Literature, authoritarianism and human rights in current Argentine literature, the case of Ganarse la muerte, by Griselda Gambaro

An embodied reading

Abstract

Ganarse la muerte was written between 1974 and 1975, being published in 1976 by Ediciones de la Flor: the very year in which the coup d’état took place. Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Méndez of the SIDE wrote a detailed report on this novel, for which it was banned in April 1977 by decree of the military junta. This article sets out to analyse how Griselda Gambaro highlights the political, social and epistemological violence exercised by the discourse and procedures of censorship during this dictatorship, incarnating it in the woman/homeland. Similarly, as Nelly Richard argues with regard to feminist epistemologies, this fiction promotes ‘new forms of political subjectivity capable of intervening in the multiple power struggles that take place between bodies, practices and institutions’ (2008, p. 8, our translation) and question the possibility of a general form of knowledge, attacking its supposed neutrality (Alcoff; Potter, 1993), without distorting the objects of knowledge due to ignorance, false propositions or invalid arguments (Haraway, 1995), as has so often been argued.