Contemporary Argentine Literature and Gender Violence: Invoking memories through Selva Almada's Chicas Muertas

In Argentina, every eighteen hours a woman is murdered. Over the years, this figure continues to rise and femicide persistently plagues societies around the globe. In the case of Argentina, the police resolve very few cases. For example, in 2016 only thirty-eight cases of femicide were closed. The patriarchal system works to burry and forget the memory of these dead women, which perpetuates the devaluation of contemporary and future generations of women in society. In the novella Chicas muertas (2015), Argentine author Selva Almada (b. 1973) investigates three cases of unresolved femicides. All of these young victims were murdered at the hands of men in the eighties. Through this literary work, Almada uses her voice to raise awareness of past and present acts of gender violence. As a female author, the way in which Almada plays with the narrative voice and the point of view creates a unique contrast between the story of femicide and the violence that occurs today.  Although she examines deaths that happened right after the military dictatorship, the change in tone and time period throughout her work emphasizes the current relevance of sexist violence within patriarchal society. This analysis and research focuses on how Almada constructs a female voice in order to invoke and preserve the memory of these women whose violent deaths the patriarchal society wants to forget and suppress.