Biography
Mónica Covarrubias Velázquez was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. She earned a bachelor's degree in Hispanic Literature and a master's degree in Latin American Literature from the Universidad de Sonora in northern Mexico. After one year of teaching secondary education, she moved to Arizona to pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature.
Her research explores the aesthetics of waste, disgust, and the grotesque in Hispanic literature and visual culture. Beginning with her master's research, she examined the symbolism of garbage, waste, and abjection in first-person Latin American novels, particularly through the traditions of the Bildungsroman and the Spanish picaresque novel. This work led to the co-authored chapter, "La estética de lo residual en Diablo Guardián de Xavier Velasco" (2020), as well as the presentation "Adolescentes basurizados en El juguete rabioso, de Roberto Arlt, y Diablo Guardián, de Xavier Velasco" at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento in Argentina (2018). In these works, she analyzes how marginalized characters become associated with images of waste and disgust while simultaneously "recycling" their experiences of the abject into literary creation.
She has also published on contemporary Latin American literature and film, with particular attention to grotesque aesthetics and representations of consumer culture through the lens of Zygmunt Bauman's work on liquid modernity and consumer society.
Her doctoral dissertation examines the affects and effects of grotesque aesthetics in seventeenth-century Spanish art and literature. Focusing on the cultural and rhetorical functions of disgust, her research argues that disgust, although often deployed to marginalize the Other, can also serve as a performative discourse that produces unexpected ethical and political effects. For example, grotesque representations of women may function not simply to denigrate female bodies but, in certain contexts, to defend women against misogynistic narratives.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journals
- Covarrubias, Mónica. “Cuerpos femeninos podridos: la imagen grotesca en 'La inocencia castigada' de María de Zayas y 'Los pájaros de la noche' de Mariana Enriquez.” Laberinto Journal, vol. 18, 2025, pp. 23-40.
- “La voz de cuál cuerpo: Nadie sabe que estoy aquí (2020) de Gaspar Antillo.” Hispanic Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, 2023, pp. 11-29.
- “Del amor en la posmodernidad: dos relatos de Claudia Ulloa”. Lejana. Revista Crítica de Narrativa Breve, no. 16, 2023, pp. 88-102, DOI: https://doi.org/10.24029/lejana.2023.16.5106
Article in Edited Volume
- Covarrubias, Mónica and Rosa María Burrola. “La estética de lo residual en Diablo Guardián de Xavier Velasco,” Revisiones críticas de la literatura hispanoamericana: poéticas, identidades y desplazamientos. Coords. Fortino Corral, Gloria Vergara and Alejandro Palma. Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Universidad de Colima, and Universidad de Sonora, 2020.
Book Review
- “Edward H. Friedman, editor. A Companion to the Spanish Picaresque Novel. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2022. ISBN: 978-1855663671. 240 pp.” Laberinto Journal, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 40-41.