In 'Zona de dolor' (Zone of Pain), Eltit places the body – her body – at the center of this political and social re-signification: she cuts and burns herself and then goes to a brothel, where she reads part of her novel 'Lumpérica.' Her mortified body mirrors the wounded national body, and establishes a connection between the individual and the collective, and the private and the public, exposing her physicality, her words, and her voice in communion with a space that exists at the edge of social structures. In the latter part of this video Diamela Eltit's voice accompanies her action of washing pavement in front of the brothel, collapsing the boundaries between her novel's words, her body, and the space inhabited by 'public women.' Eltit not only disrupts the space of gendered sexual transaction, but also proposes a powerful reflection upon where the 'zone of pain' might be located in a historical moment marked by sorrow and injustices.

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