Labor Metamorphosis and Violence Against Women in Sergio Chejfec's The Dark

Abstract

Sergio Chejfec is one of the most important Latin American writers of the last decades. His novels have been well received in academia due to an innovative narrative style that combines classic realism with avant-garde narrative strategies, as well as an accurate reflection of his political context. He shares this style, sometimes descripted as anti-realism, with other South American writers of his generation, 1 whose goal is to represent their reality giving an accurate reflection of what we, in our neoliberal times, do not have a language for. Therefore, Chejfec’s The Dark (Boca de lobo; originally published in 2000) became an instant success, because it accurately exposes and reflect on the falling of the Argentinian working class, problematizes the geographic and photographic characteristics of memory, meditates on the status and value of writing, and anticipates the popular uprising against neoliberalism in Argentina in December 2001. 2 Even if the novel can be interpreted in multiple ways, I will argue that Chejfec wants to problematize the reconfiguration of global capitalism via the flexibilization of production and working conditions, producing a systemic violence directed to women. This transformation of what I will call the “economy of violence” of the reproductive structure is one that, ultimately, is written on the bodies of women. In other words, the restructuring of work that increases precarity of life also reorganizes and intensifies the structures of violence, making women its main target.