2025 Theses Doctoral

Performing Motherhood: post-dictatorship Chilean theatre (1990-2020)

Pavez, Eduardo

This dissertation examines representations of motherhood in Chilean post-dictatorship theater as metaphors for State power and modes of resistance. I analyze mother figures in three plays from different decades of the transición period in order to explore how authors voice out their critiques and note the political tensions of Chile’s neoliberal project.

Through close readings of Benjamín Galemiri's El Cielo Falso (1997), Guillermo Calderón's Villa+Discurso (2011), and Macarena Araya Lira's Dame un minuto, esto va a ser breve (2019), and a general reading of Jesús Urqueta's staging of Taská (2012), I identify different four maternal figures that emerge in post-dictatorship Chilean theater: the Administrative Mother, who embodies neoliberal governance; the Tortured Mother, whose violated body represents national trauma; the Austere Mother, who perpetuates neoliberal self-sacrifice; and the Archivist Mother, who preserves the memory of those who are gone. These figures serve as frameworks for understanding how theater makers have mobilized maternal metaphors in order to critique or legitimize institutional power. My methodological approach combines feminist theater theory, memory studies, and political analysis that draws on Elin Diamond's feminist recontextualization of Brechtian gestus, Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, Steve Stern’s metaphor of memory knots, and Nelly Richard's cultural criticism of the post-dictatorship.

I conclude that these theatrical representations of motherhood during the last 30 years in Chile show an evolving critique from the administrative logic of early transition governments to grappling with intergenerational trauma and memory, and finally to confronting the austere hopelessness of neoliberalism. These maternal figures that I propose map out the political subjectivity of the transición period, revealing how memory itself has become both a weapon and a commodity in the ongoing struggle to reckon with Chile’s past. I close with an analysis of the importance of performing our memory in order to maintain the sense of hope, reclaim the sacred, and be able to imagine an alternative future.