Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ni perversas ni traidoras. Ficciones de colaboración femenina en las dictaduras de Argentina y Chile by Ksenija Bilbija (review)

2023; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Volume: 199; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsf.2023.a918083

2165-6185

Dianna C. Niebylski,

Latin American Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Ni perversas ni traidoras. Ficciones de colaboración femenina en las dictaduras de Argentina y Chile by Ksenija Bilbija Dianna Niebylski Bilbija, Ksenija. Ni perversas ni traidoras. Ficciones de colaboración femenina en las dictaduras de Argentina y Chile. Cuarto Propio, 2022. 171 pp. ISBN: 978-956-396-177-5. The first part of Ksenija Bilbija's title might lead readers to assume the author is giving an easy pass to the real women who inspired fictional characters loosely based on Chilean and Argentine leftist women militants who turned collaborators to avoid further tortured, death, or the loss of family members. This would be a mistake. Although two of the carefully researched chapters review the entrenched debates that have surrounded the stories of captured women whose collaboration with their Chilean and Argentine torturers during these nation's last dictatorships led to the capture, torture and even death of other leftist militants, the greater part of the book stays true to the second half of its title. Written from a decidedly feminist perspective, this book argues that most novels written about female victims-turned-collaborators —several of which claim to be based on true stories, continue to exploit women victims of sexual terror not only by dwelling on the sexual relationship between the woman captive and her tormentor but by having the abused woman admit that she could not help but feel pleasure during some of these violent encounters—. In her analysis of nearly a dozen novels written between 1990 and the present, Bilbija shows that a) entrenched sexist attitudes continue to equate sexual violence by men on women as erotic and b) that the [End Page 161] neoliberal markets that followed the dictatorship in both Chile and Argentina found a profitable business in fictional stories of female victims-collaborators that mixed politics, torture, violent sex, betrayal (always by the woman) and women's guilt: "Es precisamente la lógica del mercado la que privilegia estas representaciones y en particular, la de la mujer que siente placer durante la violación y que acaba sometiéndose 'voluntariamente' al poder de su victimario, mostrando así que su sexualidad sigue siendo propiedad del hombre" (69). Among the fictional works discussed in the first three chapters are Germán Martín's El palacio de la risa (1995), Carlos Franz's El desierto (2005) and Arturo Fontaine's La vida doble (2010), all novels about female victims of torture and rape who became collaborators during the Pinochet regime. Recognizing that these novels have been praised as emblematic of restitution in Chilean fiction (68), Bilbija concedes that they reflect the difficulty of writing about restitution in a post-dictatorial Chile where impunity remains the order of the day. This much has been said before. What has gone largely unnoticed and what Bilbija wants her readers to see is the extent to which these novels dwell on the sexual relationship between the victim and her victimizer and the frequency with which stories of rape are depicted as stories of seduction. Her discussion of Carlos Franz's prize-winning novel El desierto, a novel praised by some reviewers as an erudite allegory of Chile during the transition years provides a clear illustration of what Bilbija objects to in these fictional representations. In this novel, a brutish police chief makes a pact he does not intend to keep with a young female judge in a remote area of Chile. After noting the prurient attention devoted to the sadistic sex, Bilbija points out that, unlikely as this might be, the novelist has the judge admit her guilt over what she calls her "orgasmos negros" during these violent encounters (56, 63). It turns out, however, that the voice readers assumed to be the judge's voice is in fact that of her ex-husband. In most the novels she studies, the woman's voice is ventriloquized by other characters or, if the woman is allowed to speak in her own voice she is denied the last word in her story. A chapter on the Argentine television series Estocolmo: Identidad perdida (2016), brings to bear how many of the sexual scenarios depicted in the Chilean novels discussed previously are...