Singing the trauma: female experiences in Francoist prisons

Abstract

This article addresses the topic of women’s prison experiences during the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. The Franco’s regime exerted violence against women that was based on the notion of gender, marked by the historical character, that is, the economic, political and social context, and insisted on imposing moral, ideological, social, political and coercive power over their own lives. The study of the aforementioned topic will be based on the analysis of the testimonies collected by Tomasa Cuevas Gutiérrez and later compiled by Montes Salguero in the book Testimonies of women in Francoist prisons (2004). The focus of the work is on the question –how Spanish women sing about their own trauma caused by their stay in prison– which will be addressed through the analysis of the songs that are part of the female testimonies. Based on the literary and theoretical bibliography and, above all, on feminist and Foucauldian theory, an attempt will be made to demonstrate some essential characteristics of the Francoist penal system and, above all, the role and status of testimony, considered a special type of text, in the representation of mentioned experience. Furthermore, the objective is to point out, from an interdisciplinary approach, the impact that the dictatorship had on the social position of women at that time and demonstrate that the Francoist prison system, serving as an ideological and repressive apparatus, represented a traumatic experience.