The Fire Witch: Rhizomatic Body and Female Deterritorialization in El Año del Desierto by Pedro Mairal

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of Pedro Mairal’s novel *El año del desierto* from a rhizomatic perspective grounded in the theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to examine the deterritorialization of the female body in a context of civilizational collapse. The figure of María, traversed by exposure and the dismantling of social matrices, becomes an Othered body, split from the geopolitical coordinates of the nation-state. Her red hair, through its performativity and mutation, mediates the transition from disciplinary subjection within the city to a symbolic reappropriation in peripheral communal spaces, where she is resignified as a “fire witch.” The catastrophe is not approached as a mere dissolution of spatial order but as an opening toward alternative modes of subjectivation that question the categories of body, gender, territory, and identity. The analysis seeks to illuminate the tensions between dispossession and creative potency that shape the becoming of the female body within scenarios of social disintegration.