Feiguele y Otras Mujeres

Feiguele y Otras Mujeres brings together a series of short narratives by Argentine writer Cecilia Absatz, centered on women’s lives—especially adolescent girls—within Jewish‑Argentine middle‑class families in Buenos Aires.

The title story, “Feiguele”, follows a fourteen‑year‑old protagonist who narrates, with disarming humor and cruelty, her experiences of body image, family neglect, classroom violence, sexuality, and friendship. Subsequent pieces (“La siesta”, “La teta”, “El aborto”, “Un poco de paz”, “Un ballet de bailarinas”, “Lisa”) expand the gallery of women negotiating desire, work, motherhood, and the everyday absurdities of urban life.

Absatz’s prose is colloquial, fast‑paced, and sharply observant. She mixes tenderness with brutal honesty, black humor with vulnerability. The volume is particularly effective for engaging students with: first‑person voice, unreliable narration, the construction of female subjectivity, and the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity.

For U.S. classrooms, Feiguele y Otras Mujeres offers a highly teachable set of texts: short, vivid, and immediately accessible, yet rich enough to sustain discussions on feminism, Jewish‑Argentine identity, the politics of the body, and the representation of adolescence.