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Please find below details of the next lecture in the Culture Wars lecture series on censorship and freedom of speech, by Dr Jorge Sarasola Herrera from Hispanic Studies. The lecture will take place on Monday 8 December, 11am-12pm, in MS.04 (Zeeman Building).

The full schedule of talks for the Culture Wars series is available here:

Jorge Sarasola Herrera

From Libertarianism to Prohibition: Femicide Literature and the Politics of Reading in Milei鈥檚 Argentina

Despite proclaiming an ideology of radical libertarianism, Javier Milei鈥檚 鈥淟a Libertad Avanza鈥� movement has engaged in state-sponsored literary censorship. In a 2024 public campaign spearheaded by the country鈥檚 vice-president, Victoria Villaruel, four novels written by prominent female authors were excluded from high school syllabi on the grounds they were 鈥減ornographic鈥�. This presentation will focus on the accusation levelled at one of the novels, Dolores Reyes鈥檚 2019 Cometierra [Eartheater], which follows a young woman who has the power of locating sites where victims of femicides are buried by eating earth. By contextualizing the notion of 鈥減ornography鈥� within the history of literary censorship, I argue that Cometierra was targeted less for its explicitness than for its implicit critique of the State鈥檚 failure to address systemic femicide.