Transgenerational Feminist Memory in Dulce Chacón’s 2002 Novel La voz dormida (The Sleeping Voice)

Dulce Chacón narrativizes the Nationalist weaponization of femaleness against Republican women incarcerated in Madrid’s Ventas prison. Her novel exemplifies what I term “femimemory.” This gynocentric recovery of memory acknowledges patriarchal manipulation of historiography, promotes empathetic identification with female trauma, and ethically commits to justice through the transgenerational transmission of narratives by and about women. As “red” women, Chacón’s incarcerated characters embody the antithesis of the nationalized Catholic ideal of femininity. As a result, their captors’ sanctions and tortures intentionally defiled the political prisoners’ privacy, cleanliness, chastity, and maternity. La voz dormida bears witness to the inhumanity of inflicted trauma, as well as to the humanity of intergenerational sisterhood, thus celebrating the gynocentric, symbiotic ideology within this hostile space ruled by a phallocratic-phallocentric order.