“Distinguished Ladies” and the Doctrine of Womanhood: Auto-surveillance and Auto-performance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata

• Main Author: Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Groningen Press 2017-10-01
• Series: European Journal of Life Writing
• Subjects: autoperformativity; diamela eltit; chilean literature
• Online Access: https://ejlw.eu/article/view/31493

This essay reads Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata as form of auto-performative ‘anti-manual’  which  employs  a range  of  autobiographical  forms  and  functions  in  protest of codes of womanhood published in an actual manual of women’s con-duct authored by Augusto Pinochet’s First Lady and enforced by his regime’s National Secretariat of Women which organized forms of auto-surveillance by which women policed themselves and one another. It argues that if the NSW functioned as a mechanism for the surveillance and discipline of women in Pi-nochet’s police state, Eltit’s text functions as a subversive auto-performance of Chilean womanhood offered in protest against the state censorship of women’s autobiography. The reading demonstrates the ways in which E. Luminata stra-tegically performs Eltit’s own public self-representation of womanhood which, although meant to be impossible, is not unattainable in the regime.