Reconceptualising the Female Political Prisoner: 100 Years of Women's Imprisonment

This project aims to transform the way in which we conceptualise the female political prisoner. It will focus on prison texts produced by incarcerated women from the Franco dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975), the military dictatorships of Argentina and Chile (1976-1983, 1973-1990, respectively), and ICE and Immigration Removal centres in the present day USA and UK. I will analyse novels such as Dona Juana Jimenez's Desde la noche y la niebla (1978), poetry such as Angeles Garcia Madrid's Al quiebro de mis espinas (poemas desde la carcel) (1977) and Veronica de Negri's Definiciones (1992), collective histories such as Tomasa Cuevas's Presas (2005) and the anthology Refugee Tales (2016), and legal testimonies such as Sheila Cassidy's Tortured in Chile (1976). This range of texts will allow me to trace the figure of the female political prisoner in various political situations throughout the past century, and will provide the basis from which to analyse women's testimony of their gendered experience of imprisonment. I am particularly interested in examining these prison texts through theoretical approaches to the testimony text, centred upon the idea of bearing authentic witness to one's own experiences, and I intend for this research to draw together concepts from the disciplines of both history and literature in order to create a new theoretical framework through which to analyse the first-person accounts of female political prisoners. The inclusion of the UK and USA will also allow me to address questions raised by today's global immigration crisis, within which women's bodies and women's testimony are often detained and silenced.

This proposed project will build upon my current Masters thesis, Mujeres de Ventas Women's Writing in Franco's Prisons, which explores the literary production of the female political prisoners of Ventas Prison after the Spanish Civil War. This study focuses on prison writing and testimony in Franco's Spain, specifically on establishing the female prison text as a transgressive literary practice that calls into question the dominant social and political hierarchies of its time (Harlow, 1987). It will therefore provide me with the theoretical foundation needed to expand further my research into female prison literature. I also explored questions of historical memory in my undergraduate dissertation, which examined the collective Spanish memory of the Civil War. I have already made contact with several potential research partners, including the UK organisation Journey to Justice (an M4C cultural partner), with whom I hope to work on this project.