"When they arrested me, I thought it was because I was protesting with other teachers, and students. But later, I realized that they targeted me and other women because I am a lesbian."

We are paying tribute to Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes, who has passed away, by sharing her talk at FiLiA 2019 on her experiences of pain through torture and imprisonment in Dictatorial Chile.

"Very little of feminist scholarship on the body addresses torture of women, and still less, torture of lesbians.  The deafening silence in fiction written about this topic has finally been broken with Susan Hawthorne’s novel Dark Matters but that pioneering work needs to be replicated a thousand times by other writers.

I will be retelling my experiences of bodily pain in torture and imprisonment during the 80s in dictatorial Chile and reflect on how these experiences not only transformed my silence under torture  into an act of resistance and stubbornness but also reaffirmed my belief in speaking out and let the world know that Lesbians experience discrimination and torture worldwide every day, yet in feminist conferences and meetings, this is swept under the carpet of women’s issues, and once more Lesbians are invisible."

You can also listen again to the full Violence Against Lesbians Panel recording and our separate discussion with Consuelo.