El infierno prometido, a pop historical novel

Abstract

In this essay, we read Elsa Drucaroff’s El infierno prometido as a pop historical novel which combines different genres and discourses. By recreating human trafficking for sexual exploitation carried out by the Zwi Migdal in Argentina in the 1920s, fiction allows us to analyze its times and spaces, its narrative strategies and, above all, its characters, which reflect different types and functions of hegemonic masculinities, with categories and references coming from cultural and gender theory as well as from pop culture and contemporary languages. Weaving similarities with the present, the text projects alternative forms of experience with alterity and the world, at the same time promising, in fiction, a possible liberation for oppressed subjectivities, in this case a victim of prostitution and “traffic of women”. Also linked to many literary genealogies (and having an alter ego of Roberto Arlt as a character), the story of Dina, Drucaroff’s heroine, works as an imaginary matrix for reflection on crucial sociopolitical issues of the patriar-capitalist world and our colonial history, relating to gender, class, race, age, culture and nationality.