Remembering for the future: Feminicide literary narratives and the formation of feminist collective subjects

Abstract

Over the past three decades, transnational feminist activist movements in Latin America have been struggling to construct collective subject positions from where to remember, bear witness to, and rally against feminicide. This article explores literature’s contribution to this broader process of feminist collective subjectivity formation. It does so by means of a reading of two recent yet already emblematic feminicide narratives in literature: Selva Almada’s Dead Girls and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer. The article starts by making a case for the importance of attending to the rhetorical dimensions of contemporary literary engagements with feminicide to better understand how they mobilize memory with a view to enabling political change. Subsequently, the analysis shows how, in the process of commemorating gender violence, Almada and Rivera Garza tactically interpellate readers into communities of feminicide remembrance with the aim of bolstering ongoing feminist struggles against gender violence.

Keywords

feminicide literary narratives feminist activism memory rhetoric

I am not the woman in the bag. That is why I am here, before you, reading this text and breathing in all of our pain, our struggle and our hope. I am not the woman in the bag, because she (among others) is Daiana, who is gone, and nothing should erase the singularity of her absence, the irretrievability and irreplaceability of her violent death at the hands of a femicida. We are not the women who are no longer with us. But they traverse us.¹

Marta Dillon, Virginia Cano—“Que la rabia nos valga” (2015).

Introduction

These are the opening lines of the manifesto read aloud by writers Marta Dillon and Virginia Cano at the first reading marathon against feminicide,² which took place on 26 March 2015 at the Book and Language Museum in Buenos Aires. The event was a response to the murder of 19-year-old Daiana García, whose body had been found days earlier inside a garbage bag by the roadside, and of countless other women before her. It was also an outcry against the revictimizing discourse of sensationalist journalism and, specifically, its tendency to frame the victims of gender violence as promiscuous, rebellious, and thus somehow deserving of the violence perpetrated upon them. By inviting people to come together to read aloud, the organizers sought to take joint action against feminicide by bringing into circulation new narratives for talking and thinking about violence against women.

Dillon and Cano’s manifesto bears the signs of the writers’ efforts to deliver on this goal. To start with, the manifesto constructs an enunciative position from where to bear witness to feminicide. In successive negotiations that are registered in the text, the speaker first rejects the identification with the victim (“I am not the woman in the bag”) and then proceeds to position herself as a grieving and outraged, yet also hopeful, witness. Verbally testifying to the irreparable harm done to another (Daiana) before a public forum, the witnessing “I” addresses her listeners directly: “That is why I am here, before you” (emphasis added). In addressing her audience, moreover, the speaker is making a claim on them to co-witness and to remember Daiana and her “violent death at the hands of a femicida.” Through the invitation to join in the act of collective feminicide witnessing and remembrance, finally, the speaker imagines a “nosotras,” a female and feminist “we” that is “traversed” by the memories of “the women who are no longer with us.”

The manifesto presented at the reading marathon by Cano and Dillon was written to contest another, previous manifesto authored by writer and journalist María Moreno and used to advertise the event. In it, Moreno (2015) rewrites the popular folk tale of the boogeyman by centering the victims inside the bag and not the perpetrator carrying it, and reclaims the figure of the woman in the bag to politically mobilize against feminicide: “we are all the women in the bag and we are coming out so that there is not one woman less” (n.p.). Dillon and Cano’s manifesto resolutely rejects Moreno’s proposal to inhabit the place of the women killed and disposed as garbage. Instead, the writers claim a different speaking position for themselves: one connected to feminicide victims through shared vulnerability, yet different from them: “we are not the women in the bag, but we could be” (Cano and Dillon, 2015: n.p.).

The opposing manifestos written for the occasion of the Ni Una Menos reading marathon spotlight the struggle within contemporary Latin American feminist movements to articulate a collective subject position from where to bear witness to and rally against feminicide. If, as Rosa Linda Fregoso (2023) poignantly argues, the victims of feminicide “have been annihilated as witnesses” (p. 8), who should bear witness to their deaths? And how? Put differently, what novel enunciative positions can be forged to speak, write about, and remember extreme gender violence? Crafting an answer to these questions is crucial not only break the silence that feminicide leaves in its wake, but also to enable the consolidation of anti-feminicide protest movements. As Marianne Hirsch (2019) reminds us, the word protest comes from the Latin protestari, meaning “to bear witness together, to testify publicly” (p. 16). This etymology attests to the fact that protest movements require, above all, a coherent collective subject position that allows different groups and individuals to jointly remember and speak out about the violent past to “make their causes seen and heard” (Hirsch, 2019: 16).

