Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction: Palabra de Mujer (Iberian and Latin American Studies)

An analysis of Chilean memory culture from the perspective of gender and literary studies.

How do the politics of memory perpetuate gendered images of political violence in Chile? Can the literary rewriting of painful experiences contest existing interpretations of national trauma? How do women participate in the production of collective narratives of the past in the aftermath of violence? This book discusses the literary representation of women and their memory practices in the recent work of seven contemporary Chilean authors: Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros, and Nona Fernández. It locates their works in the context of a patriarchal politics of memory in Chile, a country still grappling with the legacy of military dictatorship. Through the analysis of novels that depict the dictatorial past through the memories of women, Gustavo Carvajal argues that these texts explore remembrance as a process by which the patriarchal co-option of women’s memories can be exposed and even contested in the aftermath of violence.