Abstract

SUSTI, Alejandro. (Sur)viving or Dying in the World’s Garbage Dump: Gender Violence in "El Limpiador", by Rocio Silva Santisteban. Letras [online]. 2023, vol.94, n.140, pp.158-172.  Epub Dec 30, 2023. ISSN 0378-4878.  http://dx.doi.org/10.30920/letras.94.140.12.

This article examines "El Limpiador" -a short story included in the volume Me perturbas (1963), the first narrative volume by Rocío Silva Santisteban (1963)-, a reworking of "El campeón de la muerte" by Enrique López Albújar (1872-1966), initially published in Cuentos andinos (1920). First of all, I study the space where the story takes place as an example of the image of a "dump/frontier zone" (Bauman, 2005) in which concepts as communitas (Esposito, 2009), State and Law are completely absent. In this bordering territory, biopolitics -"the techonology of power over population, over human beings as living beings" (Foucault, 2011)is displaced by a "necropower" (Mbembe, 2011) exercised not by the State but by those men who hold the power of killing the weakest -mainly women-. In second place, from a gender perspective, the analysis focuses on the normalization of violence by male characters over women employing the three dimensions of violence proposed by Johan Galtung (1969, 2016), as well as the concepts of gender violence -as it is defined by Feminism-, feminicide, rape of women (Segato, 2003, 2021) and "symbolic trashing" (Silva Santisteban, 2003, 2008), all of these regarded as forms of punishment of those women who "abandon their positions" in the patriarchal order (Segato, 2003).

Keywords : Peruvian Narrative of the 20th Century; Rocío Silva Santisteban; Gender Violence; Femicide and Rape; Femininities and Masculinities.

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