The Villa Miseria and the Gated Community: Urban Materialities and Social Exclusion in La Virgen Cabeza and Las viudas de los jueves

Abstract

This article analyses the literary representations of the Argentinian social and urban context of the 1990s in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s La Virgen Cabeza and Claudia Piñeiro’s Las viudas de los jueves. Drawing on the theoretical and critical contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, Josefina Ludmer and Gisela Heffes, this comparative analysis focuses on how inequality is inscribed in the opposing urban spaces of the villa miseria and the gated community. The former is depicted as a space saturated with garbage, remains and corpses, where its inhabitants are perceived as “social waste”; in contrast, the gated community is represented as an enclave obsessed with controlling the landscape and selecting its members. In both novels, these spaces are portrayed as living archives of inequality, where social hierarchies are inscribed into the geography itself, and where the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the useful and the disposable, become porous. The analysis thus reveals how these works offer a critical perspective on how the physical and material organisation of space reflects, reproduces and reinforces relations of power, exclusion and social inequality.