Female Gazes at the World of Drug Trafficking through Fiction

Abstract

Since the beginning of the so-called “war against drug trafficking,” declared by former president Felipe Calderón, violence has increased alarmingly in Mexico. This situation has impacted on the Mexican literary production of the 21st century; it is even at this time that the controversial category of “narco-literature” boomed. This work will focus on two novels that share several similarities in aesthetic, thematic, and perspective levels and that, in addition, were written by women who were outside of the centralized literary canon: Orfa Alarcón (Monterrey, 1979) and Iris García Cuevas (Acapulco, 1977). The objective of this paper is to review the category of “narco-literature” and to analyze the novels Perra brava and 36 toneladas based on female views on violence derived from drug trafficking, one of the most serious problems facing Mexico today.