Literary re-emersion of silenced female voices and memories during the Brazilian military dictatorship

Abstract

Nowadays, the voice of Brazilian women is considered an inconvenience by the conservative political power, which continually tries to (re)establish the priority of men’s speech and the illegitimacy of women’s presence as a political subject in the public space. In this particular political moment, it is compelling to look at the experiences of women who lived and fought during another brutally conservative moment in Brazilian history: the twenty-one years of the civil-military dictatorship. This research explores works by two women from this generation: Maria Pilla and Maria Valéria Rezende. To remember these women is very important because both Temer and Bolsonaro’s governments have established an explicit connection to the dictatorship era, and because theBrazilian feminist movement itself is entwined with the history of the struggle against authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s. This research studies women's testimonies, reports, and novels written by them. Our aim is to reflect on the process of memorytransmission by women involved in the struggle against dictatorship –between historical suppression and literary re-emergence –across the temporality of this memory, in order to understand the impact of such heritage in relation to contemporary struggles by Brazilian women. Consequently, we have also researched two contemporary women authors who write of private, family memories from the dictatorship. The selected authors regarding the contemporary generation are Adriana Lisboa and Lilian Hang Brum.