In Testimonios, géneros y afectos, Claudia Bacci and Alejandra Oberti, both professors at the University of Buenos Aires, take up a 2017 conferencesession organized in the context of the XIII National Conference on Women’s History–VIII Ibero-American Conference on Gender Studies, to compose a heterogenous and insightful book that gathers the separate disciplinary fields of memory studies, women’s writings, and gender studies. Bacci and Oberti express it neatly when, in the book’s introductory chapter (“Un diálogo sobre testimonios, género y afectos”), they state that the book’s criteria are rather “un modo de leer, una perspectiva, antes que una temática” (10), and therefore, that the proposed organization (“I. Memorias y legados (33–154),” “II. Políticas de la experiencia (155–304),” “III. Visibilidad, cuerpo y afectos (305–420)”) could be organized otherwise, under a different perspective rather than the thematical organization. In their own words: “La perspectiva que los atraviesa y unifica no es disciplinaria” (10).
The first chapter of the first section is Nora Domínguez’s “Diálogos del género o cómo no caerse del mapa. Una vuelta,” in which the author, also a professor at the UBA, takes up as well a 2000 paper published in the journal Estudos Feministas to interrogate the situation of Latin American women writers and their translations by what nowadays is called the Global North. Rapidly, from acknowledging the improved translated position of those writers in comparison with 20 years ago (the case with Diamela Eltit and Tununa Mercado, among others), Domínguez’s analysis turns into a problematization of the concept and practice of translating, according to which “traducir implica al mismo tiempo pensar las imágines que nos adjudican, la crítica y la revision de este lugar a partir de la devolución de esas imágenes” (40). In this vein, we are dealing here not exclusively with a wider or narrower Global North’s publishing houses’ translation policies but with an interrogation of the broader exchange of theories, authors, and concepts between the West and the rest of the world. In the author’s words: “nos devuelven imágenes y representaciones que estimulan nuestro pensamiento” (48), as long as the discrete charm of becoming objects allows us to truly interrogate the precarious, neoliberal present that is the environment of those novels.
The second chapter also deals with Latin American women writers: Mariella Peller’s “Nombrar los cuerpos olvidados. Memorias de la violencia en la narrativa de Nona Fernández.” Peller, drawing on the theoretical contributions of the memory studies field (notably the concepts of second generation and Marianne Hirsch’s “affiliative memory” (the critiques that this concept has received from Global South scholars notwithstanding), revisits certain of Fernández’s novels (Fuenzalinda, Twilight Zone) and theatrical pieces (Liceo de niñas) to analyze Chile’s transición tutelada (69) from Pinochet’s dictatorship to the neoliberal democracy. She does this through three separate elements—Fernández’s use of Pier Paolo Passolini–based luciernagas (72), Ignacio Álvarez’s theorization of “el estoico como guardian de la memoria” (73), and Elsa Drucaroff’s analysis of Argentine postdictatorship generations’ new narrative, full of “manchas temáticas fantasmáticas y espectrales” (83). Particulary interesting is the literary character Juan in the story “Av 10 de julio Huamachuco,” who, beset by Pinochet’s neoliberal policies after the coup, “perdió a su esposa a causa de su obsesión por no abandonar su casa” (86). Peller analyzes Fernández’s narrative to read specific physical and psychological consequences that capitalist neoliberalism has over our bodies. Indeed, Mark Fisher’s Reference Fisher2014 writings would be a thought-provoking interlocutor to hear in relation to Fernández’s works.
It is also about ghosts and specters in the third chapter of the section, Lucas Saporesi’s “Afectos, cuerpo y memoria. La memoria del amor en Aparecida de Marta Dillan.” Building on the theoretical developments of the “affective turn” to conceptualize memory, following Sara Ahmed’s notion of “scene of contact,” Saporesi carries out an analysis of Dillon’s novel. Dillon herself is a disappeared’s daughter and a person living with the AIDS virus since the 1990s. Saporesi aims to rethink the escraches of HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) as festive performances, contrary to the recent neofascist capture of the escraches lately performed by right-wing movements. In this sense, “si ningún afecto puede considerarse per se opresor o emancipador” (104), either an escrache or Dillon’s public mourning of her mother can show up as timely moments to bid farewell to someone who did not teach us how to leave without her, and therefore will accompany us forever.
The last chapter of the first section, “‘Se rompe el territorio.’ Entender y repensar los marcos a partir de los cuales las mujeres mapuce protagonizan la Resistencia al extractivismo,” by Graciela Alonso, Eva Lincan, Anabella Paz, and Laura Fernández, condenses the three previous contributions. It is noteworthy, in relation to Domínguez’s insights, how part of the symbolic and physical dispute, in the context of the Mapuche resistance to capitalist extractivism, operates at the core of language: against the “fracking [fracturas]” (135) that neoliberalism performs to the “Wal Mapu (entorno),” the “wenu mapu (espacios aéreos),” and “mince mapu (subsuelo).” The native people living there for centuries resist neocolonial fracking, highlighting the “lelfvn kimeltuwvn (conocimiento comunitario),” with a prominent position for Mapuche women at the leading edge of the fight.
