"Country Club" and Global City in Claudia Piñeiro's The Widows of Thursdays

Abstract

Abstract:My article links Henri Lefebvre's theory of social space to Neil Brenner's insights into the global. By focusing on Claudia Piñeiro's novel The Widows of Thursdays (2005), I reflect on some of the transformations taking place in Buenos Aires, as the very wealthy and the emergent middle-class retreat into private luxury-living housing quarters, known as 'country clubs.' First, I link the global city of neoliberalism with institutions, urban plans, and discourses to address the former's role in the creation of social space. Second, an attentive examination of space challenges its assumed transparency to outline its concrete material, mental, and lived components. Third, by recognizing the role of rhythm and affect in our lived experience, I consider the place of the body's affective core in the construction and reconstruction of social space within neoliberalism. I then demonstrate that the country club's ties to the global city of neoliberalism mediates between political economy, the creation and reorganization of social space, and the body's affective states. In fact, as a satellite-district of the global city, the country club kits out a representational space in which social space, affect, and the body 'enable collective life to live' (Lefebvre).