The struggle to construct a collective subject in contemporary Latin American feminist movements is essentially future-oriented. This means that it is not aimed at a once-and-for-all solution, but rather constitutes an open-ended search for spaces of convergence that can accommodate differently positioned individuals without homogenizing them (Gago, 2020; La Greca, 2023; Millán, 2020; Peláez González and Flores Pérez, 2022). And yet, feminist thinkers across disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and performance studies (Bacci, 2020; Cano, 2022; Flores Pérez, 2014; López, 2020; Sosa, 2021) argue that the forward-looking process of collective subject formation depends on public practices of commemoration and narration. Remembering and narrating stories and experiences of gender violence, according to these scholars, offers a way of collectivizing the painful past and creating connections “to other lives and deaths that are tied together with ours” (Cano, 2022: 14). It is on the basis of these imagined connections that new solidarities across spatial, temporal, and ideological divides can emerge.

Building on these insights, this article sets out to analyze the link between memory, narration, and the formation of collective subjectivities in some more depth. Specifically, it will examine how contemporary literary forms of narration participate in the larger project of crafting collective subject positions from where to remember and mobilize against feminicide. In the search to find an answer to this question, I engage with two particularly impactful literary works from Argentina and Mexico respectively: Selva Almada’s Chicas muertas (2015; Eng. trans. Dead Girls, 2020) and Cristina Rivera Garza’s El invencible verano de Liliana (2021; Eng. trans. Liliana’s Invincible Summer, 2023). These two nonfictional texts retrieve unsolved murders of women from the 1980s and 1990s and recall them in the present. In Dead Girls, Almada revisits the feminicides of three teenage girls—Andrea Danne, María Luisa Quevedo, and Sarita Mundín—perpetrated in Argentina between 1983 and 1989. Rivera Garza, for her part, engages with the unpunished feminicide of her younger sister, Liliana, killed by her ex-boyfriend in Mexico City in 1990, when she was only 20 years old.

Both Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer were widely received after their original publication. Since its first edition in 2015, Dead Girls has been translated into more than six languages, has received numerous (inter)national prizes, and has already given rise to a substantial body of criticism. Despite its recent publication, Liliana’s Invincible Summer has enjoyed similar success. It too, has been awarded multiple prizes, was listed among the top 10 best-selling books in Mexico, and has received a constant flow of positive reviews ever since its release. Readings of Dead Girls and of Liliana’s Invincible Summer converge in situating the texts as forms of political action, calling attention to how they develop new narrative frameworks for narrating gender violence (Almada, 2022; Falbo, 2017; García Sánchez, 2021; López Casanova, 2020; Moret, 2018; Nanni, 2019; Pacheco, 2021; Russell, 2022; Tornero, 2020) and to how they help consolidate a nascent cultural memory of feminicide (Cabral, 2018; Chiani, 2019; Monge, 2022; Peller and Oberti, 2020; Quintero Nasta, 2022).

This article contributes to these studies by illuminating dimensions of the mnemonic and political work that Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer carry out in the present which are to the best of my knowledge yet to be explored. It sets out to do so by adopting a methodology that combines a rhetorical approach to narrative (Phelan, 1996) with a comparative and transnational approach. Approaching Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer as rhetorical—and not only representational—acts enables an exploration of how Almada and Rivera Garza tactically use language and narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience in a context of political activism. The comparative and transnational approach, for its part, brings into focus how, despite being products of distinct national contexts, histories, and feminist environs, Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer deploy similar rhetorical strategies with converging political stakes. My overarching argument, in this sense, is that these two examples can illuminate how contemporary Latin American women writers are similarly contributing to feminist processes of collective subjectivity formation through two key interventions at the level of rhetoric. First, by constructing feminist collective speaking positions, experimenting with them as places from where to bear witness and remember, and making them available for identification. And second, by involving or implicating readers into these imagined collectivities through practices of address.

Before presenting my methodology in more detail, in what follows I first offer a schematic mapping of present activist efforts to commemorate feminicide in Latin America. Thereby, I focus on anti-feminicide struggles in Argentina and Mexico, since these are struggles in which Almada and Rivera Garza inscribe themselves explicitly—both in their writing and through the activist and public intellectual work they do beyond the page.³ At the same time, however, the following overview underscores the ways in which feminicide commemoration crosses borders, transforming Latin America into a veritable “transnational memory space” (Wüstenberg, 2020) or “region of memory” (Olick, 2022) when it comes to gender violence.⁴

Memory-activism against feminicide in Latin America

In her influential work Los trabajos de la memoria (2002), Argentine sociologist Elizabeth Jelin (2002) defines memory as a form of work that can “build and transform the social world” (p. 14), and define or redefine individual and collective forms of subjectivity. This particular conception of memory as a tool for political transformation rooted in the present and geared toward the future is echoed in several later studies written on the topic in Latin America (Allier-Montaño and Crenzel, 2015; Fonseca Santos et al., 2023; Jelin, 2021; Villalón, 2017), and it has much to do with the recent history of the sub-continent. While there exist important national differences, there is a general consensus that after a period of military dictatorships, internal conflicts, authoritarian regimes, and political repression throughout the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America, human rights movements made use of memory—albeit in different ways and with uneven results—to achieve justice and political change in the present (Jelin, 2002; Mandolessi, 2023; Montaño, 2015). In the context of these struggles, publicly recalling memories of the violent past was a way of expanding the remembering “we” through the incorporation of new subjects and, at the same time, of bolstering the fight against impunity.

