ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the novel Perra Brava (2010) by Mexican author Orfa Alarcón and focuses on aspects of violence and gender. Perra Brava [“Brave Bitch”] tells the story of a woman who struggles to assert a self-determined female subjectivity after her lover, the head of a drug cartel in the Mexican-American borderlands, introduces her to a social world marked by hypermasculinity and violence. In this novel, precariousness is not exclusively the result of poverty or a lack of resources — in fact, the adult life of the main protagonist is characterised by the pseudo-opulence of hyper-consumerism. Rather, the precarious stems from an experience of omnipresent violence, insecurity, and contingency in the radical power asymmetries of narco-society, which are such that life can at any moment “be expunged at will” (Butler 2016, 43). From a neoliberal postfeminist perspective, Mora Ordóñez focuses on the question of how feminine subjectivities are constructed within the limits and conditions of this system of violence and shows how hyper-consumerism goes hand in hand with the (self-)commodification of the female subject.
