death. To interpret and underscore Restrepo's incomparable ability to reflect those darker and more sordid aspects of the human psyche, as a theoretical framework, the essay focuses on George Bataille's studies on eroticism and Julia Kristeva's work on subjectivity and abjectness.