“We are all commodities at Yaxaktun”: Resisting Oppression Through the Latina “Multiplicitous Selfhood” in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse Silvia Moreno-García’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022) against the backdrop of posthumanism and Latina feminist philosophy, in order to show how the transgression of the human/animal dualism of Moreau’s hybrids, now embodied by his daughter Carlota, exceeds that explored in H.G. Wells’ original novel. Thus, this study demonstrates that Moreno-García’s historical re-contextualisation within the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901), far from simply retelling the story against a different, exotic background, provides an intersectional commentary on the sociocultural and political factors that enforce commodification. Carlota Moreau’s existence as part-jaguar and part-human—both white and Maya—converges various systems of domination: the reification of her body as a scientific project and the racial and patriarchal oppressions that surround it. Following Mariana Ortega’s concept of “multiplicitous selfhood,” this article analyses how the imagery of fragmentation and the politics of naming work in the novel to endorse liminality as a valid and legitimate state of being. Hence, diverging from Wells’ portrayal of hybridity as imperfect and incomplete, Moreno-García’s multiplicitous selves embrace, rather than shun, in-betweenness as a form of resisting from the margins.