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Naming the Body

A Queer Woman's Restorative Mapping of the Self

María Mínguez Arias Robin Myers

$28.95   $26.20

Paperback

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English
Mouthfeel Press
09 May 2026
Naming the Body: A Queer Woman's Restorative Mapping of the Self celebrates and reclaims a queer woman's uprooted, mothering, ailing body and an erased identity through memory and language. An identity that just three decades ago could not be claimed because women, especially queer women, didn't have the language to signify and embrace them. This collection of sixteen units of text, freeing itself from all form or expectations, is written with unequivocal honesty and one single goal in mind: to give voice to a silenced body. The result is literary patchwork, storytelling under the stars, a cry, a riddle, a manifesto, even a road map for the future! Naming the Body is a contemporary hybrid memoir in translation that places the body at the center of multiple realities through a unique, interrogative, and entertaining reading experience.
By:  
Translated by:  
Imprint:   Mouthfeel Press
Dimensions:   Height: 216mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 10mm
Weight:   200g
ISBN:   9781957840505
ISBN 10:   1957840501
Pages:   168
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

María Mínguez Arias is a fiction and non-fiction bilingual writer, accidental editor, translator, and journalist born in Spain and residing in California for the past three decades. She is the author of Nombrar el cuerpo (2022) named among the Best Queer Lit of the year in Spain, the Int'l Latino Book Award winning novel Patricia sigue aquí (2018), and co-editor of #NiLocasNiSolas: narrativa escrita por mujeres en Estados Unidos (2023). Her essays, short stories and reviews appear in anthologies and journals in the US, Spain, and Mexico. She delves into her identity as an immigrant, queer woman, mother, and Spanish-language writer in the US to explore subjects such as memory (digital, familial, and historical), motherhood, language, the body, and everyday life and strength as experienced on the margins. She is part of what has been coined the #NewLatinoBoom: a 21st century movement of writers, editors, publishers, and other literary professionals that, aided by all things digital, are collaborating in doing the work in Spanish and in the United States. She works as Co-Director of feminist press Aunt Lute Books in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner and their two young adult kids.

Reviews for Naming the Body: A Queer Woman's Restorative Mapping of the Self

In this beautiful ode to the female body, María Mínguez Arias takes us on a journey with both prose and poetry as our guides, through the intimate terrain of illness and healing, the complex emotions of motherhood, and the struggle to claim her body and her queerness as her own. A brilliant and unabashedly feminist tour de force for these painful and confusing times.- Anne Raeff, author of Only the River After reading this personal collection of essays, I started to tremble, to allow myself to touch parts of my experiences too painful to be acknowledged. Mínguez Arias gave me the tools to freely inhabit my own self and name the monsters (i.e. misogyny, religion, Dominican and American patriarchal societies, education systems and politics that inhibit education, fear, survival, etc.). This text provided me with the words to name and to love myself vociferously.- Kianny N. Antigua, author of Bestezuelas and translator of Dominicana There are those who say that mothering is giving our children the words they don't yet have. But what happens when the words to name ourselves don't exist-when they were not given to us by our own mothers? Naming the Body is an inquiry into personal and collective memory. Mínguez Arias rereads her own past through the light of new language-now that she can call things by their name. If, as Voloshinov said, language is the arena of class struggle, then the pages in this book become a territory that subverts, a subversive cartography.-Mariana Graciano, author of The Air In Naming the Body María Mínguez Arias returns to the corporeal to explore the foundational memories and bodily experiences that shape her as a queer, migrant woman, mother, daughter, lover, and writer. This journey requires imagination and the will to surrender as both, the body and its language, can only be reached through approximations. She invites us to imagine a world in which we look within to allow the body to articulate the ache, the pleasure, the fear, and the tremors that come with being alive. -Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, author of Pero venías tú, and translator of All That Was Future / Todo lo qua due futuro


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