Narratives of Violence Against Women: Wasted Bodies and Deaths that (Don’t) Matter in the Contemporary Literature in Peru and Argentina
The global phenomenon of violence against women has gained acute relevance in Latin America since the paradigm of terror and impunity in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. However, there are other contexts that have become particularly relevant due to their association with political violence and lethal aggression against women. That is the case in Peru, where rape was perpetrated as a tool of war and torture during the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980–2000); and in Argentina, where an increase of brutal femicides in the last decade caused a social upheaval. Alongside these events, literary and esthetic practices have intensified the use of imaginaries of the residual to reflect on what remains: subjected bodies, wasted lives and violent deaths. The aim of “Narratives of Violence Against Women: Wasted Bodies and Deaths that (Don’t) Matter in the Contemporary Literature in Peru and Argentina” is to analyze representations of physical and symbolic violence exerted over women’s bodies in a corpus of texts within the genres of fiction and non-fiction. As a working hypothesis, the research suggests that while these writings illustrate the dehumanization of victims’ bodies, they particularly unravel the mechanisms of possession, consumption, and disposal of women’s bodies. On the basis of an analytical literary framework that integrates  perspectives pertaining to Anthropology, Gender Studies and History, the project focuses on the ways that women’s bodies are transformed into wasted humans in the contemporary world. By addressing that, it is expected to give rise to reflections on how societies establish distinctions between lives to be protected and lives to be abandoned.