The Mexican writer Yuri Herrera , in a conference at University of Wisconsin-Madison, once proposed that a woman represents the threshold (umbral) “because she is the limit between life and death.” His words find echoes in the objective of this book, the seeds of which can be traced to a preoccupation with violence in Latin America and the precarious place occupied by women in these countries.
“She” is the threshold in numerous ways. “She” is the entrance to the penumbras, to the more intricate and profound relationship between children and female figures. “She” is the limit between the Eros drive and the Death drive and occupies a social position that gives her the option to observe a range of human actions.
Not only do women in Latin America inhabit the margins of society , but they also occupy the liminal space. I found the concept of “liminal” appropriate for describing the positions of “in-between” that women perform in society as the entrance to life and the limit between public and private spheres.1 To some extent, the concept of liminality in this book resonates with multiple definitions regarding the concept, yet this book offers another way of reading the liminal.
It is evident that the situation for Latin American women has improved dramatically in the past century. There are women in politics, in science, in high positions within economic emporiums, and in cultural arenas, too. We can find women authors in bookstores and libraries and can read voices that sound fresh in the immense world of masculine literature. Yet the situation for millions of women is very difficult, and the novels studied in this book address these women, the ones who occupy the lowest step of the social hierarchy : the prostitutes, the uneducated, the gang females, the bodies forgotten after sexual abuse , or the corpses found dead in places where the police do not have the resources to investigate massive numbers of crimes (or do not have the interest to pursue the criminals).
Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels discusses women who inhabit the margins of society. In general, we can say that women occupy the weaker part of the “male–female” dyad . In Of Grammatology (1976), Jacques Derrida explains the importance of deconstructing binary thought and oppositions, such as that of outside–inside, speech–writing, normal–abnormal, or center–periphery. The semiology accompanying each term in binaries has its own history , its own point of view. In the male–female dyad, for example, the female position is relegated as secondary2 in the social imaginary.
There is more than one way to talk about women in Latin America, and women’s position depends on several factors, especially economic, cultural, 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 important 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 alarmingly 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, stabbings 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 institutions to maintain social order.4 According to the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), “[certain] forms of violence against women … are often tolerated or even condoned by laws, institutions, and community norms,” and some researchers argue that violence against women is not only a product of “gender inequality, but also a way of enforcing it” (Bott et al. 2013, 5).5 If we come close to the idea of gendered violence , we need to ...