Memory activism lives on in contemporary activist struggles that mobilize memory to militate against the new forms of violence presently unfolding throughout Latin America. Contemporary Latin American feminist mobilizations against feminicide are a case in point. In the past decade, feminist movements against gender violence across the region have gained unprecedented momentum. Ni Una Más in Mexico; Ni Una Menos in Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay; and the Chilean Feminist Spring protests—to name but a few examples—have organized transborder strikes and mass demonstrations to protest feminicide; pushed for improved legislation and violence prevention campaigns; sought to ensure the safe flow of testimonies denouncing gender violence; and worked to inscribe the long-silenced memories of feminicide into public and cultural memory.

Feminicide changes quantitatively and qualitatively in each territory, in interplay with local, structural, and conjunctural conditions (Borzacchiello, 2016: 357). Similarly, there are significant inequalities in the trajectory, visibility, and scale of feminist movements across national contexts. But while it is essential to keep these divergences in mind, there are also commonalities and resonances across seemingly disparate geographies that enable and have enabled transborder feminist alliances and transferences. Contemporary processes of feminist political mobilization in Latin America, in this sense, “are connected by overlapping zones, struggles, and realities that are not reduced to the borders of nation-states” (Gago, 2020: 34). These transnational interconnections, as Márgara Millán (2020) has lucidly demonstrated, become visible in the flow of agendas (such as intersectionality), artistic interventions (such as the performance Un violador en tu camino by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis), and slogans (such as #Niunamenos, #Niunamás, or #Vivas nosqueremos) across borders.

Mexican and Argentine feminist movements have played important yet distinct roles in enabling the continental “scenario of interconnectivity” (Millán, 2020: 210) that defines current anti-feminicide mobilizations. The “detonating moment” (Allier Montaño, 2015: 40) when it comes to the work of feminicide remembrance and anti-feminicide mobilization can be traced back to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the early 1990s. The border city was undergoing a seemingly unprecedented spike in killings of women and local feminist academics and activists began referring to the murders as feminicidios to underscore the gendered nature of the violence.

The term feminicidio was introduced into the public debate by Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, who drew on South African sociologist Diana Russell’s (2001) definition of femicide as “the killing of females by males because they are female” (p. 3), yet transformed it by adding two key layers of meaning to it. First, Lagarde and de los Ríos (2011: xv) frames the murder of women as human rights violations, thus repositioning violence against women as a matter of political concern to be discussed in (inter)national courts and fora, while also, crucially, incriminating governments that condone the violence. Second, Lagarde y de los Ríos (2011) grants feminicidio an intersectional dimension, underscoring that feminicidal violence “is reinforced by classism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination” (p. xxi).⁵

The popularization of Lagarde’s definition in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s was a crucial milestone in the cultural remembrance of and mobilization against feminicide. By naming the killings of women feminicidios, activists and academics relocated gender violence from the private into the public and political arena, calling attention to the structures of inequality underpinning gender violence, and enabling the emergence of new forms of collective commemoration and political mobilization (cf. Delgadillo, 2020: 138). The last decade of the twentieth century in Ciudad Juarez thus witnessed the emergence of activist organizations against feminicide such as Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa and Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas. These early movements, whose driving force were the mothers of the victims, developed a broad repertoire of commemoration and protest strategies including street marches and public performances of mourning and testimony as well as the production of posters, murals, songs, monuments, memorials, and digital platforms to remember the victims (Driver, 2015; Ravelo Blancas, 2004). In the early 2000s, Juarense feminist activists began seeking national coalitions, eventually giving rise to nation-wide movements such as Mujeres de Negro and Ni Una Más (Wright, 2010).

About 10 years after the first anti-feminicide mobilizations emerged in Ciudad Juárez, a group of writers, journalists, and intellectuals in Buenos Aires organized the first reading marathon against feminicide under the slogan Ni Una Menos.⁶ The narratives of collectivity and resistance crafted there found resonance and, a few weeks later, the phrase Ni Una Menos was taken up again as a slogan for the mass demonstrations that took place in different cities in Argentina on 3 June 2015 and later spread throughout Latin America and other parts of the world. With the transnational expansion of Ni Una Menos (Caballero, 2019; Urzúa Martínez, 2019), together with the aftereffects of the global #MeToo movement, new strategies of feminicide commemoration have emerged in recent years. One can think, for instance, of the “glitter march” (Lezama, 2022) and the “wall of memory” (Flores Pérez and Peláez González, 2022) in Mexico, of the strike and the use of public and social media escraches (Popescu, 2021) in Argentina, or of new practices social media witnessing (Fuentes, 2019). In a present in which gender violence is still ongoing, anti-feminicide movements in Mexico, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America—much like the mothers of Ciudad Juárez before them—articulate memory work and artistic production with activist work in diverse yet sometimes overlapping ways to enable change.

