Literature, Malvinas and Women: A Reading in Feminist Key

Abstract

In this article, we will address the fictional construction of women in Malvinas literature and interpret it from the perspective of feminist epistemologies, as it requires revision, from the perspective of traditional patriarchal configurations that divide subject positions between the public and the private, the political and the familial, the rational/instrumental and the emotional, as formations that construct and sustain poetic and political imaginaries.

Although literature constitutes itself as the discourse capable of critically addressing the Malvinas War—a debt that neither historiographical nor political discourse seems able to assume in these 40 years—in relation to the place and role of women in the war, it assumes the same significant construction as the traditional discourses of military and militarized patriarchy. Women are absent from the field of political and social representation of the war (only in recent years have the voices of women who participated in the Malvinas begun to be raised) and also from the literary and aesthetic imagination. In testimonial discourses, in current political discourses, and in their own representation in literature, the women health professionals who participated in the South Atlantic Theater of Operations (SATO) are represented as "angels," "like a mother, sister, or girlfriend," "capable of providing comfort or affection" to wounded soldiers without densifying the representation of the central professional role they played in the war or as "prostitutes," "whores," "Argentine hysterics," etc.

In this sense, we propose our (mine, in this case) own reading from a feminist epistemology that situates me as the subject of the gaze, as a subject who connects my own corporeality and subjectivity located in being a woman who shares the history of women's displacement from the centers of knowledge and power. It is from this position that this critical reading, this construction of situated knowledge, is constructed. As Haraway argues, "With whose blood were my eyes made?" (1995:15) eyes as a synecdoche of a positioned and localized critical gaze (open, unstable, partial, at times tense) from which epistemic and political positions are played out and in which, according to Haraway, the alleged objectivity of knowledge is resolved; an objectivity as a positioned rationality that proposes to read the stereotypical representations of women in the Malvinas War.