Violence against Women in Anglophone and Hispanic Contemporary Literature

This doctoral thesis arises from the need to address the issue of women's invisibility as part of a broader movement encompassing violence against women and girls, which oppresses and affects them in the current heteropatriarchal society. This topic falls within the humanities with a feminist perspective, also covering aspects related to gender studies and sociology. The overarching objective is to investigate and analyze identity intersections concerning violence against women and the voices of women in contemporary Angliphone and Hispanophone literature. In the current landscape of the #MeToo movement, women are using their voices to narrate past traumatic events they still suffer today. The current British sociopolitical context, marked by Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic, simultaneously evidences different attempts to overcome tensions regarding asylum, labor needs, and multicultural citizenship. Based on the idea of a "redesign" or "readjustment" of immigration, multicultural, and political approaches, this apparent willingness places a conservative emphasis on monitoring national borders, as well as excavating older assimilationist discourses emphasizing cultural unification, social cohesion, and a notion of a central national identity. Contemporary work is often feminized, meaning that working conditions originally linked with female workers now become relevant to the entire workforce. Some of these working conditions include temporary, informal, and flexible employment contracts, care and emotional work, as well as work performed at home. This research project will explore literary representations of 21st-century women in contemporary Anglophone and Hispanophone literature. This dissertation will gather literature from various Anglophone contexts, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Nigeria, to provide evidence of how contemporary literature can enrich the understanding of contemporary women's experiences. In the past, women fought to access the labor market, showing an apparent evolution in their relationship with work and thus with the sense of autonomy. However, there still exists a problematic area in addressing women's emancipation, as well as its impact on their health. Women still feel afraid of being visible due to their lack of legitimacy. Social science studies show that for women to apply for a job, they feel they must meet 100% of the requirements, while men typically apply when they meet around 60% of the same requirements. The fact that women do not feel secure enough to access workplace opportunities evidences the fear they face in attempting to feel legitimized in the world. Consequently, movements of false empowerment continue to develop. According to Hadley Freeman, the term 'empowerment' initially referred to the idea of offering autonomy and strength to marginalized people in the 1970s. However, the current model of female empowerment is known as "fake empowerment," which, beyond keeping women safe, promotes consumerism under the idea that "everything is possible," thus contributing to their commodification—that is, the transformation of women's bodies and identities into a product for commercial purposes. Although these movements present themselves as a cover for a void concerning women's self-esteem to face the labor market, paradoxically, they demand blindness to inequality, thus affecting the formation of women's identities in the present. Therefore, the symptoms caused by these situations of violence against women are generally identified as psychiatric disorders, a fact that generates double suffering as well as revictimization of women.