Corpses and Capital: Narratives of Gendered Violence in Two Costa Rican Novels (original) (raw)
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The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation. The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.
2016
This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies. These novels look at actual instances of violence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, contributing to a social critique of historical and ongoing inequality and injustice in Latin America and the global South. Using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, this thesis argues that the novels express the human potential in desire for and to create excess. This has the effect of universalising guilt against the tendency to contextualise or localise events of violence in Mexico, Central, and South America.
El hombre de Montserrat: writings on violence in the latin american crime fiction
Alea, Estudos Neolatinos, 2018
Th e article adresses the novel El hombre de Montserrat, written by the Guatemalan writer Dante Liano and recognized within the genre of crime fi ction, as a precursory model for a narrative that established a way of rewriting the history of violence in Central American countries in both fictional and theoretical terms. Dante Liano’s successful reception has turned the novel into a reference of the Central American literature of the nineties. Th is is due to the fact that his narrative is replete with mechanisms that were seen in the best works of the previous Latin American narrative, far from the great discourses, by a displaying genre hybridization, a parodic transgression or lexical localism.
Violence in Literature: The romance of violence in Latin America
SOCIOLOGIES IN DIALOGUE, 2020
The purpose of this essay is to analyse what could be seen as a transformation of a genre of fiction, the novel of violence. In sociological tradition, various authors have chosen the detective novel as a research object to explain modernity. This sociological tradition in studies of detective fiction allows us to suggest the emergence of another form of romance, the novel of violence, in the last thirty years. In México, the latest works of Carlos Fuentes (México, 1928-2012) belong to this genre of novels. Also, Elmer Mendoza (México, 1949-) who write about the detective and the organised crime. In the novels of violence, crime and solution are secondary, because violence is seen as a structuring element of social reality. New forms of murders arise: violent crimes, international drug trafficking, sexual abuse and violence, rape, corruption, and torture. These forms appear as an aesthetic of "brutalism" and "cruelty". The world of the novel of violence is a world without law, defined by the ineffectiveness or simply the absence of the police or the judiciary. There is a lack of a legitimate authority, formal or informal, signifying the crisis of the judicial system. But, also, this literature appears to have worldwide lectors in late modernity.
Rewriting the Nation: Novels by Women on Violence in Colombia
Rewriting the Nation: Novels by Women on Violence in Colombia, 2015
Excerpt from the introduction: "I examine Colombian feminist literary production inspired by three interrelated historical eras of violence—the 1920s struggle of union workers on the Caribbean coast that led up to the 1928 Masacre de las Bananeras, the mid-century period known as La Violencia in which Liberals and Conservatives engaged in an unofficial civil war, and the Drug Wars of the 1980s. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, Colombian female authors strove for cultural legitimacy and literary recognition among the canon of male-dominated representations of the nation’s violent history. Before this point, female novelists sparsely contested the dominant patriarchal ideology, and literary representations of women adhered to traditional maternal and domestic themes." This manuscript was the winner of the 2014 Victoria Urbano Award by the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Feminista Hispánica (AILCFH, now known as the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades/AEGS)
The Language of Female Violence in Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas
I n the early 1960s in Mexico, accounts of three notorious sisters inundated newspapers. Delfina, María de Jesús and Luisa González Valenzuela, known as "Las Poquianchis," 2 were accused of crimes including mass murder, torture, the kidnapping of women for prostitution, and the clandestine operation of a brothel. Due to the extensive coverage of the case by the Mexican media, the Poquianchis became an infamous sensation, captivating the interest of the Mexican people and even drawing in international press. 3 With his novel Las muertas (1977), Jorge Ibargüengoitia responds to the overzealous media damnation of the women by providing an alternative narrative of the crimes of the Poquianchis.
Contesting the Narrative of Colombian Violence
Journal of Contemporary Poetics, 2017
Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has long been seen as the epicentre of an intense kind of Latin American violence that appears fundamentally different from everyday antagonism in what is known as the West, the First World, or the Global North. Colombia has been paralysed for half a century by an undeclared civil war between government and anti-government forces, fought first against the backdrop of the Cold War, and then against the United States-led war on drugs. This article will discuss the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, who challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence. His short story "Brides by Night" and novel The Armies step back from the context of the Colombian conflicts to draw attention to gender violence. This article argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Using the psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity developed by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others, this article discusses how a similar libidinal investment in women and Colombians as Other confines both gender demographic and a racial demographic to a similarly precarious position. In a globalising world, it is not only counterintuitive, but unethical to imagine and, in so doing, reinforce patterns of marginalisation and violence. A collective effort to traverse the fantasy of otherness in different art forms and media is crucial.