Biopolíticas del trabajo en Rafael Arévalo Martínez

This paper reflects on the relationship between the power of life and the
regulation of work in the short story by Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez, “Por
cuatrocientos dólares (Un guatemalteco en Alaska)”, published in the seventh edition
(1951) of the collection El hombre que parecía un caballo (The Man Who Looked Like a
Horse) (1915). Drawing on the studies of Foucault, Deleuze, Gabriel Giorgi, and others on
biopolitics, this paper seeks to investigate the fictionalization of the rationalization of life
in the productive world—or, in other words, the narrative tension between the power of
life and governmentality, the counterpoint between irreverent feasting and the organization
of bodily consumption in industrial production. The aim of this work is to define the role
of queer aesthetics and baroque style, both in terms of form and content, in the definition
of a subalternity (from the point of view of work and social role) as one of the key
tensions that characterizes modernity.