ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the push and pull generated by the contradictory, double location of the body, that stimulates growth and change in this novel; the kind of progress towards self-consciousness and social agency that is the common feature of all of the works explored in Gender and the Self. The story told in Arrancame la vida is set against the backdrop of the politically turbulent post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1930s and 1940s. In short, Catalina is written as a space of synthesis that shows doubleness, not fixity or certainty, to be the essence of a transformative agency, expressed in Butler's philosophical mode as follows. The story finally ends with the funeral of Andres, whose textual demise cannot easily be disconnected from the narrative's obvious sociopolitical motivations, thus pointing hopefully towards a future without the form of patriarchal control embodied by him throughout the novel but questioned right at the end of his life, in the words cited above.
