Discomfort Work: Latin American Literature and the Feminicide Frame – A Seminar with Sofía Forchieri

Abstract

In this talk, Sofía Forchieri will talk about her dissertation, “Discomfort Work: Latin American Literature and the Feminicide Frame.” Since the early 1990s, and through the transnational efforts of Latin American feminist artists, academics, and activists, feminicide has developed from a counter-hegemonic concept into a frame that guides how violence against women is understood and remembered. Sofía’s dissertation argues that the work of recent Latin American women writers features formal experimentations that challenge key dimensions of this frame. To give insight into the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of literary reframings of feminicide, the dissertation proposes the notion of discomfort work. The talk will first introduce this idea. In a second step, it will put it to the test as a lens for reading through an analysis of three fictional works: Fernanda Melchor’s Páradais (2021), Daniela Catrileo’s Piñen (2019), and Dahlia de la Cerda’s Perras de reserva (2022).

Bio.

Sofía Forchieri is a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen and a lecturer in Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American women’s writing, memory studies, and decolonial feminisms. Her dissertation, “Discomfort Work: Latin American Literature and the Feminicide Frame,” explores how recent literary works from Latin America interrogate and expand existing structures of feminicide imagination and remembrance. Sofía’s work has appeared in journals like Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Memory Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Journal of Perpetrator Research.

This seminar is organized by the Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group (ICON).