6.3. Feminism, Affective Trauma and Vulnerability [ES/EN]

This paper explores the cultural and literary dynamics shaping how relational trauma is witnessed and narrated in American memoirs (1978–2025). It examines whether these life writings expand or restrict testimonial freedom in a culture negotiating motherhood, trauma, and memory. Drawing on narratology, trauma theory, and motherhood studies, the paper traces a genealogy of maternal testimony and its shifting cultural legitimacy. By situating memoirs within the framework of collective memory, the study analyzes how writers challenge the myths of motherhood and the authority of maternal figures in American culture. While early motherhood studies (A. Rich) emphasized patriarchal structures of mother-blaming, they often overlooked adverse maternal experiences and the silencing of those who suffered them. The erasure of the maternal practice (T. Brennan) redirected attention toward cultural representations of motherhood rather than the perspectives of those deprived of maternal care. Narratively, the memoirs reveal how trauma reshapes identity and memory, echoing J. Herman’s notion of testimony as healing and the Yale school’s concept of “reading the wound.” Yet, the dominance of ego psychology (H. Hartman) and Lacanian theory led to interpretations that privileged autonomy over relationality, obscuring maternal care as a foundation of selfhood. In contrast, object-relations theory (J. Bowlby) and relational psychoanalysis offer more organic frameworks for understanding developmental trauma. Methodologically, the study employs interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore how individual experiences of maternal loss, neglect, or ambivalence are culturally mediated and personally interpreted. Through close contextual reading, IPA enables tracing how subjects transform suffering into testimony. The corpus includes memoirs by V. Gornick, M. Karr, A. Leve, J. Walls, D. Antrim, and authors connected to poetic, feminist, or Holocaust legacies (e.g., A. Sexton, A. Miller), revealing how testimonial freedom and maternal trauma intersect within American autobiographical writing.

The Chilean civil-military dictatorship (1973-1990) implemented diverse repressive practices and policies aimed at disciplining and eradicating an “internal enemy”. Among these, the legal and clandestine production of political exiles stands out. Until recently, forced displacement in the Southern Cone remained largely unexplored by the social sciences. Recent advances in human rights activism have rescued exile from oblivion and allowed it to be seen as a violation of human rights. However, the practice of exile has tended to be conceptualised from a male perspective, obscuring the experiences of women, children and young people who were also active protagonists and interpreters of exile. This article is part of my Bachelor's Thesis in Social Anthropology, in which I address the memories of those who were children, adolescents, and young adults during the Chilean exile in Buenos Aires. The objective is to understand the different positions—intra- and inter-family, community, and gender—and emotions that these social agents experienced in a context of forced mobility and state terrorism. Through biographical interviews and a historical-ethnographic approach, I will analyse the memories of two sisters who went into exile with their parents. I will specifically address the question of how the affections and emotions related to the exile experience are set in motion in the narratives driven by adult women who today remember their childhood and youth. Far from understanding the family universe as an intimate sphere separate from the public arena, it is relevant to investigate how forced mobility and the various repressive practices instrumentalised by the civil-military dictatorship had an impact on the decisions, paths, relationships and affections of exiled families, unmasking the various ways in which the public is intertwined with the private, shaping specific meanings, knowledge and relationships.

The paper examines the intersection of disability studies, literature, and trauma and memory studies to explore how persons with disabilities navigate and negotiate their identity and agency following life-altering impairments. Literary texts such as Rachel DeWoskin’s Blind, Wendelin Van Draanen’s The Running Dream, and Natasha Friend’s How We Roll have been analyzed to illustrate how literary representations of disability transcend the medical model to engage with the psychological aftermath of trauma, followed by the recontextualization of selfhood. The research adopts an interdisciplinary methodology, integrating theoretical frameworks from Disability Studies—particularly the scholarly work of Colin Barnes, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Tom Shakespeare—and from Trauma and Memory Studies, including the work of Cathy Caruth and Catherine Malabou. This framework enables an exploration of how memory and trauma inform bodily and psychological adaptation, revealing the protagonists’ emotional progression from denial and anger to reconciliation and acceptance. The research paper seeks to highlight that an individual's disability extends beyond a state of deficiency and is instead a transformative lived experience. The primary literary works foreground themes of resilience, societal discrimination, and the subjective articulation of lived experiences with disability. These works challenge social hierarchies of normalcy and establish the role of literature in reimagining the disabled body as a site of meaning, agency, and relational strength.