The scatological subject: immigration, evacuation, and the abject in Juan Bonilla´s Los príncipes nubios

Abstract

Juan Bonilla’s Los príncipes nubios (2003), winner of the Premio Biblioteca Breve, has garnered attention for its representation of illegal immigration and the globalized sex trade. The novel’s narrator works for an international company that rescues beautiful people from zones of political or socio-economic crisis to service first-world clients as sex workers. This bodily contraband problematizes the boundaries of national identity, consumer wealth, and value in a globalized spain. Drawing on Kristeva’s theory of the abject, this essay examines how liminal organs and bodily emissions incarnate the border-crossing of the somatic body to symbolize the threatening instability of the national body in the novel. The evacuation of the morbid other from his misfortune for consumption by spain  ultimately tropes an evacuation of the (national) body-an elimination of feces through the expulsion of the immigrant abject, which is necessary to the corporeal and ethical integrity of the spanish subject.