Toward new feminist solidarities: disentangling the role of literature

Literature plays a key role in the present scenario of transnational memory activism against feminicide in Latin America. Nora Domínguez (2019), in this vein, posits the existence of “a varied and expansive articulation between the arts, literary writing and feminisms” (n.p.). This articulation is not new. Ever since the first anti-feminicide mobilizations in Ciudad Juárez, writers have made creative use of literary form to commemorate, reflect on, and raise awareness of feminicide (Delgadillo, 2020; Domíngez Ruvalcaba and Ravelo Blancas 2015; Finnegan, 2018; López and Hart, 2022). Centering the case of recent feminicide literary narratives, Domínguez (2019) uses the term “writings of urgency” (n.p.) to make sense of the activist impulse behind many contemporary literary engagements with gender violence. These texts, as she defines them, document, take up, and disseminate feminist demands with a view to politicizing audiences and enabling change in a present in which the violence is pervasive (n.p.).

Literary works like Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, in this sense, are marked by a palpable sense of urgency because they recall a form of violence that is in the past but is in no way over. Both texts carry out their work of feminicide remembrance in a precarious present in which, as Rivera Garza (2023) puts it in Liliana’s Invincible Summer, the systematic murder of women “doesn’t stop happening” (p. 12). In remembering feminicide through literature, Almada and Rivera Garza, I aim to show, are not coming to terms with a violent past that has ended. Instead, they are mobilizing memory for the present and future, as a way of countering the ongoingness of the violence by participating—from within the arena of literature—in broader processes of feminist political mobilization. But how, precisely, can literary works perform the work of memory activism?

In Nomadic Theory, philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2011) postulates the existence of a link between the arts, memory, and collective processes of coalition-building. Memory, she proposes can engender connections between subjects and is therefore instrumental to forging identities and relations that can, in turn, enable social change (Braidotti, 2011: 32). The arts, for their part, constitute privileged platforms for enlisting memory to carry out the creative work of imagining new figurations of subjectivity and community (Braidotti, 2011: 165). In Braidotti’s triangulation of memory, the arts, and identity, the arts constitute a space of experimentation where, through creative acts of remembrance, new forms of individual and collective subjectivity can be cultivated and disseminated.

Similarly exploring the agency of the arts in processes of political and mnemonic transformation, Ann Rigney (2021:13) argues that performances of memory in the arts can make small-scale contributions to (re)shaping social imaginaries in the present. By crafting particularly “memorable mediations” (Rigney, 2021: 15) of scenes and events from the past, Rigney’s (2021) argument goes, artistic works can create unconventional affiliations and thus help redraw “the borders of the imagined community with which individuals identify” (p. 18).

This article embraces the understanding of works of art as agentic participants in the making and remaking of cultural memory as well as in the process of creating of new solidarities in the present. My primary focus, however and as touched on in the introduction, will not be on the mediation or representational part of this dynamic, but rather on its rhetorical dimension. A rhetorical approach, as defined by literary scholar James Phelan (2018), is a reading practice that goes beyond a sole interest in narrative as a representation or story, to also explore narrative as an action that seeks to achieve a purpose or effect in an audience. In practical terms, the rhetorical approach translates into an analytical attention “toward narrative communication and the prominence of tellers, audiences and purposes” (Phelan, 2018: 1). Its goal is to gain a better understanding of how authors “draw upon the resources of language” (Phelan, 2018: 2) to establish cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic relations to an audience.

My analysis of Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer adopts a rhetorical approach with the aim of better understanding how these performances of feminicide remembrance contribute to ongoing processes of feminist collective subject formation. Situating the texts as communicative acts, the analysis centers on two key interventions at the level of rhetoric: first, how narrators position themselves before an audience; and second, how they address that audience to achieve political, affective, and ethical purposes.

Looking into how narrators position themselves before an audience entails zooming in on the positions of enunciation fashioned by writers. Positions of enunciation refer to the more or less stylized roles taken up and performed by literary narrators (Frow, 2014: 41). Constructed through specific formal techniques, positions of enunciation “are available for identificatory relations” (Poletti, 2020: 2). Through the act of reading, in this sense, readers are invited to relate to and adopt—if only partially and temporarily—some of the traits, vocabulary, style, or mood encoded into figures of enunciation. Readers are invited, in other words, to identify with the way in which enunciative subjects construe and talk about, but also remember, particular topics and to revise their own ways of being, seeing, speaking, and remembering (Felski, 2020: 91; Poletti, 2020: 2).

