One thing that shocked me in Cristina Fallarás’s book about losing her job and becoming impoverished is the complete absence of any men as active agents of family life in the story. There’s she, there’s her sister, her mom, they are all trying to figure something out to make ends meet. That there’s a husband and a father of her very small children only comes up when Fallarás shares that in the middle of the family’s floundering, the husband “traveled to Germany to participate in a literary event because he’s a writer.”
The family is at the stage of rationing food, and dude is … a writer? Not an Uber driver, house painter, cleaner or absolutely anything else that makes money but a writer who makes none? I’ve never heard of him, so it’s not like he’s a brilliant artist who didn’t want to sacrifice his art to menial labor.
Fallarás was fulfilling her part of the social contract and giving birth to children. Why wasn’t their father fulfilling his?
This happened back in the former USSR, too. Women hustled while men felt sorry for themselves and did nothing to inscribe themselves into the new economy. I always thought it was the legacy of WWII and Stalinism. But it looks like it’s the same in Spain.
I forget now who said that women always come out as winners in the neoliberal game. Fallarás is now well-to-do, famous, and married to a woman. Her ex-husband is languishing in irrelevance.
Fluidity is easier for women, it seems like.
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