Toward a Feminist Theory of Justice for the Disappeared: Ana Castillo’s Creative Writing and the Case of Sister Dianna Ortiz

Ana Castillo’s poem “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories” (2000), her collection of plays Psst … I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor (2005a), and Sister Dianna Ortiz’s testimonio The Blindfold’s Eyes (2002) narrate the details of Sister Dianna’s 1989 disappearance by Guatemalan military forces. The article argues that, together, these texts reveal the complexities of justice for the disappeared and work toward a feminist theory of justice that goes beyond appeals to the state for punishment and reparation. By decentering the very state formations that perpetrate and sanction human rights violations as the privileged arbiters of justice, Castillo imagines the disappeared and their allies as essential to processes of justice-making. This leads Castillo to conceptualize a more localized and comprehensive feminist model of justice that requires constructing and allowing for community-based responses to injury through collective action, accountability, advocacy, agency, consciousness-raising, and healing. The discussion is contextualized within the history of torture and impunity in Guatemala and the United States during the 1980s and into the present, as well as locating Castillo’s work within the genealogy of Chicana/o theater and testimonio.