"Como manto que retiran": construcción identitaria del sujeto itinerante en el discurso autobiográfico de Gabriela Mistral

Abstract

Recent studies on the work of Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, especially since 2005, confirm the current academic interest in approaching her work from new critical perspectives (cultural studies, feminist criticism, textual genetics, queer theories, among others), allowing for her rediscovery, the reinterpretation of her literary imagination, and the demystification of the public and private figure that the cultural system has constructed of the author. However, the careful study of Mistral's autobiographical writing has not yet received sufficient critical coverage, given the recent availability of biobibliographical material and its scattered and fragmentary nature. In this context, the doctoral research presented here analyzes Gabriela Mistral's autobiographical writing, especially the unpublished and posthumous works that have been reconstructed and disseminated between 2005 and 2025, with the aim of establishing the processes and variables of identity construction of the itinerant subject who, according to the hypothesis underlying this thesis, is proposed as a rhetorical entity, invisible and unnamed until today, which acts as resistance to a social order that excludes and stigmatizes sex-gender diversities and as a mediating discursive strategy between the intimate, wandering, and official subjects, a typology present in referential genres such as letters, interviews, testimonies, diaries, and other literary manifestations of autobiography. The state of discursive itinerancy allows us to affirm that the mobility of Mistral's itinerant subject is the result of a discursive consciousness that creates, in the author/character otherness, multiple outlets for a subject that the hegemonic cultural system sought to fix as a “unified self,” ignoring that the hybrid nature of its tense not only challenges the official discourses with which it is conceived, but also the mechanisms of camouflage of its identity which, when discovered, contribute to the understanding, dissemination, reinterpretation, appreciation, and projection of its intellectual and literary legacy. To carry out the analysis, methodologies, contributions, and critical approaches from literary, linguistic, and sociocultural studies related to autobiography as a discursive genre are used, theories of the subject, the theory of the enunciation of the subjectivities of language, and critical discourse analysis, analytical references that allow us to support and propose the notions of “itinerant subject,” “reconstructed literature,” and “discursive itinerancy” as resources for analysis that can be projected onto other autobiographical authorship and textualities.