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Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels: Psychoanalysis and Gendered Violence 1st Edition Beatriz L. Botero (Eds.) full chapter instant download
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LITERATURES OF THE
AMERICAS
Series Editor: Norma E. Cantú
WOMEN IN
CONTEMPORARY
LATIN AMERICAN
NOVELS
Psychoanalysis and
Gendered Violence
Edited by
Beatriz L. Botero
Literatures of the Americas
Series editor
Norma E. Cantú
University of Missouri–Kansas City
Kansas City, MO, USA
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in lit-
erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
boundaries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the
United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contempo-
rary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is
rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include
cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial,critical race, and
ecofeminist approaches.
Women in
Contemporary Latin
American Novels
Psychoanalysis and Gendered Violence
Editor
Beatriz L. Botero
Faculty Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Madison, WI, USA
Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the
19th century
vii
viii Contents
Index 135
Contributors
ix
x CONTRIBUTORS
Beatriz L. Botero
There is more than one way to talk about women in Latin America, and
women’s position depends on several factors, especially economic, cul-
tural, and social factors, whose interplay can create independent, fully
potentiated women. However, economic, cultural, or social status does
not guarantee women’s freedom from violence in private and public
spheres, because in Latin America, women deal with a culture of machismo
that is embedded in the social costume. In that respect, Latin American
feminism needs to rethink the basics. Machista culture pervades the social
structure, with a strong sense of masculine pride and the idea that impor-
tant matters are associated with the male. Therefore, men’s voices matter
more than those of women as the qualities of authority, autonomy, and
universality are labeled male, whereas love, dependence, and particularism
are labeled female (Ortner 1975, 179). When we study the role of women
in Latin American novels, we must not forsake the concept of machismo.
As Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega observes, “with their heartfelt
devotion to motherhood and their equally heartfelt refusal of fatherhood,
Latin machos have made lasting contributions to state-of-the-art
machismo” (58–59).
Sadly, violence has become part of daily life for numerous women in
Latin America. Violence, to be clear, ranges from constant micro-
aggressions to murder. Most of this violence and death are associated with
the desire to punish and to control women’s actions, bodies, emotions,
and behaviors, which fits with the assumption that men own women
(Russell and Harmes 2001, 13–14). The figures for these cases are alarm-
ingly high—and growing. The 2014 Economic Commission for Latin
America’s (CEPAL) report on feminicide3 found that 2289 women were
killed by their partners in Mexico; 531 in Honduras; 225 in Argentina;
217 in Guatemala; 188 in the Dominican Republic; 183 in El Salvador;
145 in Colombia; 90 in Peru; 40 in Chile; and 32 in Paraguay (Navarez
2012). “Crimes of passion, killings due to an unexpected pregnancy, stab-
bings during theft and beheadings after a divorce” are but a few cases of
feminicide (Navarez 2015). Over the past seven years in Argentina alone,
1808 women have been murdered because of gendered violence. In Brazil,
on average, fifteen women per day die. The National Citizen Feminicide
Observatory of Mexico reports that “3892 women [have been] killed
across [Mexican] territory” (Navarez 2015). In the estimation of Jean
Franco, the situation is exacerbated by the desire of hegemonic institu-
tions to maintain social order.4 According to the Pan-American Health
Organization (PAHO), “[certain] forms of violence against women … are
4 B.L. BOTERO
She is talking about the Indian women who were fascinated, violated,
or seduced by the Spaniards9 and, at the same time, the rape of these
women produces an image of double violence from the spectator’s per-
spective, as it contains sexual pleasure for the rapist and terror for the vic-
tim. It is a violence that combines sadistic pleasure with rejection and fear,
Eros and Thanatos, desire and aggression. The result is a psychological
6 B.L. BOTERO
and social cost for the raped and the absence of fatherhood in the social
imaginary, which can be represented as the rejection of the familiar envi-
ronment.10 This is one of the reasons why the male figure is complicated
and is manifested in social-politics as masculine leaders who perpetuate
violence even though that violence results in painful consequences.
The same way that we have scars in the skin, we can say that we have
scars in our own history. Social frustration can lead to trauma, scars, and
memory; society uses these same three aspects to express feelings and to
construct narratives that reinforce identity. In this book, each chapter ana-
lyzes, implicitly or explicitly, the social discharge of this frustration through
the lens of literature in a specific time and space.
