Women's Adaptive Life Writing and Latin American Dictatorship

"The analogous relationship between DNA replication and women’s resistance writing in Latin America highlights the ways in which impossible forms of autobiography adapt and move on, undetected, through the inhospitable environments of dictatorship. Through adaptive forms of poetry, memoir, and the autobiographical novel by women in Chile, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, narratives of dissent lend defiance against three of the most murderous and misogynist autocracies of the twentieth century. As Richard Dawkins points out in his study of human evolution, The Selfish Gene, because genes bear partial responsibility for their own survival, they depend not only on the efficiency of the hosts in which they live, but also on their ability to function as selfish survival machines that will adapt when threatened (23-24). Like genes, these narratives must adapt to their environments and prove capable of reemerging over time in cycles of resistance, liberation, and survival when facing the perils of dictatorship."