Writing the Antiportrait: Decapitations and Fragmented Identity in Roque Larraquy’s La comemadre and Eduardo Rubinschik’s La entereza

ABSTRACT: This article examines the figures of decapitation in Roque Larraquy’s novel La comemadre (2010) and Eduardo Rubinschik’s La entereza (2017) as both a provocative aesthetic strategy and a self-reflexive political gesture. Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between literary studies and recent theorizations of portraiture in the visual arts, it introduces the concept of the “literary antiportrait” to illuminate previously overlooked intermedia and performative dimensions of both novels and to investigate the cultural and historical resonance of decapitations in contemporary Argentinian literature. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the intruder and Michael Newman’s historical notion of anti-portrait, the article reads both novels as paradoxically reversed portraits, created through grotesque and allegorical techniques of decapitation. While La comemadre intertwines national traumas with corporeal fragmentation, La entereza deconstructs mythical cephalophores to explore the interplay between personal and national identity.