The project aims to analyze representations and figurations of physical and symbolic violence exerted over women’s bodies in a body of literary texts. On the basis of an analytical literary framework that integrates perspectives pertaining to Anthropology, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, my research project will be focused on the ways that these writings reveal mechanisms of possession, consumption, and discard of women’s bodies, that is, transformed into wasted humans.

For that purpose, Intersectionality will be adopted as a theoretical orientation in my research, and concepts of “human waste” from Zygmunt Bauman (2003), “(un)grievable lives” from Judith Butler (2009) and “pedagogy of cruelty” from Rita Segato (2016) will be used within the analysis. Additionally, since my research project underlines the importance of contextualizing the phenomenon of violence within specific histories and politics of place, it uses a decolonial approach (Segato 2016; Lugones 2007) that allows a deep understanding of how history and place matter to how we conceive and experience violence.

Profile: Virginia León Torrez studied Spanish Linguistics/ Literature and Latin American Studies, and completed a Master of Arts with special qualification in Literature at the University of Bern. She is currently assistant and teaching fellow for Latin American and Ibero-Romance Literary Studies at the University of Zurich. Besides, she organizes a reading circle of Latin American Literature in Zurich
https://letrasbernaculas.ch/wordpress/, she is a member of the creative writing group Letras Bernáculas (https://letrasbernaculas.ch/wordpress/) and found member of The Latin American Working Group of the Swiss Association for Gender Studies (SAGS): Feminisms, Marxism and Decoloniality (FMD)
https://www.gendercampus.ch/en/sags/sags-working-groups/ag-feminismen-marxismus-und-dekolonisierung-fmd-die-lateinamerikanische-arbeitsgruppe-der-sggf