Violent Effects: Domestic Violence and Poetic Subversive Discourses

Abstract

Processes of sociosexual geo-racialization consistently render Latinas in the U.S. vulnerable to domestic abuse. Engaging this issue, third space feminists have adapted testimonio as a means for exposing domestic abuse while striving to craft transformative discourses that humanize these women’s experiences of oppression. The dusmic nature of poetry, as defined by Nuyorican poets, lends itself to this task. “Violent Effects” synthesizes poetry’s dusmic nature with third space feminists’ development of testimoniando —or testimonio as an agentic process—to identify how Maria Luisa Arroyo’s poetry exposes, dignifies and humanizes survivors’ experiences of domestic violence and thereby subverts dehumanization’s violent effects.