Scars create a map on the skin that offers a historical account; a person
can generally remember the story behind a scar, the moment of pain and
drama, and so too can a society. We construct maps of our memories and
bodies. On top of this macro-level identity, we construct a narrative of
who we are and where we are: personal identity and national identity.
Cristina Moreiras makes this point a salient feature of her work Cultura
herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática (2002), yoking the idea
of the Spanish dictator Franco with that of the scar. That painful historical
moment is still present in Spain more than forty years after the dictator’s
death. Further still, Slavoj Žižek turns to September 11, 2001, in Welcome
to the Desert of the Real (2002), where he claims that the day was more
than an attack on the Twin Towers: it also formed a scar on individuals and
on the modern global world.
Scars are indelible marks, marks of recognition. Traumatic moments are
those most vividly remembered, and those memories help to avoid their
repetition. As a society, we remember tragedy with monuments and by
passing on—via narration—the stories surrounding these events to the
next generation. In that sense, murmurs figure as another way of recon-
necting with the trauma of death. In murmurs, there are no clear words,
only sounds that connect two worlds: the visible and non-visible world, as
Juan Rulfo teaches us,11 the material world and the world of death.
The third aspect that merits analysis when discussing gender in contem-
porary Latin American literature is the “boundary stretching” of the dyad
between male and female. On one hand, “extreme masculinity” frames vio-
lence as part of normal behavior (Franco 2013, 15). On the other, extreme
female-body construction entails exaggeration of form and hyper-sexuality
in line with the aesthetic of television models and narco values.12 This furi-
ous way of life, full of bullets, money, and women, is depicted as preferable
INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 7
to a boring (and poor) normal life. The cultural products that talk about the
narco realm show both females and males as exaggerations.
As John Charles Chasteen states in Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise
History of Latin America (2001), access to the Internet and US television
creates an imaginary where the young want to adopt US-style consumer-
ism. The consequences extend beyond the economic sphere. For one,
there is imitation. Shows such as “American Dreams” and “Big Brother”
export US culture globally; children everywhere with television access
learn that, to some degree, there exists a happy, complete other world,
which they then compare to their own (with frustration being a common
outcome). On the other hand, women want to adopt this aesthetic in their
homes and on their bodies. The Latin American phenotype is closer to
indigenous and mestizo physiognomy; therefore, the difficulty of match-
ing the ideal US body images with which they are flooded breeds diverse
reactions, such as low self-esteem, individualism, ethical lapses, loneliness,
and internal violence, which cumulatively take a toll on society.
These three ideas, which pervade Latin American novels, are the expres-
sion of social problems that governments are willing to work on but are
unable to solve. Violence toward women, as public or private acts, has
become part of the murmurs of cities, towns, and neighbors.
In Chris Schulenburg’s chapter, the seriousness of voice and the impor-
tance of literary vision are explained by constructing a meaningful dia-
logue between a cultural murmur and the dead. Schulenburg explores the
way that 2666, by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, guides intellectual
voices to the anonymous voices of victims of femicide in Santa Teresa,13
where impunity is rampant.
Although Schulenburg’s focus is local, I would add Colombia and
other parts of Latin America to the list of areas witnessing violence of this
tragic nature. For her part, Jean Franco expands this violence from the
region to the globe:
The melancholy truth is that “femicide,” a term coined to describe the rape
and death epidemic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is not confined to that coun-
try. The rape and extermination of women in Ciudad Juárez and in Central
America in “peacetime” raise the uncomfortable prospect that atrocity of
this kind has now been “privatized.” (2013, 92)
manifest as jokes, soap operas, and Hollywood movies. This feeds into the
underrepresentation of women in mass media: “only 29 percent of speak-
ing characters in top Hollywood films are women” (“Media Literacy”).17
Moreover, most of these 29 percent are white and young (with a near
complete absence of old and indigenous women). We must address this
issue, especially given 50 percent of US teenagers spend almost half of
their days consuming media with rampant gender stereotypes that per-
petuate gender-related violence (“Media Literacy”). It would not be sur-
prising to find these statistics hold for teenagers in Latin America.
