UC Riverside

This dissertation reads the poetry written by Chilean women between 1973 and 1990 as an affective archive: a documentary corpus whose legibility depends on articulating the relationship between violence and language. Against the impulse to fill the gaps in literary history, it argues that this poetry constitutes not an appendix to the national canon but an affective counter-archive—one that registers the absence, erasure, and cultural exclusion produced by a double censorship, at once juridical-political and literary-institutional.Under the dictatorship, as the collapse of legal channels disabled established regimes of proof, testimony was relocated rather than silenced: poetry became the medium through which it was received, metabolized, and reterritorialized. Drawing on a Peircean notion of the index, the study proposes that this poetry does not represent violence but inscribes it—through theme, gesture, syntactic torsion, and productive silence—carrying the force of affect without naming it directly. The “economy of silence” that organizes the work of poets such as Elvira Hernández, Soledad Fariña, Astrid Fugellie, Bárbara Délano, Eugenia Brito, Verónica Zondek, Carmen Berenguer, Teresa Calderón, Heddy Navarro, and Marina Arrate, among others, is read here not as absence but as a strategy of containment and survival. The manuscript advances three analytical axes—hermeneutic-historiographic, psychoanalytic-neuroscientific, and materialist-feminist—organized around four transversal categories: archive, body, testimony, and violence. It demonstrates that dictatorial and patriarchal violence are co-implicated, sharing an infrastructure of impunity that preceded the 1973 coup. Reconstructing an expanding corpus of 154 women poets, 71 magazines, and dozens of self-managed workshops, the dissertation shows how a precarious material infrastructure made possible a decentralized counter-archive of dictatorship-era violence, and how reading the poetry of this period repairs the rupture between body and word that state terror and patriarchy sought to impose.