Enfoques

Becoming-bird: Alternative Models of Girlhood in "Pájaros en la boca" by Samanta Schweblin

Ana Deleon-Zemke

University of California, Davis

DOI: 10.58748/ADZBB

Resumen:

This article analyzes Samanta Schweblin's short story "Mouthful of Birds" to examine how the protagonist Sara's consumption of live birds creates alternative models of girlhood that resist patriarchal control and environmental toxicity. Through theoretical frameworks from Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stacy Alaimo, and Barbara Creed, I argue that Sara's transformation represents sophisticated embodied resistance operating across psychological, political, and environmental registers. Her bird consumption functions as abjection that threatens patriarchal symbolic order, becoming-animal that creates escape routes from prescribed femininity, trans-corporeal alliance that refuses toxic incorporation, and monstrous-feminine embodiment that challenges masculine authority. Rather than pathological behavior requiring psychiatric intervention, Sara's becoming-bird demonstrates how girlhood can become a site of radical transformation that addresses interconnected crises of patriarchal regulation and environmental destruction. Her refusal of domesticated consumption and direct material alliance with more-than-human nature creates new possibilities for existence outside industrial capitalism's toxic systems. This analysis reveals how Samanta Schweblin's fiction positions children as incisive social critics whose marginalized status grants unique clarity about normalized violence and dysfunction. Sara's transformation suggests that alternative models of girlhood can emerge through material interconnection with non-human nature, offering environmental wisdom that challenges the systems designed to contain and define feminine identity.