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The control over women’s bodies in Claudia Piñeiro’s Quién no
María E. López
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,
1 Claudia Piñeiro, Las viudas de los jueves (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005). Elena Sabe,
2 Claudia Piñeiro, Elena Sabe (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006). Tuya,
3 Claudia Piñeiro, Tuya (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005). Las grietas de Jara,
4 Claudia Piñeiro, Las grietas de Jara (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2009). Betibú5 Claudia Piñeiro, Betibú (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011). and
Una suerte pequeña.6 Claudia Piñeiro, Una suerte pequeña (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2015). Las viudas de los jueves,
Betibú,
Tuya and
Las grietas de Jara have been adapted to film.
7 Las viudas de los jueves, dir. by Marcelo Piñeiro (Spain and Argentina: Castafiore Films and Haddock Films, 2009); Betibú, dir. by Miguel Cohan (Argentina: Haddock Films, 2014); Tuya, dir. by Edgardo González Amer (Argentina: Tres Mentes, 2015); Las grietas de Jara, dir. by Nicolás Gil Lavedra (Argentina and Spain: Benteveo Producciones and Bowfinger International Pictures, 2018). 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.
8 Claudia Piñeiro, Quién no (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2018). 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. This is because, for her, the mistreatment of women is still approached in the country as an event happening at the margins of society.
Violence in all its forms isolates the protagonists and does not allow them to communicate their feelings to their loved ones, to socialise and to digest past traumas. For Piñeiro, progress in life entails leaving behind the many social and family stereotypes through which violence often operates and moving towards an inclusive and equalitarian view of life. In this way, violent dynamics force individuals to confront their traumas with honesty and courage and leave behind the hypocrisy, focus on social appearance and competitiveness. Yet, this is presented as a difficult process that involves deep emotional wear and tear for the protagonists, who oscillate between the disintegration and reconstruction of their lives and their fragile identities.
We shall see that the females in Quién no often live normal lives but stoically endure being the preferred victims of a system that deceives and mistreats them and ignores their views. For example, in ‘Dos valijas’ (‘Two suitcases’, pp. 25–41), a woman finds out that her dead husband had another family almost identical to hers. She accepts this bizarre situation and returns her husband’s belongings to the other family. In ‘La madre de Mariano Osorno’ (‘Mariano Osorno’s mother’, pp. 93–109), an incident on a football field gives rise to a bizarre situation in which a woman’s honour is called into question. ‘Alquiler temporario’ (‘Temporary rental’, pp. 185–215) recounts how a young mother, Natalia, is captured by a family of torturer children a few days after her baby’s death. In ‘Lo mejor de vos’ (‘The best of you’, pp. 161–77), a woman who has tried to commit suicide several times ends up killing her parents.
Yet, women do not represent a solid group of victims of hegemonic masculinity for Piñeiro. In
Quién no, there are also male characters with an egalitarian view of gender relations, who follow their wives’ commands, show empathy for the situation of the females around them and have a strong commitment to their children. This is the case with Julián and George Mac Laughlin in the opening story of the book, ‘Lo de papa’ (‘Daddy’s’, pp. 9–25), which tactfully narrates the encounter of two divorced fathers in an empty flat. This encounter is a symbol of a fresh start for these two males and their children. Such is also the case with Hernán in ‘El abuelo Martín’ (‘Grandpa Martín’, pp. 129–35), who, as we shall see later in more detail, understands gender relations differently from his beloved grandfather, who killed his wife and hid her body behind the walls of the family home. The discovery of the murder of his grandmother shakes Hernán’s existence but not his vision of gender relations, judging by how he looks at his son as a symbol of hope. These stories, among others, are indicative that in addition to contesting the humiliating treatment of women, Piñeiro challenges hegemonic masculinity as a tool that appropriates women’s bodies in Argentinian society. Piñeiro’s views are in line with recent critical theories on harmful masculinity (in the singular) and strategies to build alternative masculinities.
