DescriptionMy dissertation explores the politics of mourning in post-dictatorship Chile from a feminist perspective. Consequently, it is concerned with the possibilities of remembrance after a political demise: what and how to remember, how to reckon with the dead and the disappeared bodies, is there an ethical approach to the past that will defy the post-dictatorial politics of oblivion? In order to answer these interrogations I analyze the work of two of the most influential Chilean feminist artists of the past five decades, Cecilia Vicuña and Diamela Eltit, rarely studied in tandem. My dissertation wishes to contribute to Latin American post-dictatorial and cultural studies by addressing a critical void in the work of memory, that is, a comparative feminist approach that includes other aesthetic practices such as painting, sculpture, and art installations. On the other hand, my project wishes to contest the critic’s predominant melancholic approach to the work of mourning who conceive of literature as unable to transmit experience and thus as a failure. I argue that the critics in resourcing to Walter Benjamin’s rhetoric of mourning have performed a reductive reading of his theory of allegory and hence have not offered a possibility of imagining the future otherwise. If allegory is the privileged figure in times of horror it is allegory which must be reconceived as a critical tool to address the past. I argue that both Eltit and Vicuña, through their different aesthetic media, re-signify allegory as an interpretative and creative modality to re-enact the work of mourning. In their search for the disappeared body they unearth a deeper layer of disappearance, the female body, as the biopolitical support to Chilean national history.