Failing The Language: Writing and Abnormal Corporeality in Las Primas by Aurora Venturini

Abstract

This article examines the points of contact that Aurora Venturini’s novel Las Primas (2007) establishes between language, corporeality, and normative deviation (linguistic, social, cultural, etc.). Drawing on the concept of a “failed tongue,” it argues that the narrator’s dislalia and her disruptive stylistic choices operate as aesthetic-political procedures in which affected syntax, hybrid vocabulary, and anomalous punctuation—far from representing a disability experience—embody a poetics of difference. Incorporating insights from crip theory (McRuer, 2016) and a hermeneutic method of textual analysis, the article reframes Yuna as a writer who fails not by mistake but by necessity, and whose writing subverts the logics of linguistic ableism. In this way, Las Primas becomes a narrative device (Foucault, 2020) that challenges the norms and limits of what can be said, read, and written.