Between body and land: sexual violence and imaginations of justice in contemporary Latin American short stories

Abstract

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of sexual violence against women and its possible fictional elaborations in contemporary Latin American short stories by women authors, through the construction of forms of justice that escape institutional channels and are grounded in community practices and in a material relationship with the land and bodies. Starting from the observation that, in the social sphere, gender-based violence often goes unpunished or receives insufficient institutional responses, the study turns to literature as a privileged space for imagining other possible responses. The corpus consists of the short stories La mansedumbre, by Giovanna Rivero (2020), and Sangre coagulada, by Mónica Ojeda (2020), published in recent collections and representative of different geographical contexts. The analysis shows that, although distinct in their narrative and aesthetic strategies, the texts share the construction of scenarios in which sexual violence is addressed and reconfigured through acts of punishment against perpetrators of sexual crimes against women that are not presented as merely individual, but rather as situated practices shaped by ancestral knowledge and community logics. In these short stories, justice is not grounded in abstract legal principles, but in a concrete relationship with the body, the land, and non-hegemonic forms of symbolic organization. It is argued that these configurations, while challenging ethical and narrative boundaries, operate as devices for reworking female agency in contexts of extreme violence. In doing so, the texts not only denounce the brutality of these experiences, but also explore, on the fictional level, the possibility of displacing the effects of what Rita Segato (2013) describes as a pedagogy of cruelty, opening up space for other forms of action, perception, and elaboration of violence. KEYWORDS: Gender-based violence; Latin American short story; Female authorship; Community feminism.