“Una casa hecha de palabras”: Unsettling the Wounded Family Paradigm in Diario de una princesa montonera. 110% verdad (2012) by Mariana Eva Pérez

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Argentine dictatorship, the national imaginary anchored memory through a familial relation to loss, constituting a wounded family, that is, a broken lineage of family members of the disappeared whose biological kinship has become the motor for memory work and political activism. In this article, I explore the gendered implications of what it means to bear witness and be a member of the wounded family in the novel Diario de una princesa montonera. 110% verdad (2012) by Mariana Eva Pérez. As a daughter of disappeared parents, Pérez’s work constitutes a postmemory text that uses humor and genre experimentation to unsettle the solemnity and performative imperatives within the wounded family imaginary. Through a feminist criticism lens, I argue that the metafictional strategies of the text re-envision the possibilities of memory narratives and challenges that the conventional codes of remembering present within the Argentinian national imaginary.