‘For me, everything was about the continent’: reimagining gender affects and collectivity through Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco (2023)

Our paper brings together two seemingly dissimilar disciplines, philosophy of emotions and postcolonial literature, to analyse Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo’s novel, Chilco (2023). We argue that emotional contagion is a positive move in the novel, as it enables a decolonial, gender-based collectivity in light of Catrileo’s depiction of the colonial legacies in Chilco. Because we see Chilco as a political fiction under an inter and transdisciplinary framework, our purpose is to analyse how Catrileo’s Chilco illustrates women’s collectivity in a decolonial narrative drawing from emotional contagion and gender studies. Our paper has two sections. In “Connected body,” we draw on Chilean feminism to illustrate the experience of collectivity, delving into shared rage and joy (Judith Butler, 2015; Sara Ahmed, 2014). In “Connected discourses,” we draw on Magalí Armillas-Tyseira and Anne Garland Mahler (2021), Audre Lorde (2017), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2015) to illustrate the post- and ongoing colonial discourses that are challenged in the novel. Catrileo’s novel unveils borderless and timeless (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010) notions of gender using a collective voice both in form and content. Finally, given the dialogic nature of the paper, we reflect on our intersectional experience as women working in academia and in between the Global North and South. This paper is triggered by fiction, but it is the result of personal experiences too. Writing this paper together mirrors a feminist and decolonial practice that, although inexhaustive, may have potentially practical and gendered consequences for collective feminisms.