ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how each woman has transformed, over approximately three decades, her life story, particularly descriptions of torture and sexual or gender-inflected injury during captivity. It traces the interpretations by historians, filmmakers, and novelists in the course of employing their oral histories in the production of testimonial-based popular artifacts, in particular, a feature-length docudrama, Pau Vergara's 2007 Memorias de una guerrillera. Women are raped in wartime and during periods of political repression by dictatorial regimes. Testimonies of Spanish Republican women have been studied by scholars from many vantage points, and yet the subject of rape and gendered humiliation and torture has been taken up only very recently by historians Maud Joly, Irene Abad, and Paul Preston. The chapter seeks to perform close readings of sexualized violence as described or alluded to as traumatic personal experiences in the life stories of individual women.
