Art, Violence, and Social Change. Challenging Violence Against Women and Girls Through Entertainment-Education

But Oates radically undermines Connie's security by showing us how many women are seduced by the romantic "promises" in our pop songs: her young protagonist in fact becomes a victim of Arnold Friend, who, in the end, is not very friendly at all. Oates's short story is, therefore, fascinated with male violence (both psychological and physical) against women, for, as she says about her prodigious work in general, "I sense it around me, both the fear and the desire, and perhaps I simply have appropriated it from other people." Like Islas's and Viramontes's narratives, Robert Stone's work, which we may call postmodernist meditative realism, concentrates on stories that are already embedded in an inter-American, hemispheric, and global dimension. Dog Soldiers (1975), a novel about heroin and drug dealers, for instance, travels globally between Saigon, San Francisco, and a middle-class retreat near the United States-Mexico borderlands. Stone's hard-nosed language and lurid scenes of sexual violence bring him clearly within the orbits of K Mart realism ...»