Whores, or almost... gender violence in fiction films from Argentina and Brazil in the Twenty-First-Century

Abstract

In recent decades, many films have sought to address the issue of gender violence. The cinematographic representations, especially the Brazilian ones, reveal that most victims of male violence outside of conjugal relationships are women in situations of prostitution, whether voluntary or forced, or those who, for some reason, are associated with prostitutes. These types of violence are essentially sexual and are marked by power hierarchies. The understanding that we live in a society built by and for men, which reinforces a certain type of masculinity at the expense of others and reverberates in gender relations, crosses film readings. In this work I approach narratives of gender violence in fiction films from Argentina and Brazil produced in the first decades of this century. I seek to reflect, from the perspective of the History of the Present Time, on these representations as the result of long and medium-term historical processes, noting how such processes influence the constitution of a misogynistic imaginary, perceptible in these representations, which still seems to divide the women between “saints” and “whores or almost...”, imposing on the latter “punishments” in the form of sexual violence.