Eden Besieged. Spatial Segregation and the Construction of Identities in Privates Urbanizations

Abstract

The adoption of the neoliberal model in Argentina in the 90’s not only brought economic consequences but it also contributed to the rise of social inequality and the discursive construction of the subjects “winners” or “losers.” The emergence of private urbanizations was one of the symptoms of this decade together with the symbolic and effective consummation of an imaginary entity that left the dispossessed of a system of ferocious segregation “out in the cold.” Some of the texts of Argentine narrative, understood from this approach as symptomatic cultural discourses, materialize and particularize the effects and consequences of that First World illusion. Within this framework, we analyze the configuration of the realms of exclusion/inclusion in the novel Las viudas de los jueves (2005) from the Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro. These realms delineate spaces (country/periphery, within/without) and times (historicity/ahistoricity) that visibalize/invisibalize different identities.