Examining the practices of address deployed in narrative involves tracing the utterances directed at the audience in texts. Practices of address “seek[...] to act upon the other” (Butler, 2009: 51). They constitute strategic uses of language that speak to a more or less specified “you” and invite the reader to imaginatively inhabit different positions or take on different roles (Butler, 2009; Fludernik, 1993; Lugones, 2006; Roelofs, 2020; Rooney, 2002). Through specific modes of address, literature and other cultural forms can therefore recreate existing forms of subjectivity and collectivity or, on the contrary, potentially “realize new subjective and intersubjective possibilities” (Roelofs, 2016: 383) by proffering unexpected positions to readers.

In the remainder of this article, I hope to show how attending to the positions of enunciation and practices of address in Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer can offer a way of illuminating how these works play into broader attempts to construct collective positions from which to bear witness to and remember feminicide. More broadly, I aim to elucidate how contemporary Latin American literature is partaking—if only in small-scale, contingent, and fundamentally unpredictable ways—in processes of feminist commemoration and political mobilization in the present.

Positions from where to speak, bear witness, and remember

Commemorators

True to the conventions of nonfictional writing, Almada and Rivera Garza implicate themselves “as self-created presence[s] inside the text” (Lehman, 1997: 38): both as narrators of, and as characters in, the narrative. More precisely, both writers position themselves within their texts, first and foremost, as homodiegetic narrators and mediating figures advocated to the project of reconstructing and thereby bearing witness to the past. They present themselves in other words, as commemorators or memory entrepreneurs, that is, agents who work “with and through the memories of the past” (Jelin, 2002: 48) to forestall forgetting. At the core of Almada’s and Rivera Garza’s commemorative efforts is the attempt to relocate feminicide remembrance from the private and informal to the public and formative realms. To achieve this, they exercise a form of productive anachronism, that is, they mobilize a present-day understanding of feminicide as political and systemic violence. This enables the writers to retroactively interpret as feminicides crimes that in the 1980s and 1990s were misunderstood and misremembered as isolated and extraordinary “crimes of passion.”

Both writers foreground their positioning as commemorators by way of powerful imagery. Almada makes sense of her investigation into the feminicides of Andrea, Sarita, and María Luisa through the mythical figure of La huesera, or the Bone Woman, a wild old woman whose task

is gathering bones. She collects and looks after everything that’s in danger of being lost. [...] She’ll cover miles and miles, scales mountains, wade through streams, burn the soles of her feet on dessert sands to find them. Back in her hut, with her armful of bones, she pieces back together the skeleton. (p. 31)

The “bones” that the narrator-commemorator gathers, metaphorically mimicking La huesera, are in fact social discourses (López Casanova, 2020: 54). Traveling hundreds of kilometers across rural Argentina, Almada pilgrimages to the small towns where Andrea, Sarita, and María Luisa were killed—San José (Entre Ríos), Villa María (Córdoba), and Villa Ángela (Chaco)—to locate and reclaim textual and discursive scraps from the public and private archives linked to three teenage victims. The narrator gathers news reports, witness testimonies, legal records, autopsy reports, email transcripts, anecdotes or pieces of gossip, and testimonies by family members of the victims, and then reactivates these inert documents by incorporating them into the new context of her writing.

In Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza similarly digs up written materials from the past to bear witness to her sister’s life and death. Legal documents, poems, witness testimonies, newspaper articles, and even a eulogy written by Liliana’s friends after her death find their way into Rivera Garza’s literary performance of memory. The author’s main sources, however, are Liliana’s personal documents, which had lain untouched in cardboard boxes at her parents’ house in Toluca for nearly four decades: the letters she wrote (and received), diary entries, notes and cards, lecture notes, schedules, subway tickets, poems, creative texts and verses authored by Liliana herself, and to-do lists among others. Rivera Garza (2023) compares her efforts at deciphering, organizing, and staging her sister’s personal archive to those of an archeologist:

One upon another, these writings are layers of experience that have settled over time. My task is to de-sediment them. With the care of the archeologist who touches without damaging, who dusts without breaking, my intention is to open and preserve this writing at the same time: de- and recontextualize it in a reading from the present. (p. 193)

Through the figures of La huesera and the archeologist, Almada and Rivera Garza condense and self-reflexively draw attention to the mnemonic work they carry out in their texts by transforming private, overlooked and subterranean memories into public and cultural ones. This process is presented as a laborious work of digging up or “de-sedimenting,” collecting, and re-assembling that which runs the risk of being forgotten or covered up with the passage of time. The work of memory, in both cases, is thus portrayed through the Benjaminian metaphor of archeology (Benjamin, 2005: 576), which underscores “that it requires hard work to unearth the past and its secrets” (Arnold-de Simine, 2013: 71). Or put differently, that cultural recall does not just happen but has to be performed (Jelin, 2002; Plate and Smelik, 2013).

