Camila Sosa Villada - Les Vilaines

2021, Argentina, Camila Sosa Villada, French,

"Les Vilaines" (The Bad Ones) is the French language edition of "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) published in Argentina in 2019 by Camila Sosa Villada.

From the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada, a book of love and affection: when we finish the last page, we want the whole world to read it too! When she arrived in the city of Córdoba to study at the university, Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada decided to go to Parque Sarmiento during the night. She was scared to death, thinking that the brutal verdict she had heard from her father could come to fruition at any moment: "One day they will knock on this door to warn me that they found you dead, thrown into a ditch." For him, this was the only possible destination for a boy who dressed as a woman.

Camila wanted to see the famous transvestites of the park, and there, before those women and the difficult reality to which they are subjected, was immediately welcomed and felt, for the first time in her life, that she had found her place of belonging in the world. The novel is all this: a rite of initiation, a fairy tale or a horror story, the portrait of a group identity, an explosive manifesto, and a guided tour of the imagination of the author. These pages converge two facets of the trans community, facets that fascinate and repel societies throughout the world: the transvestite fury and the feast that is in transvestite.

According to Wikipedia, Camila Sosa Villada is a transgender Argentine writer, theatre, film, and television actress1. She was born on 28 January 1982 in La Falda, Argentina. Throughout her childhood, she moved around the Córdoba Province, living in a number of cities including Cruz del Eje, Los Sauces, Mina Clavero, and Córdoba1. She studied Social Communication for three years and another four years for her bachelor’s degree at the National University of Córdoba.

In 2009, Villada premiered her play ‘Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de un travesti’, a biodrama of her life that fused her personal experiences that she recorded on her blog, ‘La Novia de Sandro’, with the poetry of Federico García Lorca1. Her first novel, ‘Las malas’ (2019), about a group of travestis who practice street prostitution in Parque Sarmiento, became a critical and public success and catapulted her to fame, establishing her as one of the most original writers of contemporary Argentine literature and LGBT literature in Argentina. The work won numerous literary awards, such as the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and was translated into several languages such as French, English, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish.

She set the example for other transgender women, proving that a career from a street worker to a famous writer and actress is possible. This is what she said about her childhood: "As a child, I imagined that I was going to act, that I would do theater, cinema, but not that I was going to live from this. I started dressing at the age of 16 in a village of 5000 inhabitants. I know very well what it was like to be a transvestite in a town like that 20 years ago. It was doubly burdensome."

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Wikipedia

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