(Sur)viving or Dying in the World’s Garbage Dump: Gender Violence in “El Limpiador”, by Rocio Silva Santisteban

Susti A. · Letras (Peru) (2023) · DOI: 10.30920/letras.94.140.12

Resumen

This article examines “El Limpiador” —a short story included in the volume Me perturbas (1963), the first narrative volume by Rocío Silva Santiste-ban (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 com-munitas (Esposito, 2009), State and Law are com-pletely absent. In this bordering territory, biopoli-tics —“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 perspec-tive, the analysis focuses on the normalization of violence by male characters over women employ-ing the three dimensions of violence proposed by Johan Galtung (1969, 2016), as well as the concepts of gender violence —as it is defined by Fem-inism—, feminicide, rape of women (Segato, 2003, 2021) and “symbolic trashing” (Silva Santisteban, 2003, 2008), all of these regarded as forms of pun-ishment of those women who “abandon their positions” in the patriarchal order (Segato, 2003).

Instituciones: Universidad de Lima