It 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 them and embrace them.
Mouthfeel Press
“Among the year’s best LGBTQ+ literature.”
—Revista Qué Leer (Spain)
“Her wordcraftship is as enchanting as her capacity to dissect fears and dreams, turning the reading of Naming the Body into a visit to a house of mirrors where each corner becomes a reflection of ourselves.”
—Author Nando López for Vanity Fair (Spain)
“Naming the Body is that sexual education lesson I never received at home nor in school; it identified the feelings I was never meant to feel –but, like termites were devouring me from the inside out—, it recognized my existence and the value of my all. After reading this personal collection of essays, I too started to tremble, to allow myself to touch parts of my experiences that were too painful to be acknowledged. María 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
“In this beautiful ode to the female body, Maria Minguez 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. Though deeply personal, Naming the Body is a guide for all women, indeed, all humans who struggle to be seen, to feel, to heal, and to love. A brilliant and unabashedly feminist tour de force for these painful and confusing times.”
—Anne Raeff, author of Only the River
“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. This book is, in many ways, about the limitations of the body and the limitations placed on certain bodies, yet it is also about nonconformity. Naming the Body is an archive that reminds us there are other ways of being in the world.”
—Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, author of Pero venías tú (forthcoming) and translator of All that Was Future
“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. Thank you, María Mínguez Arias, for naming your body, because in doing so you’ve also given me the words to do it.”
—Mariana Graciano, author of The Air
“Writing in a wise, untethered, and elegant voice, Mínguez Arias presents us with a range of hybrid textualities… a critique of the patriarchy and its oppressive systems, it sparks both smiles and rage.”
—Dr. Norma Elia Cantú, Chicana folklorist, poet, novelist, and professor of Humanities
“A bird’s eye view of the collective experience of womanhood. A journey, a quest through someone else’s skin that echoes our own. How wonderful it is to be able to construct a dialogue with one’s body. Naming the Body is profound and courageous!”
—Cam Sánchez Bolaño, Editor Newsweek (Latin America)
GRATEFUL TO THE FOLLOWING JOURNALS FOR PUBLISHING ESSAYS FROM THESE COLLECTION!
María Mínguez Arias is a fiction and non-fiction bilingual writer, random editor, translator, and journalist. 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). She is Operations Director and co-acting Executive Director at interseccional feminist press Aunt Lute Books in San Francisco, California.
maría mínguez arias 