In their role as commemorators, Almada and Rivera Garza become available for identification as “memory activists” (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2022) who work to recover a forgotten history of feminicidal violence as a form of political action in a present in which gender violence is still pervasive. In the process, they not only expand the existing repertoire of enunciation when it comes to bearing witness to feminicide. They also provide readers with an original model of feminicide memory-making as archeology, understood as a practice that “retrieves lost objects and defunct information from a distant past, forging an important return path from cultural forgetting to cultural memory” (Assmann, 2010: 98). The writers, put differently translate the archeological task of excavation, retrieval, and restitution into an original mode of literary composition that works with and through the documents hosted in the archives of gender violence to forge new memories and narratives of feminicide. Once enacted and conveyed in writing by the narrators, this mode of feminicide remembrance as well as the authors’ self-reflexive textual positioning as agents of memory become available as templates for future memory entrepreneurs and literary performances of memory.

Survivors

At the same time as they take on the role of memory activists or entrepreneurs, Almada and Rivera Garza carefully position themselves within the cartography of feminicidal violence as survivors of gender violence. This role entails a degree of victimization but also, crucially, the capacity to bear witness. It thus affords an experiential and affective proximity to the victims without claiming identity. Both Almada and Rivera Garza, in this sense, join Cano and Dillon in rejecting a direct alignment with the victims. While they center their narratives on the lives and deaths of individual women and attempt to create, through language, a sense of affective proximity to them and their suffering, they go to great lengths to emphasize that this proximity does not entail identity. Both Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, in this sense, are traversed by what Marianne Hirsch calls a “distancing awareness”: a constant reminder of the space that lies between narrators and victims, or, as Hirsch (2016) puts it, of the fact that “although ‘it could have been me, it was, decidedly not me’” (p. 84).

Almada marks the distance between herself and the victims subtly, yet effectively, by way of careful grammatical choices. To narratively approach the victims and their last hours of life, the narrative switches from the homodiegetic first-person narrator which corresponds to the presence that Almada crafts for herself within the text and which follows her investigation of the murders, to a heterodiegetic third-person narrator focalized through “the girls” and rooted in the Argentina of the 1980s. This narrator, however, hesitates when it comes to making any statements about what the victims might have felt or thought before they were killed and refuses to inhabit their perspective. Instead, the narrative halts by letting go of the past tense and resorting to verbal constructions that express uncertainty, the impossibility of truly knowing (Chiani, 2019: 195):

Andrea must have felt lost when she woke up to die. Her eyes, suddenly open, would have blinked a few times into the two or three minutes it took her brain to run out of oxygen. (p. 21, emphasis added)

The conditional constructions draw readers into a liminal and speculative space, inviting them to imagine what the victims must have experienced while denying them the certainty of truly knowing and refusing to blur the distinctions between narrators, victims, and readers.

Rivera Garza makes the distance between herself and Liliana tangible for readers by meta-narratively bringing it to the foreground. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is interspersed with moments of self-reflexivity, where the narrator underlines the uncertainties, the contradictions, and the failures of closure that emerge in the process of trying to reconstruct her sister’s life. The text does not attempt to resolve these gaps and tensions, but accommodates them, and even displays them as “pieces of a very complex puzzle that I will never quite finish putting together” (Rivera Garza, 2023: 193). The loose pieces serve as reminders, to use Cano and Dillon’s words, of the “irretrievability” of Liliana’s absence.

Even though Rivera Garza and Almada make sure they do not inscribe themselves into the place of the victims of feminicide, the speaking position they fashion for themselves is connected to the victims by a common sense of vulnerability: the idea, to return to Hirsch’s (2016) expression, that “it could have been me” (p. 84). This is made particularly clear in Dead Girls, which is deeply invested in conveying the experience of vulnerability imposed onto feminized bodies (de Mauro Rucovsky, 2019; López Casanova, 2020). Throughout its entirety, the book bears witness to a seemingly endless repertoire of forms of gendered violence: from rape to forced prostitution, verbal, emotional, and physical abuse, all the way to feminicide. A few pages into the book, indeed, readers learn that its title does not exclusively refer to Andrea, María Luisa, and Sarita but to countless other dead and victimized girls and women that populate the pages of the book. Almada weaves lines of connectivity between herself and them by homodiegetically positioning herself as “a woman at the center of the plot” (Nanni, 2019: 84) and as someone who has also been the victim of gendered abuse more than once in her life (Almada, 2020: 15–18). In the process, Almada constructs herself as a survivor of feminicide, as shown most clearly in the epilogue to the text, dated 30 January 2014. There, the narrator lists the names of the 10 women killed since the beginning of the new year and recalls the morning when her 13-year-old-self woke up to the news of the murder of Andrea (2020):

