Gendering Trauma: Ariel Dorfman's Narratives of Crisis and Reconciliation

Abstract

The author studies the gendering of women in theories of trauma through an analysis of one film and six novels by Chilean author Ariel Dorfman. The essay begins by situating Dorfman's writing in the context of the 1973 Chilean coup, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the Chilean Truth Commission. Tracing the representation of women as markers of national trauma and masculine identity in Dorfman's writing demonstrates that women's voices remain a site of uncontained ambivalence in his work. As these texts oscillate between a critique of the sexualized figuring of women and a continued reduction of them to desired objects, the silent female voices rupture both authoritarian national discourse and the anti-authoritarian narrative practices of the novels. Ultimately, this figuring of women registers a textual trauma in Dorfman's writing that draws attention to the dissociation and discursive erasure of women's experience in narratives of national tragedy and trauma studies.