Las niñas del Caribe y la 'conciencia corporal": apuntes para una descolonización encarnada.

This article summarizes the contributions that writers of the Hispanic Caribbean can make to the understanding of the relationship between bodies, subjectivity and power in the Greater Caribbean and the Americas. Based on a more comprehensive study of coming of age novels by Caribbean authors (Antonia Palacios, Magali García Ramis, Marvel Moreno, Fanny Buitrago and Mayra Santos Febres), Celis illuminates the lessons that the writing and analysis of the stories, voices and perspectives of girls and adolescents can offer to Gender studies in the Caribbean and Latin America. In particular, the analysis focuses on the actors, scenarios, discourses and practices surrounding girls' bodies that guarantee the embodiment of gender in patriarchal societies, as well as on the connection of the process by which gender emerges with the institution and functioning of other forms of social hegemony. Celis reviews also the contributions that the concept of 'corporeal consciousness' can make to the urgent revision of the feminist project of emancipation, and to the global process of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]