Ficcional and Non-Ficcional Movements of Violence. Women’s Crimes

Abstract

Crimes against women are a distinctive mark of the late twentieth century, and the beginnings of the twenty-first. They acquire a serial form in the context of globalization and poverty. Literature accompanies this process, presenting itself as a force field where violence and terror are the substrate of political fictions. Through the analysis of “La parte de los crímenes” in 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004), and the novels El trabajo by Aníbal Jarkowski (2007) and Le viste la cara a Dios by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (2012) this paper thinks women’s bodies as narrative devices that give form to political versions of mob exchanges, prostitution as neoliberal threat or human traffic of persons as hard nuclei of truths. Notwithstanding the fact that literary texts sustained by their verbal limits always come short of narrating the naked experience of suffering and pain, they try once and again to do so with the material signs that can evoke them and construct meaning.