Cartographies of Implication: Feminicide in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Abstract

The problem of feminicide in Latin America is pervasive. More women are killed in this region than anywhere else in the world. This phenomenon has given rise to an unprecedented transnational feminist activism that has transformed Latin America into a battleground against gender violence and placed feminicide at the center of the public debate. The various discourses engaging with the topic, however, tend to either operate with a narrow focus on victims and perpetrators, or diagnose the violence by naming the system at its root: neoliberalism or patriarchy. Hence, they have been slow to conceptualize how figures that fall outside of the victim-perpetrator binary nurture and sustain the structure of gender inequality that enables feminicide. One place where these more ambiguous forms of involvement are being explored is the literary realm. In recent years, impactful narratives have been emerging across Latin America that address feminicide by inquiring how ordinary subjectivities, ostensibly positioned outside the violence, reinforce it obliquely. In the process, these works deploy a series of affectively disruptive formal strategies that obstruct identification with the victim and instead invite the audience to engage with different forms of complicity and perpetration. My thesis examines three examples among this growing body of works to find out how they might encourage new critical understandings of feminicide and its conditions of possibility. To work towards an answer to this question I draw on theories of implication and complicity, affect theory, and affective formalism. At its broadest, my research aims to contribute to our understanding of the relation between aesthetics, affects, and critical thought.