Camila Sosa Villada - Tesis sobre una domesticación

2019, Argentina, Camila Sosa Villada, Spanish,

Original title: "Tesis sobre una domesticación" (Thesis on a domestication) by Camila Sosa Villada.

A trans actress – who could not be a mother – adopts a six-year-old boy with her husband, a homosexual lawyer. That HIV-positive boy – who did not know his biological father and whose mother committed suicide when she discovered that she infected him with AIDS – was raised by the maternal grandparents, until the grandfather killed his wife and then committed suicide.

The book lays bare the fragility of the bonds and the "invisible" agreements, not exempt from violence, that are woven around marriage and couples. The writer and actress from Cordoba raises questions about motherhood, fatherhood and orphanhood with an unlimited curiosity to try to account for the abyss between desires and experiences, between what is imagined or dreamed and what happens in the family back room. The apparent initial happiness of "life resolved" explodes. "Her legs, her heart, her transvestism, her family, everything weighs on her then as she had never weighed on. And being an orphan too," warns the narrator.

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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