UCLA

This dissertation provides an analysis of the representation of violence in contemporary Mexican and Argentinian literature, with emphasis on works depicting gender crimes. This study focuses on what I call “ficciones especulares,” a literary category defined by embedded texts that perform as notional configurations, in which connectedness replicates the construction of collective memory after traumatic events. In these narratives, Mexican writers (David Toscana, Fernanda Melchor) and Argentinian writer (Selva Almada) explore femicides or violence against queer people, unresolved due to impunity, by organizing and confronting discursivities from assorted literary genres and archives. The method of inquiry involved in the analysis stresses a search for internal relations within and between narrative units. My project argues that twenty-first century Mexican and Argentinian literature promotes the deconstruction of patriarchal ideology while foregrounding sociocultural frames that regulate affective and ethical responses to violent phenomena.In Chapter One I examine the excess of violence reverberated in the several novels abridged in David Toscana's El �ltimo lector (2004). Focusing on the impaired emotional involvement of the main characters, Lucio and Remigio, I outline the pedagogy of cruelty (Segato 2018), a process aimed at the removal of human qualities, attributes and rights. In examining a scene of animal sacrifice, I underline violence as a bonding element of hegemonic, toxic masculinity. In Chapter Two I continue the survey of representations of violence through the analysis of Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes (2017). In this chapter, I repurpose the concept of embeddedness (Sassen 2017) to connect the multiple cases of gender violence portrayed: child sexual abuse, femicide, compulsory prostitution, rape, sexual assault, and violence against queer people. Based on this violence network, I emphasize the devaluation of the human body in neoliberal capitalism, an epoch I characterize by the production of performance-oriented subjects and a surge of pleonexia, a Greek philosophical concept related to insatiable, materialistic desires. In Chapter Three, by comparing Selva Almada's Chicas muertas (2014) with its fictional precursor, “Chicas lindas” (2007), I scrutinize the social forces or institutions in charge of concealing gender violence, in specific during the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983). On the other hand, I highlight the recent efforts to give visibility to the problem within academia, social movements, and law amendments. Moreover, I contemplate Almada's posture towards the revision of collective memory, as well as the methods used to choralize the voices of the victims. The main contribution of my dissertation is the identification of polyphonic narratives which multi-layered design provides supplementary perspectives to gender violence, from its origins to its perpetuating factors. I recognize in the selected works a hermeneutic construction that extends to the sociopolitical sphere, which contextual symbolic economy functions as a tool to interpret the triggering cycles of subordination, emotional and physical abuse.