6 - The control over women’s bodies in Claudia Piñeiro’s Quién no

Summary

While feminist activism has given worldwide visibility to the impunity over the violence against women and girls and femicides in Latin America, I said in Chapter 5 on Selva Almada that girls’ and women's safety and wellbeing continue to be relegated to the bottom of Argentina's political agenda. I argued in that chapter that the lack of State resources to combat gender violence and investigate cases of femicide in the interior of the country is sustained by the dominant machista ideology that, among other things, ensures male hegemonic power and therefore the humiliating treatment of women and girls.

In this chapter, I address the representation of the violence against women in urban Argentina by Claudia Piñeiro, who is one of the country's most relevant voices in the crime genre. Piñeiro is the author of Las viudas de los jueves, Elena Sabe, Tuya, Las grietas de Jara, Betibú and Una suerte pequeña. Las viudas de los jueves, Betibú, Tuya and Las grietas de Jara have been adapted to film. Piñeiro's stories revolve around a violent act, such as a murder, a femicide, an accident, an abortion or a suicide. Despite being a crime genre author, her plots do not focus on knowing the perpetrators’ identities but on witnessing the processes through which the protagonists, apparently normal people, survive these events and traumas, which shake their lives in the context of a fragmented, amnesiac and competitive social environment. In her writing, Piñeiro thus challenges the notions of ‘normal people’ living a ‘normal life’. However gruesome they may be, these events can happen to anyone because all of us, she argues, are exposed to various modes of violence in contemporary society.

This chapter addresses Piñeiro's approach to the impact of the dynamics of violence against women in Quién no, which is an anthology of 16 short stories. This book provides detailed accounts of a contemporary Argentinean society that is mostly conservative, classist and patriarchal. Piñeiro camouflages her strong commitment to feminist activism in the existential dilemmas affecting the lives of the protagonists, such as social hypocrisy, guilt, loneliness, competitiveness and individualism. These violent events rarely appear in history books and yet, as Piñeiro points out in her narrative, they haunt the existence of most Argentinian women.