Elena Fortún in "Oculto sendero", the Possibility of a Testimony

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse Elena Fortún’s autobiographical novel Oculto sendero (2016) as a fundamental testimony of LGBTI+ history in Spain. To carry out this research, I propose a materialist analysis of the diegesis and the contexts to which it relates: the one of the recounted events, the one of the time of writing, i.e. when the author was finally able to begin elaborating her story, and the present, when her story is finally made public. This reception allows real testimony to take place: the testimony is only possible when her acknowledgment as a lesbian has found reception and acceptance. The construction of identity will be studied from its different aspects: as a woman, as a woman who writes in the first half of the Spanish twentieth century, as a lesbian, as a subaltern subject and as a writer who expresses her gender dissidence through the hidden and revealed narration of different experiences and statements that I will try to categorise.