Nancy Bird-Soto’s chapter traces the trajectory of domestic violence in
Puerto Rican literature. She grants a historical perspective to inequality
and gender bias using two novels, Manuel Zeno Gandía’s canonical La
charca (1894) and a contemporary rereading, retelling, and reframing of
the mundo enfermo in Gean Carlo Villegas’s Osario de vivos (2013). In
Villegas’s text, world-sickness [mundo enfermo] pervades the plot: The
sickness of greed and masculinity’s control over death are fueled by the
novel’s treatment of drug traffickers and the structure of gangs or para-
militaries. Namely, women embody the stereotypical subservient role
(nourisher) and are sources of sexual pleasure, with perfect bodies replicat-
ing those of cast members from Baywatch or The Dukes of Hazzard.
However, these Caucasian bodies are different from the indigenous and
mestizo bodies of Latin America, and that does not even begin to account
for the starved or surgically enhanced bodies paraded by mass-media out-
lets. The kind of performativity carried out by women and men as part of
their daily lives is portrayed in literature and television series that glorify
the economy of drug trafficking and the mafia.18 Language and body aes-
thetically represent power.19
In the drug-trafficker’s mundo enfermo, daily life is suffused with vio-
lence (including domestic violence). This is a world in which only the
strong survive. Although this is far from the first story to begin with a
woman’s rape and her subsequent sense of shame and is certainly not the
first treatment of domestic violence, the novel’s innovation stems from its
performance of the idea of “extreme masculinity.” We have previously
touched on Jean Franco’s concept of extreme masculinity, and it is worth
developing further here: “What massacres, rape, and desecration suggest
is a meltdown of the fundamental core that makes humans recognize their
own vulnerability and hence acknowledge that of the other” (2013, 15).
This concept presupposes outstanding brutality in interactions with per-
ceived enemies. Likewise, it is present in the daily affairs of those who
10 B.L. BOTERO
inhabit the margins. In Latin America, violence takes place in both public
and private spheres and is frequently exercised against women: “The
implacable, all-powerful male requires subjugated victims,” thereby fram-
ing “rape [as] a crucial and symbolic weapon” (Franco 2013, 15). Rape
and violence against women in slums and rural areas—the site of insur-
gents, guerrillas, paramilitary groups, military groups, narco-military
groups, and common criminals—is all too common. Bird-Soto remarks
that much work remains to be done if we hope to solve this problem, for
the status quo has failed to ameliorate the conditions in which a society
becomes primed for the explosion of subjugated, marginalized sectors.
In her chapter, Melissa Gormley highlights social and political changes
in Brazil in the 1930s. Her approach stresses the female image in the con-
text of Getúlio Vargas’s military dictatorship. At that time, the metaphor
of sickness surfaced in political speeches and the media in reference to the
state of the country. Gormley describes the conversion of “sickness” into
a political orientation of what must be eradicated at any cost; the author
also discusses the repetition of this process in other Latin American coun-
tries run by dictators, for example, Argentina and Chile.
Women’s entrance into the wider economy gave rise to the massively
significant replacement of the private house for the public workplace.
Gormley elaborates on Edward Soja’s reflections on space and women, in
which the workplace at the turn of the nineteenth century helped to
establish production patterns and social relationships in a new era of
women’s work and consumption. Over time, more than just production
was impacted: Gormley follows the discursive changes brought about by
this transformation and coins the term Thirdspace, a space characterized
by emotional connections made between marginalized (female) and sites
of production (real and imagined). She reads Thirdspace in national
posters that called for progress and captured iconic images of the state
and war, filled with boys and men. In that respect, the state defined
nationhood as male and modern, whereas women were cast in “tradi-
tional” supporting roles as wives and mothers. That meant women were
far removed from the concept of progress, the fundamental idea of
Brazilian national identity. Gormley’s presentation of Parque Industrial
(1933) by Patricia Galvão (Pagu) examines Brazil’s wartime catapult into
modernity via industrialization from the perspective not of a traditional
narrator, but rather through the voices of marginal female factory work-
ers. The stories of these workers do not stray far from those of today’s
workers in São Paulo or other large Brazilian cities. Galvão must have
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