Novelist Alia Trabucco Zerán has long been
fascinated not only with the root causes of violence against women, but by
those women who have violently rejected the
domestic and passive roles they were meant by their culture to inhabit.
Choosing
as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women in the
twentieth century, she spent years researching this brilliant work of narrative
nonfiction detailing not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves,
but the story of how society, the media and men in power reacted to these
killings, painting their perpetrators as witches, hysterics, or femmes fatales
. . . That is, either evil or out of control.
Corina Rojas, Rosa
Faúndez, Carolina Geel and Teresa Alfaro all committed murder. Their crimes not
only led to substantial court decisions, but gave rise to multiple novels,
poems, short stories, paintings, plays, songs and films, produced and
reproduced throughout the last century. In When
Women Kill, we are provided with timelines of events leading up to and
following their killings, their apprehension by the authorities, their trials
and their representation in the media throughout and following the judicial
process. Running in parallel with this often horrifying testimony are the
diaries kept by Trabucco Zerán while she worked on her research, addressing the
obstacles and dilemmas she encountered
as she tackled this discomfiting yet necessary project.