Abstract
In this chapter I analyze representations of the ways that women are subjected to physical and symbolic violence. My analysis will be focused on the literary representation of sexual violence against Indigenous women in the novel Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez, which sheds light on the meanings of sexual violence as a war crime and crime against humanity. The novel is distinguished for its historical contribution to the study of the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980–2000) between the insurgent group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the government of Peru. There, rape
was indeed used as a “weapon of war” (Skjelsbaek 2010). Moreover, sexual violence inflicted on women had a strong racist dimension (Boesten 2014). In post-conflict Peru, cultural production that addresses the systematic sexual violence during the conflict supports movements against forgetting and in favor of inclusive politics of justice. Resistance literature, such as the cited work, can be defined as a “repository for popular memory and consciousness” (Harlow 1987, 34), which forms part of a wider project of cultural and political transformation that is required to meet the victims’ demands of reparations
and criminal justice.
León Torrez, Virginia