Political Bodies
Subtitle: Gender, History, and the Struggle for Narrative Power in Recent Chilean Literature (The Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: August 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 307
ISBN-13: 9780838755037
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Politics and literature; Gender Studies; Social Science; Latin-American Spanish; Sociology; Politics in literature; General; Chilean literature; 20th century; Chile; History and criticism
Description: "Political Bodies is one of the first studies to link recent developments in Latin American literature to the rise of new social movements in the late 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on literary works in the context of the Chilean women's movement and resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship, Alice Nelson contends that the recent struggle for narrative power in Chile has been a contest about gender ideologies.

Furthermore, she argues that this contest has been enacted literally and figuratively on the stage of human bodies as sites of domination and resistance. Examining works by Pia Barros, David Benavente and the Taller de Investigacion Teatral, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Isabel Allende, Political Bodies engages emergent feminist critiques of authoritarianism in terms of gender and class, history and language.

Nelson persuasively argues that the cultural forms of resistance produced under Pinochet anticipated both the achievements and the shortcomings of Chile's democratic transition, from the late 1980s through the present Concertacion."--BOOK JACKET.