‘Every Reader Is Guilty, Every Text is Murderous’: Witnessing Feminicide through Complicity and Perpetration

One of the cornerstones of feminicide memory culture as it has evolved in Latin America over the past three decades is that memory work should focus on the victims and not on the killers. Increasingly, however, writers, filmmakers, and artists are venturing to explore the mind, voice, and motives of feminicide perpetrators. This article aims to make sense of how this stream of commemoration intervenes in present feminicide memory culture. Drawing on scholarship from perpetrator studies, complicity studies, and decolonial feminisms, it argues that perpetrator-centered narratives can productively diversify feminicide memory culture by opening up witnessing positions that are structured by complicity and implication. To develop this argument, the article analyses a recent creative engagement with the figure of the feminicide perpetrator: María Eugenia Cerutti’s experimental, multimodal work Con toda la muerte al aire (With All the Death Laid Bare, 2021). The article concludes by suggesting that because they ground testimony in implication and complicity, perpetrator-centered works of memory can enable alternative ways of witnessing feminicide that are shaped by discomfort and, potentially, self-reflexivity.