Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina's Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood is the latest in a string of publications on Argentine memory politics to have emerged since the end of the last dictatorship in 1983. The book's main contribution to this literature is its theoretical reworking of the existing scholarly and media debates on memory and identity. As the author announces in the book's preface, the study constitutes both a querying and a queering of the hierarchical ‘bloodline normativity’ that has permeated human rights activism. Framing the emphasis on ‘bloodlines’ and kinship ties based on perceived pedigree as an obstacle to the establishment of a widening circle of mourning and, what I would call, ‘affective activism’ in contemporary Argentina, Sosa destabilises a crucial pillar of both official and unofficial human rights discourse in two ways. First, although she does not entirely abandon discussion of the key protagonists of the post-dictatorship, such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo and H.I.J.O., she offers insight into the various ways that these groups articulate collective and individual identities that eschew traditional narratives of mourning. Second, building on the work of scholars like Ana Ros and Alejandra Serpente, she expands analysis beyond the ‘usual suspects’ belonging to the human rights movement to encompass those with a non-biological relationship to the victims of dictatorship-era repression. The impetus for this study is Sosa's personal experience. Growing up under the shadow of state terrorism, she was deeply affected by this experience despite having no disappeared family members. In many ways, the book explores this ‘limbo’ position, bridging the insider/outsider dichotomy that continues to mark Argentine politics, culture and society vis-à-vis the recent past.

In the book's six loosely structured chapters, Sosa does not so much analyse a new phenomenon or new debates as employ a new theoretical language with which to discuss such issues. Although queer theory may not seem the most obvious theoretical lens through which to explore post-dictatorship Argentina, Sosa draws on Judith Butler's conceptualisation of queer as that which goes against the grain. Applying this to a wide range of films, theatrical productions, a novel and human rights sites, practices and rituals, she demonstrates that post-dictatorship mourning based solely on bloodlines is not the only form of engagement with the past, ushering in novel forms of participation, identity and even pleasure.

In chapter 1, Sosa accounts for the post-dictatorship emergence of what she terms the ‘wounded family’, the loose consortium of relatives associations, linking its hegemony with the intertwining of familial loss and biological truth. Focusing on the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Sosa disentangles the dynamics that underpin the matriarchs of this ‘wounded family’ trope, while simultaneously arguing that the Madres resisted reproductive temporalities. She links this with the Kirchner administrations' support of human rights issues as part of an amplification of the circle of those affected, a development that has undoubtedly gathered momentum in recent years.

The following chapters, as well as the bulk of Sosa's analysis, focus on post-dictatorship generation activism and cultural production, beginning with Chapter 2's discussion of H.I.J.O.S. (the organisation formed by children of the disappeared in the mid-1990s), taking members' use of black humour as a strategy for empowerment and a means of reversing the shame associated with being a child of the disappeared. In doing so, Sosa reminds the reader of the tensions and hierarchies related to blood ties which provide subject matter for such humour while simultaneously obstructing the inclusion of a wider community of non-victims in the group's struggles for human rights. Chapter 3 continues to voice these concerns, notably by comparing two documentaries directed by children of the disappeared, as a means to show how the ‘cult of the victim’ might carry some weight yet is not sacrosanct. Although the author defines these contrasting documentaries as exercises in ‘postmemory’, she does not elaborate this theoretical frame sufficiently to fully exploit the different issues that these narratives express.

Chapter 4 provides a brief and somewhat unexpected hiatus from post-dictatorship generations, to focus on the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), which became a space for memory in 2004. In a nuanced reading of the cooking classes organised in the former clandestine detention centre, by the notorious Madre, Hebe de Bonafini, Sosa offers a significant contribution to yet-to-be-resolved debates about intervention in spaces of state violence and how mourning and engagement with loss might become a community activity.

In the penultimate and final chapters, Sosa moves away from prior discussion of members of the wounded family to two contrasting iterations of postmemory, in chapter 5 Mi vida después (2009), a performance directed by Lola Arias and in chapter 6 Félix Bruzzone's 2008 novel Los topos. The two chapters reveal a number of synergies particularly in their interrogation of the legitimacy of voice and the question of who is speaking for whom. Moreover, through Arias' performative approach and Bruzzone's use of satire to critique biological normativity, Sosa suggests that such cultural productions might be truly transformative for both victims and witnesses, as well as broader society.

Although Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina's Dictatorship reveals that hierarchies of biological normativity are persistent, Sosa purports that the ‘wounded family’ model is being increasingly challenged and brings to the fore debates which are fast-moving and under continual re-evaluation. In elucidating the myriad ways in which a spectrum of Argentines (from those directly affected to those with limited relationship to past violence) experience and have engaged with the past, this study advocates novel forms of convivencia, based not on hierarchy and exclusivity but on horizontalism and inclusivity. As such, this ambitious study is a valuable contribution to scholarly and societal debates in contemporary Argentina and undoubtedly instructive for other countries grappling with the aftermath of state violence.