Dead Girls: Gender Violence & Radical Imagination

How do we talk about girls? How do we talk about dead girls? How do we make their lives matter in a world that, too often, doesn't want to care?

Femicide is generally defined as the murder of women simply because they are women. In Argentina 278 women died as a result of male violence in 2018, and almost 150 cases occurred in the UK that same year. In her new book Dead Girls, internationally acclaimed Argentinian author Selva Almada dives into the heart of this problem with a journalistic novel, comparable to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

Inspired by the novel, we have gathered a special panel to explore how Art can address painful and critical social issues, and violence against women* in particular. Dead Girls blended fact & artifice to open a feminist space for giving voice to victims, and imagining the way our world could be if we really confronted its inequalities and injustices rather than accepting them as inevitable.

Our speakers - legal scholar Sharon Cowan, feminist visual artist Camila Cavalcante, and writer Carolina Orloff who is Charco's Director and Editor - will use the book as a starting point for broader conversation.

We'll be discussing the historic and contemporary violence women face, and consider the power of fiction or story, in making parts of our world more accessible to others/ more affecting to unfamiliar readers/ more open to reimagining. *Our definition of Women is trans-inclusive, and includes all who identify as women and are oppressed by patriarchy as a consequence.

Speaker Bios:

Prof Sharon Cowan is the Professor of Feminist and Queer Legal Studies at Edinburgh University. She has published widely in areas relating to: law, genders and sexualities; the impact of law on trans people; asylum and refugee studies; critical pedagogy; law and popular culture; and criminal law, particularly focusing on legal responses to sexual violence. She is one of the coordinators of the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project, and an editor of the book by the same name: https://www.sfjp.law.ed.ac.uk/

​ Camila Cavalcante is a Brazilian visual artist and the author of For the Lives of All Women, a book that culminated from meeting women across Brazil who have had or who have witnessed illegal abortions. She photographed fifty women who shared their stories with her. Through the use of documentary photography, Camila's work intertwines embroidery, collage and installation to create a place in which the idea of ‘private’ and ‘public’ overlap and complement each other. More about her & her work: https://www.camilacavalcante.com/

​ Dr. Carolina Orloff is an author, translator and scholar who has been working on research projects studying the literature, politics and culture of contemporary Argentina. At the end of 2016, together with Sam McDowell, Carolina co-founded CHARCO PRESS, an independent publishing house focused on the translation into English of contemporary Latin American literature. Carolina acts as director and main editor at CHARCO PRESS, and is the publisher of Dead Girls. This event is a collaboration between Lighthouse & Charco Press and was made possible due to the generous funding of the Scottish Book Trust for Book Week Scotland!