Cárcel de mujeres: Gender and Gendering in “La Tita” Avendaño’s De la libertad y el encierro

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Roberta “La Tita” Avendaño Martinez’s De la libertad y el encierro in which she begins to articulate a female experience in 1968 and expose the gendering of the discourse of 1968. Tita examines the way in which the prison, the prison experience, and the concept of justice and political agency are all gendered and privilege a male perspective. Her work gives voice to a woman’s perspective of prison life, away from the confines of the well-known Lecumberri prison. Still, rather than exploring her contributions to the movement, Tita illustrates her subaltern position within the movement itself by describing the drastically different living conditions she faced in a prison with only a handful of political prisoners. Additionally, she details the life of other nonpolitical prisoners as a way of illustrating the far-reaching and permeating injustices of which women were victims.