This talk seeks to first set the scene of the plight of the mining community in mid to late twentieth-century Bolivia and introduce an activist from the community, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, who finds herself at least triply oppressed, due to her socioeconomic position, her sex, and her ethnicity as an indigenous Aymara. The talk then argues that that Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s testimonial text, Let me speak!, belies the Foucauldian understanding of the modern western panoptic model, by shedding light on the captivity that imbricates the working-class mining community in Bolivia in the pernicious panopticon of state-supported neoliberal capitalism, functioning for the ultimate benefit of western hegemonic forces, while, for the working-class woman, the locus of captivity can be found in the sexist servitude of the superficially imposed bourgeois home. Domitila ultimately transgresses the limits of both in her testimonio – bourgeois capitalism and bourgeois domesticity –, leading to her actual incarceration, a prison from which she is able to escape, if only to find herself in the equally panoptic institutions of the hospital and exile. As such, the very inequality that Barrios faces is itself utterly panoptic, invading and overseeing every aspect of her life in order to foreclose her activism for justice for her community and enclose her in a permanent state of inferiority and oppression.

Amanda Eaton McMenamin earned her Ph.D. in German and Romance Literatures from Johns Hopkins University, specializing in modern Spanish Peninsular literatures and cultures. She is currently Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. She has published reviews in MLN and Letras femeninas and given presentations on gender/genre intersections in the literature of Emilia Pardo Bazán and the bastard nature of Spanish national identity as depicted in modern peninsular literature and film, as well as temporal dysphasia in Latin American film. Recent work includes the publication “Petra, o la falsa joya del hogar: La anacrónica economía de sexo aristocrática y el desarreglo del ángel del hogar burgués en La Regenta (1884-5) de Clarín” in Verbeia: Journal of Spanish and English Studies (April 2016), as well as the forthcoming publications “The Elliptical Short Story: 'Re/Membering' Woman’s Subjectivity in Luisa Valenzuela’s Testimony 'Other Weapons' (1982)” in Short Story Journal (Fall 2016); “Almodóvar’s Palimpsestuous Bastards: Inter-serial Interpretations of Ibero-Identities in La mala educación (2004), Volver (2006), and La piel que habito (2011)” in Identities and Intersections in 21st-century Peninsular Fiction and Film (2017); and “Eating to Live, Living to Tell: Foundational Food in the Latina Testimonial Text” in The Routledge Companion to Food and Literature (2017), as well multiple entries in two encyclopedias: The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Cinema (April 2017) and The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Spanish Film (June 2017).