La monja no tiene quien la escuche. El caso de Dominga Gutiérrez y la prosa de la contra-emancipación

This article examines the way in which both the defence and the accusers in the ecclesiastical trial for apostasy that took place in Arequipa, Peru in 1831 against Dominga Gutiérrez for escaping her convent, co opted her voice for their political purposes and remained impervious to her own version of events. It also explores the diverse romantic narratives that emerged against the grain in the nineteenth century from local and national literary memories, and how these became the source of a patriarchal fantasy in the twentieth first century which obliterated the historical subject. In the context of post emancipation Peru, the aim is to assess the complex intertextual relation between gender subalternity, historical discourse and memory, focusing on the particular form of symbolic violence it reveals when the subaltern is a woman who speaks up but is not heard.