«Thresholds» of the Victim in Peruvian Narrative: Representations, Constructions, Discourses

Abstract

This paper aims to problematize one of the most controversial issues regarding the representations of violence and the productions of memory: the category of the victim and the problem of victimization. The notion of “threshold” is proposed to understand in a more complex way the conceptions of the victim formulated within the Human Rights paradigm, because it is in that framework that the notion of victim appears as we understand it nowadays. The paper takes as a case study the memory narratives in Peru, since the armed conflict from which these narratives arise has left innumerable signs of a thorny and multifactorial victimization, evidencing the limitations of rigid models usually used to understand this category.