Public Revenge: Expressive Violence and Gender Inversion in Cristina Rivera Garza's La Muerte Me Da

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of Cristina Rivera Garza's La muerte me da (2007) drawing on the concept of expressive violence developed by Rita Segato in her analysis of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. Following the anthropologist's reflection, which understands those crimes as enunciative acts in which women's bodies function as surfaces for messages exchanged among networks of power, I argue that Rivera Garza's novel constructs a fictional inversion of that framework, shaping what I call here “public vengeances.” The essay dwells on the expressive intentionality of the crimes (castrated male bodies accompanied by inscriptions made with “women's objects”), Alejandra Pizarnik's verses as an authorial signature, public space as a stage for exhibition, and the logic of inversion that structures the text across multiple levels (male victims, female detective, feminine subjectivity behind the crimes, castration as a symbolic cipher). I contend, finally, that the novel, without explicitly stating a vengeful motive, disseminates a vocabulary of retribution that, read through Segato's work, allows us to think of it as a fantasy of violent reciprocity: a fiction that imagines what would happen if the expressive violence exerted upon women's bodies were returned, inverted, upon the bodies of men.