Patriarchival Violence: Patriarchy, Archives, and Violence in Post-Dictatorship Latin American and Latina Women’s Writing

In the decades following the wave of right-wing Latin American dictatorships in the late twentieth century, many scholars have discussed the impacts of these dictatorships and their relationship to US imperialism and neoliberalism. A variety of post-dictatorship scholars, including Nelly Richard, Idelber Avelar, and Macarena Gómez-Barris, have demonstrated that narratives that draw attention to the forms of violence that continue to undergird contemporary neoliberal systems are often obscured or ignored. Despite this rich work within post-dictatorship scholarship, no scholars have devoted significant attention to the intersections of post-dictatorship literature across the Americas. However, if we take seriously the role that right-wing, US-supported dictatorships played in establishing the global hegemony of neoliberalism, then a hemispheric approach is necessary for gaining a deeper understanding of the machinations of empire. Patriarchival Violence addresses this gap by examining post-dictatorship literature by both Latin American and US-based Latina women writers published after the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. Read together, these texts draw attention to a phenomenon that I refer to as patriarchival violence—the use of archives to support, implement, and naturalize the project of patriarchy. I argue that these novels depict diverse archives alongside the flashpoint of dictatorship in order to draw attention to and combat the underrepresented forms of violence that precede, coexist with, intensify under, and follow dictatorships. These texts portray dictatorship not as an outlier, but as a condition with blurred boundaries that continues to emerge as a result of patriarchival violence. Patriarchival Violence not only investigates the role that archives play in post-dictatorship literature, but it also builds its own feminist, interdisciplinary archive. Methodologically, Patriarchival Violence draws together a large corpus of scholarship from feminist, post-dictatorship, Latin American, Latina/o, neoliberal, and decolonial studies. Through its hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach to post-dictatorship, this project pushes debates beyond how to effectively remember dictatorships. Instead, Patriarchival Violence posits that post-dictatorship women’s writing not only calls attention to these regimes but works to create a critical readership capable of decoding the violence embedded in the language and symbols used both within and beyond dictatorships.