This chapter continues the task of demonstrating the largely unacknowledged literary force and range of Ángeles Mastretta’s works by focusing on the hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in the author’s texts. Such an exploration will serve to place Mastretta more precisely within the context of contemporary Mexican writing. Although Mastretta has received less critical attention than some of her fellow Mexican women writers (Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska), Mastretta shares many of the artistic and ideological preoccupations of these writers. Elena Poniatowska, for example, enjoys considerable prestige in elite literary circles – unlike Mastretta – and yet she touches upon issues which Mastretta also writes about. Like the works of Ángeles Mastretta, the novels of Poniatowska are committed left-wing testimonies of the lives of various unrepresented people, predominantly women. This distinctive orientation sets their work apart from the Mexican Revolution novelists, especially the male writers.

Typical of the New Historical aspect of Poniatowska’s novel is not only her desire to talk of the marginalized Other but also her employment of intertextuality which serves as a literary weapon against dominant discourses (García, Broken Bars, p. 6) and can be seen as a direct influence on Mastretta’s Mal de amores. Mastretta’s work, like that of her better-known and more politicallyengaged compatriot Poniatowska, contributes to a literature of protest and resistance and seeks to recover the other side of a specifically Mexican history and culture from a feminine/feminist perspective. Poniatowska is a writer who has undoubtedly exerted great literary influence upon Mastretta, yet there are some significant differences between the two writers, notably in their narrative style, Poniatowska’s being more innovative and experimental. Both belong to the Post- Boom generation and both make use of a wide variety of discourses (literary, journalistic, historical, colloquial) and narrative techniques such as humour and irony. While their works are highly entertaining, drawing on a variety of popular sources and rhetorical devices, they are underpinned by serious purpose, fulfiling social and documentary functions, and showing particular sensitivity to the position of women. The plot-centredness and chronological structure of the works of both Mastretta and Poniatowska (Hasta no verte Jesús mío) provide for greater reader accessibility than did the typical Boom novel, though their trenchant social criticism precludes ‘passive’ consumption or complacency on the part of the reader.