Acting up and carrying on: Women writers of Chile, 1945--2006

Abstract

Analyses of exemplary novels, short stories, and collaborative literary activities that took place during three key historical periods (the 1950s and 1960s, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the transition from dictatorship to democracy) highlight the importance of collaboration and group formation among Chilean women writers. During these periods, female authors used art to push for the equal representation of women in political, cultural, and everyday life. In both their narrative texts as well as in their public lives as artists, the authors featured in this study typify the ways women writers of their eras worked together to create prototypes of female artists as architects of both socio-political equality and aesthetic innovation. Beginning with the first rumblings of collective political-literary activity in the 1950s and ending shortly before the 2006 presidential elections, this dissertation plots the strategies and patterns uniting three groups of female intellectual activists in a literary genealogy fashioned deliberately to advance common, liberating goals. A sustained focus on female Künstlerromans, which were either performed in the public sphere or published as novels and short stories, illuminates how the writers of these periods used art to create and represent oppositional views counteracting discrimination and oppression. Analyses of María Elena Gertner's La mujer de sal and María Carolina Geel's Cárcel de mujeres, novels of the Generation of 1950, show that women artists of the 1950s and 1960s began using narrative to galvanize subaltern voices. From the Generation of 1980, analyses of Pía Barros's role as founder and director of the Ergo Sum workshop and press, and short stories by Alejandra Basualto locate the apex of collective political-literary action during the Pinochet regime. Finally, readings of Nona Fernández's Mapocho and Andrea Jeftanovic's Escenario de guerra , novels which showcase the collective vision of the writers of the Group of Cultural Industry, illustrate how contemporary authors have updated the projects of their literary antecedents of the Generations of 1950 and 1980, casting female artist heroines in crucial leadership roles during the transition from dictatorship to democracy.