2. “Telling the Truth to Stay Alive.” Stories of Gendered Violence and Testimonial Politics

This chapter examines the testimonial politics of gendered life stories in contemporary Spain through the narratives of Ana Orantes and Rocío Carrasco. It argues that accounts of gender-based violence operate not merely as expressions of suffering but as public interventions that reshape the conditions under which such violence is acknowledged, contested, and politicised. Framing testimony as both evidence and event, the chapter situates these cases within Spain’s cultural and institutional history, from Francoist repression to feminist media interventions and their reactionary backlash. Orantes’s 1997 television appearance and subsequent murder became a turning point in Spain’s reckoning with gender violence, prompting major legislative reform. Carrasco’s 2021 docuseries reframed intimate partner abuse through the concept of violencia vicaria (vicarious violence), introducing a new vocabulary for psychological and post-separation abuse. These narratives function as technologies of political imagination, revealing the structural logics of gendered injustice and reshaping who is recognised as a credible subject of suffering, even while remaining vulnerable to distortion and dismissal. Testimonial acts such as these are shown to be both forms of resistance and critical sites where feminist futures are imagined and contested.