9 See, for example, Marta Segarra and Ángels Carabí, New Masculinities (Barcelona: Icaria, 2000).Due to the complexity of each story and in order to avoid a superficial analysis of them, this chapter focuses on four stories: ‘Claro y contundente’ (‘Clear and convincing’), ‘El abuelo Martín’ (‘Grandpa Martín’), ‘Un zapato y tres plumas’ (‘One shoe and three feathers’) and ‘Basura para las gallinas’ (‘Scraps for the hens’).
10 I use the Spanish titles throughout.In ‘Claro y contundente’, the mother of a child with special needs is tempted to kill everyone around her to free herself and her son from social and academic prejudice. In this story, Piñeiro presents the competition among upper-middle-class wives and mothers. ‘El abuelo Martín’ narrates the precise moment when a man finds out about the femicide of his grandmother at the hands of his grandfather. The story, as we shall see, talks about gender-based violence and femicide behind the appearance of a normal family. ‘Un zapato y tres plumas’ presents how repressive and violent family dynamics cause a man to end his wife’s life and destroy his relationships with his children. The story describes the return of his son 20 years later and the way he challenges the power of his decadent father. This, as we shall see, is a metaphor for the political violence and repression of Videla’s time, which Piñeiro refers to in her interview with Martínez as ‘a moment of death in Argentina’.
11 Spanish original: ‘un momento de muerte en la Argentina’; Ezequiel Martínez, ‘Claudia Piñeiro, la dama del suspenso’, El Bloc de la Bòbila, 5 May 2015; http://bobila.blogspot.com/2015/05/claudia-pineiro-la-dama-del-suspenso.html [accessed 18 November 2020].In these stories, Piñeiro engages with the theme of memory, in particular with the debate on what is part of the official history of Argentina and what is deliberately ignored. This is the legacy of political violence inherited from the State repression that occurred during the military government of Jorge Rafael Videla (1976–81). Writing has therefore become a necessary activity that allows Piñeiro to publicly challenge the taboos and silence over several issues inherited from that period that are still affecting women.
Similarly, in ‘Basura para las gallinas’, Piñeiro reproduces the considerations of a mother who has performed an abortion on her daughter and is about to throw the foetus in the bin. In this story, the practice of illegal abortion is presented as the only alternative for women without economic resources in the country. Piñeiro presents the legal prohibition of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in Argentina as a form of political violence that caused the deaths of thousands of victims of illegal abortions.
12 While writing this chapter, a bill on the right to legal and safe abortion has been passed by the Argentinian parliament. Piñeiro understands the illegal interruption of pregnancy in Argentina as a conservative measure formed by the Church-State in the defence of the traditional family. She argues that the violence against women in Argentina was a form of political violence, as the Church-State declared itself in favour of the ‘two lives’ concept, leaving women who decided not to continue a pregnancy without health coverage:
It was very clear that at first they said ‘we are in favour of life’ and then they moved on to say ‘both lives’. […] Save the two lives is an absolute falsehood because, in general, you do not save either. With a knitting needle or with parsley, in all those cases, the woman will die.
13 Spanish original: ‘Quedó muy claro que ellos al principio decían “estamos a favor de la vida” y después pasaron a decir “las dos vidas”. […] Salvemos las dos vidas es una falsedad absoluta porque, en general, no salvan ninguna de las dos. Con una aguja de tejer o con un perejil, en todos esos casos, la mujer va a morir’; Ezequiel Scher, ‘Quién sí y quién no: entrevista con Claudia Piñeiro’, Lavaca. Revista Mu, 16 November 2018; https://www.lavaca.org/mu129/quien-si-y-quien-no-entrevista-con-claudia-pineiro/ [accessed 19 December 2019].Achieving the free right to the interruption of pregnancy thus became a way to free women from male control over their bodies. The debate on the interruption of pregnancy in Argentina was ultimately embedded in the political debate on the right for the State alone to make decisions about women’s fundamental rights. This explains Piñeiro’s engagement with the feminist movement that took her to the streets to demand a change in the law to guarantee the right to the voluntary termination of pregnancy in Argentina, known as the ‘Marea Verde’ (‘Green Wave’), which we will talk about next.