Canon, Infrastructure, and the Body: Operations of Exclusion and Counter-Archive in Chilean Women’s Poetry (1973–1990)

Abstract

This article examines the operations of exclusion that have shaped the Chilean poetry canon and the ways in which women's poetic production during the dictatorship (1973–1990) articulated a counter-archive that challenged those mechanisms. First, the paratexts and selection criteria of foundational anthologies—from Anguita and Teitelboim (1935) to Erwin Díaz (1991)—are analyzed, showing how procedures presented as objective and neutral (breadth, consistency, posterity) historically functioned as devices for marginalizing women's writing. Second, the new infrastructure of literary production and circulation that emerged after the military coup—poetry magazines, literary workshops, and independent publishers—is studied, revealing how it enabled an unprecedented participation of women in the poetic field by suspending or weakening traditional canonical criteria. Third, the body is proposed as a common axis across these works, which, while not emerging with aesthetic unity, share a thematic one. The body appears as a central symbolic platform in this poetry, where corporeal materiality operates as a site of resistance against the patriarchal imaginary and the violence of the dictatorship, confronting the regime's moral ideals and naming forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Finally, it is argued that the failure to incorporate this transformation into the representation of the literary field in the decades following the dictatorship constitutes a continuation, by other means, of the same operations of exclusion analyzed here, and that a critical reform of the literary institution bears on the relevance of literature to address the experience of the community as a whole.