Swiss Trash: l'Autre Suisse de Dunia Miralles

Swiss Trash, Dunia Miralles's first novel, became a best-seller in French-speaking Switzerland after it was published in 2000. By showing the feelings of alienation and dereliction experienced by abused women, isolated immigrants, and marginalized drug addicts, Dunia Miralles calls into question the myth of a prosperous and healthy Switzerland and reveals the deep anxiety pervading a society that struggles to acknowledge its internal divisions and differences. This article aims to highlight not only an other Switzerland divided by various social, economic, sexual, and cultural fractures, but also some exoticizing tendencies of Francophone studies which, by privileging a multicultural approach, sometimes fail to examine the margins and peripheries created by the violence of social, economic, political, and ideological practices in European Francophone countries.