Filiation and feminine memory in the Peruvian novel written by women of the last decade

Abstract

This article analyzes a set of four Peruvian novels written by women and published in the last decade: Jennifer Thorndike's [Ella] (2012), Katya Adaui's Nunca sabré lo que entiendo (2014), Karina Pacheco's Las orillas del aire (2017), and Christiane Félip's Los espejos opacos (2018). They address the issue of filiation as part of a project to recover personal and historical memory. For the study of this corpus we will use, in the first place, a diachronic perspective that seeks to insert them in the genealogy of women's writing in republican Peru, that is, in a tradition in which maternal filiation constructs the subjectivity of the characters and metaphorizes society. In a second moment, we will analyze the novels in the light of the notion of feminine memory (Jelin, Collin). In short, we want to demonstrate that in these novels we are witnessing a redefinition of the feminine subject not only as a subject that is liberated, but that is resituated by transforming power relations in their environment through the search for their family past.