We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now, I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck. (p. 143)

In these lines, the fictionalized Almada emerges as someone who is alive by chance, a survivor. Someone who has been subjected to violence without getting to “the point of no return” and who can therefore simultaneously bear witness to the violence inflicted on other (fatal) victims and on herself (Jelin, 2002: 111). In the author’s note to the English translation of the text, this positioning becomes even more explicit as the writer states that she, or any other of her friends, “could have been Andrea, María Luisa, or Sarita” (Almada, 2020: iii). By positioning herself as a survivor of gender violence and as someone still marked by the vulnerability imposed on female bodies, Almada fashions a speaking position that differs from yet is adjacent to that of the victims.

The motif of the narrator as survivor of feminicide materializes somewhat differently in Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Rivera Garza, linked to Liliana by family ties, sets the emphasis on the feelings of guilt, shame, and confusion that besiege those who mourn a victim of gender violence. The narrator exposes the widespread social practices of victim blaming in the 1990s—“a methodical and crushing machine” (Rivera Garza, 2023: 277)—and how they extended to the surviving family members. She scrutinizes the guilt she and her parents felt after Liliana’s murder, the restless self-questioning—“what did we miss? Why did we fail to protect her” (p. 41)—as well as the long years of silence that resulted from it. Despite highlighting different aspects in her textual rendition of herself as a feminicide survivor, though, Rivera Garza, echoing Almada’s strategy, establishes a connection to her sister by alluding to a shared, externally imposed vulnerability: “the only difference between my sister and myself is that I never came across a murderer. The only difference between her and you” (Rivera Garza, 2021: 42, emphasis added). Crucially, in these two brief sentences Rivera Garza is doing more than merely creating a link between herself (as feminicide survivor) and Liliana (as a victim). She is also reaching out of the diegetic frame to directly address an implied female reader—adding, as it were, an “it could have been you, too” to the initial “it could have been me.” The result is a triangular structure of connectivity that links the narrator-survivor, the reader-survivor, and the victim on the basis of vulnerability as a common condition.

The narrator of Dead Girls utilizes a similar tactic early on in the book, as she recalls what she felt after hearing the radio broadcast reporting how Andrea, a girl only a couple years older than her at the time, had been stabbed through her heart and killed in her sleep:

I was thirteen at the time, and that morning the news about the dead girl hit me like a revelation. My house, any teenager’s house, wasn’t really the safest place in the world. You could be killed inside your own home. Horror could live with you, under your roof. (p. 4, emphasis added)

The second person entreaties in the last two sentences of this passage have at least two addressees. On one hand, they are addressed inwardly: the narrator is speaking to herself, recognizing, as in an epiphany, her own vulnerability as a woman and her subordinated position in a violent patriarchal structure. On the other hand, the direct forms of address are directed outwards, to a presumed female reader, pulling her, too, into a position of vulnerability within a larger structure. Through this complex and multi-layered act of communication, female narrators, readers, and feminicide victims are proffered a shared position of vulnerability. This shared positionality, in turn, cements ties of affiliation between differently positioned women, forging a female and feminist “we,” a “nosotras.”

In taking vulnerability as a factor of transversality intended to unite women across ideological, racial, and class differences, Almada and Rivera Garza echo the coalition-making strategies used by contemporary feminist movements both in Mexico and Argentina. To generate political unity and gain momentum in its early stages, Ni Una Menos had to carry out “a painstaking construction of a common foundation” (López, 2020: 9), and found a way of doing so by underscoring the shared experience of vulnerability among women. Similarly, contemporary feminist collectives in Mexico struggle to build collective feminist subjects through the acknowledgment of gender violence as a “shared history that resonates in the bodily memory of women’s bodies” (Flores Pérez and Peláez González, 2022: 53). Vulnerability, in these contexts, is not defined ontologically, as constitutive of women’s bodies, but as “as politically produced” and “unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power” (Butler et al., 2016: 5). Accordingly, contemporary feminisms resort to vulnerability does not translate into a collective fixation in a position of victimization and powerlessness. On the contrary, it has given way to self-empowering demands to counter gender-based violence including changes in school curricula and the expansion of support networks for women among others. Both in Mexican and Argentinian feminisms, moreover, vulnerability is intertwined with other diverse affects with the potential to create political unity or a sense of collectivity such as outrage, desire, pain, hope, joy, and sorority (Flores Pérez and Peláez González, 2022; Solana and Vacarezza, 2020; Sosa, 2021).

