In this dissertation, I examine how 21st-century novels and short stories written by women authors from Brazil and Argentina participate in the contemporary debates about feminicide in Latin America. Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde introduced the legal and political concept of feminicide to the murder investigations at Ciudad Juárez, at the US-Mexico border, in the 1990s. Feminicide addresses the killing of women because of their gender, and it has been studied in various disciplines, such as law, anthropology, sociology, and public health. Feminist scholars such as Rita Segato affirm that this extreme form of violence against women is structural and instrumental to maintaining a hierarchical social organization. Over the past decade, massive protests throughout Latin America helped popularize the concept, and several literary works focusing on this topic have been published. Although violence against women is an age-old problem that has always been present in literature, the conceptualization of feminicide has given contemporary writers a feminist framework to approach the topic anew. This phenomenon is only just beginning to be addressed by literary scholars.
My dissertation highlights the aesthetic dimensions of the political struggle against feminicidal violence while exploring the potential of literature to create knowledge, build community, and perform acts of disobedience to a patriarchal political order. In Chapter 1, I study the nonfiction novel Chicas muertas (2014) by Argentine author Selva Almada. I argue that Chicas muertas produces feminist theory about feminicide by exploring several narrative aesthetics, including journalistic chronicle, crime fiction, and autobiography. Moreover, Chicas muertas disrupts the national history of political violence by suggesting that feminicide is political and by centering on border towns in rural Argentina. In Chapter 2, I study how the novel Mulheres empilhadas (2019) by Brazilian author Patrícia Melo confronts the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil. By contrasting how the national justice system deals with violence against white middle-class women and violence against Indigenous women, this novel exposes the justice system’s biases against women and against racialized communities. I argue that the novel suggests that confronting culturally constructed imaginaries about Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women in Brazil is a necessary step in the feminist struggle to combat feminicide. In Chapter 3, I study the horror short story “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (2016), by Argentine author Mariana Enriquez. This story engages with the topic of female monstrosity as a response to feminicide. I argue that when women choose to transform themselves into she-monsters by walking through a bonfire and surviving, they are performing an act of embodied resistance to feminicidal violence.
Overall, this dissertation shows how feminist writers expand the conversation about feminicidal violence beyond simplistic victim-perpetrator paradigms that neglect systemic violence. Moreover, I contend that these works challenge national histories of political violence when they frame feminicide as political violence, exposing the biases of local and national justice systems against women and racialized communities. Finally, I sustain that feminist literature about feminicide co-create a counter-discourse about feminicide in dialogue with other feminist arts, scholarship, and activism.
