Gender and Sexuality

Both dictatorships and democracies are conceived in Bolaño’s texts within the framework of a patriarchal order in which sexual impulses and pleasure in the mutilation of women and children are not only the legacy of the authoritarian abuses of dictatorships but also the very condition of the formation of the legal apparatuses of democratic states. Many of the approaches to gender in Bolaño have focused on the killing of women in Ciudad Juarez. What I contend in these pages is that the normalization of violence against women or more subtle ways of erasing women’s visions (in particular in relation to strong or independent women) is what most calls for a feminist reflection in Bolaño’s world, because what is exposed is precisely the simultaneity of autonomy and vulnerability. Gender violence in Bolaño also involves the inexorable link between masculinity and rape/feminicide. And it is precisely within this link that literature plays such a central role, not only in the exposure of violence, but also in a more silent (and hidden) consent to sexual violence and the killing of women.