SOURCE: "Valenzuela's Other Weapons," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 78-81.

In the essay below, Araújo explains the relation between the feminine body and language in terms of the violence and degradation depicted in Other Weapons.

The stories, narrations and other works of fiction of Luisa Valenzuela reveal a trajectory that incorporates female identity into social and historical circumstances. El gato eficaz and He Who Searches are baroque, truculent and multiple novels. With bold rhetoric, the erotic is intermingled with the political, thereby propitiating a textuality bordering on the absurd. Her short-story collections, such as Aquí pasan cosas raras, lead to fragmentation with passages of black humor mitigated by frustration-rpression. The more recent and more personal Other Weapons describes and punctuates a feminine sexuality which adheres to processes of power. There, subjected to organized and subtle reflexive instances, love corresponds to a subjective interiorized...