Conversation and poetics as spaces of knowledge production: Dialogues with Francesca Gargallo

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Francesca Gargallo's work based on a corpus comprised of her book Feminisms from Abya Yala, interviews given by the author, and essays available on her blog. The aim is to consider conversation not as an auxiliary research tool, but as a feminist epistemological practice capable of displacing academic authority, opening spaces for listening, and recognizing knowledge produced in historically marginalized spaces. Drawing on Gargallo's notion of narrative reason, her dialogue with Indigenous women, and her reflections on literature written by women, the text argues that conversation and poetry are ways of producing situated knowledge. This reading explains the methodological decision to incorporate dialogues with poets into a research project on poetry written by women during the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. These dialogues did not function as a testimonial complement to the textual analysis, but rather as a means of reconstructing memories, genealogies, and ways of understanding the world that the published archive does not always preserve.