Similarly, the “we” grounded on common vulnerability imagined and sustained by the modes of address exercised by Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer is not only marked by the threat of danger or harm. It also harbors a vibrant potentiality and a sense of hope that becomes palpable in the scenes of female complicity that can be found in both texts. The potentiality of the nosotras manifests itself in the opening scenes of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, which follow the narrator and her close friend, Sorais, as they traverse Mexico City, touring different public institutions in a Kafkaesque search to locate the case file of the investigation into Liliana’s murder. This quest binds both women together, creating an “umbilical cord” (Rivera Garza, 2023: 28) that keeps them connected. The theme of female camaraderie runs across the text and resurfaces in a particularly clear way at the end, where the narrator describes the experience of swimming as an activity of “most intimate sisterhood” (p. 301) between herself and her sister: one that sensorially returns her to her childhood and the many hours spent in the water with Liliana.

Dead Girls similarly closes with images of female connection. Almada says goodbye to the Señora, the medium she had regularly consulted throughout her oft-futile investigation into the murders. Squeezing each other’s hands tightly, the women then bid farewell, too, to the three dead girls: “The same wish for all of them: sleep well” (Almada, 2020: 144). Immediately afterwards, Almada recalls a memory of herself as a teenager, walking side by side with a beloved aunt who was on the verge of getting married and moving away. As a way of saying goodbye, the aunt shares with her, for the first time, the story of how she had survived a rape attempt as a girl. The women then continue walking in silence, and, as their bodies press closer together, both hear what seems like “the music of a small victory” (p. 146).

These vignettes of sorority play an essential function in the construction of the narrator-survivor in both texts. They underline that the textual “I” who narrates and remembers feminicide is enfolded in and sustained by a broader web of female connectivity. Almada and Rivera Garza, in other words, implicate themselves in their texts as individual presences who are part of a plural, feminine nosotras. Moreover, as alluded to above, by directly addressing their readership as fellow feminicide survivors, Almada and Rivera Garza overtly offer, as argued above, this position of enunciation for identification to their readers. They invite them, put differently, to enter into an identificatory relationship with the narrating “I” enfolded in the narrated and imagined feminine “we,” pulling readers, too, into this collective feminine position.

In its linking of vulnerability, solidarity, and hope, the collective position that the textual Almada and Rivera Garza inhabit and invite readers to join strongly resonates with the nosotras proposed by Cano and Dillon (2015) and galvanized by feminist movements and collectives in Mexico, Argentina and beyond. The performances of memory in Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer seem to converge, thus, with broader efforts within contemporary Latin American feminist movements to craft collective positions of enunciation from where to remember, to speak out about, and to protest against feminicide. Through the invitations for identification and the modes of address they put into motion, these literary texts can make unpredictable, non-linear contributions to weaving and disseminating the imaginary and affective ties upon which feminist communities of remembrance in the empirical world rest.

Conclusion

In Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, the work of feminicide remembrance and narration is also a future-oriented, affirmative work of feminist collective subjectivity formation. Rivera Garza and Almada use literature as a space of experimentation where new individual and collective positions of feminicide witnessing and remembrance are imagined, shaped, and cultivated. These positions become available for identification for present and future memory activists or entrepreneurs. Moreover, through the modes of address they direct at readers, Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer interpellate them to imagine and understand themselves as part of communities of feminicide remembrance, thus laboring to expand the “we” who remembers, bears witness to, and struggles against gender violence.

The female and feminist “we” imagined and made public through literary works such as Dead Girls and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, but also other activist and artistic discourses, does not point to an ontological homogeneity within women. It constitutes, rather, what Lorena Amaro (2021) describes as a strategic “pact, an alliance” (p. 276) that, through the idea of sorority, can succeed in creating the sense of political unity that is indispensable for processes of political mobilization. To achieve that aim, however, feminist collective subjects often suspend the differences in power, privilege, race, sexuality, and class that exist between women. For that reason, the imaginary and affective sense of unity created by this sort of alliances is traversed by an unavoidable tension and in constant need of redefinition to avoid the risk of homogenization or universalization (Bacci, 2020; La Greca, 2023). Acts of memory and narration that bring stories of gender violence into circulation in the public domain, in this sense, are not only needed to help form new feminist subjects and collectives. They are also required in the long-term project of questioning, revising, and potentially reimagining those subjects and collectives according to the changing demands of particular historical and political contexts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Brigitte Adriaensen, Liedeke Plate, and Valeria Grinberg Pla as well as my colleagues at the Radboud University chair group for Hispanic Studies for their comments on previous versions of this article. My gratitude also to the editors of Memory Studies and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful and generous feedback.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sofía Forchieri

Notes

Author biography

Sofía Forchieri is a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She studied Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt and Utrecht University. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American women’s writing, cultural memory studies, and decolonial feminisms, with particular interest on the relation between aesthetics, affects, and politics. Her work has appeared in Frame: Journal of Literary Studies and the edited volume Afectos y violencias en la cultura latinoamericana (Iberoamericana, 2022).

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