Resisting Through Rage: “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” by Mariana Enriquez and “Las fieras” by Elaine Vilar Madruga

Abstract

This article analyzes the poetics of violence presented in the short stories “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (2016), by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina), and “Las fieras” (2024), by Elaine Vilar Madruga (Cuba). These texts expose the pattern of systemic gender violence; thus, the fallacy that women are equal citizens to men and that the domestic sphere is the safest space for women (when their partners are their main aggressors) is shattered. Faced with this situation, shared rage emerges as a guiding force for effective collective female resistance; however, this response is problematized differently: in Enriquez's text, it is the female bodies themselves that bear the violence (and redefine the burning of witches), whereas in “Las fieras” violence is vengefully and furiously directed against male bodies (in a scene reminiscent of the Maenads). The main objective of this article is to analyze the stories’ proposal of female rage as a collective strategy of resistance. Likewise, the aim is to compare how the authors channel violence. The method of the analysis is the close reading and takes as its theoretical framework the feminist theory and the affective turn, with authors such as Ahmed, Butler, Lorde, Lagarde, and Segato. The conclusion is that female rage is reclaimed as a political force and a human affect, and that violence is channeled in opposing ways by the authors: from a dystopia and from a utopia.