Del Silencio al Trazo. La Resignificación del Trauma de Género en las Memorias Gráficas de Creadoras Transatlánticas Actuales

Abstract

This study analyzes the expressive and reinterpretive capacity of graphic memoirs written by female authors from Argentina, Chile, and Spain, focusing specifically on the representation of gender-based violence and its traumatic aftermath in the context of fourth-wave feminism. Using a qualitative approach and a gender perspective, six transatlantic graphic memoirs are examined: El cuerpo de Cristo by Bea Lema, El buen padre by Nadia Hafid, Diario oscuro by Marcela Trujillo, La sombra de la cucaracha by Gato Fernández, Estamos todas bien by Ana Penyas, and Naftalina by Sole Otero. Specifically, the use of the formal and stylistic resources of the comic medium—through Charles Hatfield's (2005) four tensions of comics—is analyzed to express traumatic experiences described as unspeakable: gender-based violence in the home, the medicalization of female psychological suffering, sexual trauma, and intergenerational trauma.Throughout the analysis, the connection between gender trauma and its structural roots is emphasized to situate this trauma in the sociopolitical context from which it must be confronted. Adopting a political relational perspective on trauma (Angela Carter 2011), these works are read as criphistemologies (Mollow 2014), sources of alternative knowledge born from the embodied experience of trauma. The role that graphic memoirs play as spaces of testimony and resistance to medical and legal discourses and as instruments of collective awareness in the context of fourth-wave feminism is highlighted. The conclusions emphasize that these works, rather than expressing trauma, perform it, constituting a critical intervention in the resignification not only of individual pain, but also of collective pain.