Systems Lack the Language: On Alia Trabucco Zerán’s “When Women Kill”

Alia Trabucco Zerán, transl. Sophie Hughes | When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold | Coffee House Press | 2022 | 256 Pages

When Chilean novelist and scholar Alia Trabucco Zerán describes her latest research project, “men and women alike furrow their brows, wince, and then nod their heads in approval of my decision to tackle such a pressing, awful, and all-too-common problem in Latin America.” Her book, When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold, investigates four homicides committed by twentieth-century Chilean women. But where people “should have heard the words ‘women killers,’” she explains, “a strange mental lapse made them hear the opposite: ‘women who have been killed.’”

This “selective deafness” suggests a pervasive cultural narrative that frames women as victims, not killers. It is “easier,” Trabucco Zerán explains, “for people to imagine a dead woman than a woman prepared to kill.” She describes the resulting “mental slip”:

The disturbing image of an armed woman was superseded by another, inoffensive one: that of a defenseless woman, six feet under—herself murdered or the victim of violence. ‘Woman’ and ‘killer’ were true antonyms, it seemed—words that, when spoken together, proved unhearable, unthinkable.

Mishearings result from cultural narratives that preclude the possibility of women killers.

Linguistically, too, women killers are unrepresented. In Spanish, the word “killer” is inherently masculine. The English translator of When Women Kill, Sophie Hughes, points out that this connotation becomes clear in the book’s Spanish title: Las homicidas. Like all other Spanish nouns, homicida—which means “killer” or “murderer”—is gendered. It is one of a few masculine nouns that ends in a but normally pairs with the masculine definite article los. In plural form, the masculine noun becomes los homicidas: “the [(male)] killers.” This noun assumes killers to be men. When Trabucco Zerán replaces los with the feminine las to form her book’s title, she creates a surprising noun: “the [(female)] killers.” With this subtle change, Trabucco Zerán exposes deep-seated associations between murder and masculinity in the Spanish word for “killer.” Culture cannot comprehend them, and linguistic systems lack the language for women killers.

When Women Kill demonstrates that even legal systems cannot make sense of women who kill. Poring over court documents and analyzing contemporary media coverage in Chile’s national archives, Trabucco Zerán recreates the cases of four women who murdered. She details their crimes in unflinching detail: Corina Rojas, who hired a hitman to murder her husband (1916); Rosa Faúndez, who strangled her husband and dumped pieces of his body all over Santiago (1923); María Carolina Geel, who shot her boyfriend in a hotel restaurant (1955); and María Teresa Alfaro, who poisoned the three children she nannied and their grandmother (1960-63). Trabucco Zerán conducts close readings of each trial transcript and argues that the Chilean legal system relied on narratives of madness and motherhood to explain away these women’s crimes.

Defense lawyers claimed that their clients were mad or emphasized their motherhood to secure reduced sentences. Madness has proved, for centuries, a convenient diagnosis for unexplainable female behavior. When society frames the madwoman as an anomaly, no one has to reevaluate prevailing definitions of womanhood or consider whether womanhood is more complicated than those definitions allow. And, in similar fashion, reminding the jury that the defendant is a mother ties her back to the domestic sphere where both lawyer and jury assume she belongs. Not only do lawyers rely on pervasive cultural narratives to defend women killers, but gender inequalities are also written into laws. Until 1953, Chilean law “absolve[d] any husband who murdered his spouse if he caught her in a flagrant act of adultery.” The legal system protected men who murdered their wives. The same protection did not apply to women who killed their husbands, regardless of their reasons for doing so. Like nouns and definite articles that assume killers to be men, these laws make assumptions about what men and women can and should do. There was no room for women as defendants in the twentieth-century Chilean legal system—their place was, cultural narratives suggested, in the home.

Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold “delv[es] into the past” to make visible four women who committed violent crimes. These women come from various backgrounds—Corina Rojas was the wife of a man forty years older than she, and Rosa Faúndez was the wife of a news vendor; María Carolina Geel was a successful writer, and María Teresa Alfaro was a nanny. But all four women killed, thrusting them into a role that Spanish has no word for, and cultural and legal narratives sprung up to make sense of what they did. Trabucco Zerán’s project is not to endorse their crimes, nor to sensationalize them—she is critical and unsparing in her analysis. Rather, When Women Kill reveals how narratives and cultural systems work in the wake of women’s crimes to put them back into their place—in the home, in court, in language, and in the simple inability to hear the word: women killers.