Returning to Domínguez’s contributions, it is always striking how we in the Global South’s academia are worried about learning English, French, or German in order to communicate with our transatlantic colleagues, while the native languages that were at the base of our modern state–nation building are courses mainly contemplated to graciously take during undergraduate time—they are not useful, they are a waste of time, a petit bourgeois luxury. It is at least questionworthy whether this is not another sort of fracking to the Mapuche territory-body-language.
The first chapter of the book’s second section is Lilian Celiberti’s “Disputas en los sentidos de la memoria. Cuerpo, sexualidad y derechos en la militancia de izquierda de los setenta.” Celiberti analyzes, in the context of the 1970 Uruguayan revolutionary militancy, when “el hombre nuevo a ser construido no sabía siquiera cocinarse un huevo” (159), the intersection of body, sexuality, and rights around one particular practice—rape. Rape was the “technology” of power though which the southern dictatorships of the 1970s attempted to interiorize power and fear. The issue with addressing this disciplinary practice, suggests Celiberti, is that even within leftist political sectors, an “ausencia de códigos para interpreter la violación” is suffered (164), meaning that rape is conceptualized as submission and as the interiorization of male domination’s cultural patterns. This absence, in the context of repeated rapes by male kidnappers under concentration camp–like conditions, highlights a problematic, shared masculine incapacity to understand the “violación como una feminización y como destrucción masiva” (180).
Claudia Bacci’s “Afectos justos: escenas del género y la justicia (Argentina, Perú, Guatemala),” the second chapter of the section, also addresses the male practice of rape, but by zooming in on three separate but interlinked juridical episodes—Argentina’s 1985 Juicio a las Juntas, Peru’s 2016 Juicio de Manta y Vilca, and Guatemla’s 2016 Juicio de Sepur Zarco. What draws Bacci’s attention to these scenes is not only how male judges (mis)treat female accounts of rape during dictatorships and the violent past but also the role that emotions classically considered disempowering, such as shame and fear, can play in the midst of those judicial processes. “¿Qué emociones serán consideradas como ‘justas’ o bien ‘excesivas’”? (asks Bacci (191), and this question links as well to what might be the second problematic point of her essay—the juridical figure of the victim, to which Bacci responds with the critics in the victim-centered bibliography. An example of the latter is Sharon Marcus’s already classic 1992 paper “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words.” But, Bacci argues, this empowerment must not be confused with inciting raped women to talk about their traumatic experiences, but instead used to concentrate on men being unable—and insensitive—to listening to their testimonies, glazing them over as an affront to male honor rather than as violence exerted toward women.
María Angélica Cruz and Valeska Orellana, in “Otras violencias de género. Memorias de la prisión política de mujeres militantes de Valparaiso,” the second-to-last chapter of this section, share Bacci’s radical critique of the concept or practice of victim and victimization. They specify “un rechazo explícito a la figura de la víctima como imposibilidad de cualquier resistencia” (233). They are dealing here with the testimony of Amanda, a former Chilean prisoner, who shares another personal and social consequence of dictatorial prison—the internal exile and the loss of friendship’s social relations. After the dictatorship, Amanda testifies to have been unable to recover or rebuild amical relations, whether because her former comrades left the country or because she was no longer able to establish a trustful relationship. Yet even so, she never resorted to the victim figure: “Nuestra hipótesis es que ninguna autocompresión de estas mujeres puede reproducir la figura de la víctima” (249). Finally, “las víctimas no son simplemente cuerpos traumados, violados o vejados” (251) but women who decide to speak of their prison and torture experiences in the nonheroic terms of agency, desire, and humanization.
Barbara Sutton’s “Memoria, cuerpo y emoción: testimonios de mujeres sobrevivientes del terrorismo de Estado,” the second section’s last chapter, adds her own contribution to this debate, and here the book’s curation is precious—Sutton revives Mozambique anthropologist Alcinda Honwana’s concept of tactical agency, “una forma muy limitada de agencia o ‘agencia de los débiles’” (262). This concept, also drawing on Michel de Certeau’s L’invention du quotidien’s art du faible, permits us to relativize the conceptual relations between agency and coercion, agency and resistance, and agency and victimization. “incluso aquellas acciones no caracterizadas como resistencia pueden implicar agencia, … la victimización y la agencia individual no son mutuamente excluyentes” (263–65). And it is precisely this nonopposition between coercion and agency, the differentiation between agency and resistance, and the nonexclusion between victimization and agency that contributes to understanding the small resistances, such as “hacer ikebana” (267), “contenerse de llorar como forma de no mostrar que a una le preocupaba el otro” (272), among other possible practices.
The third and last section of the book opens with Alejandra Oberti’s “Partos: el recuerda como acto de creación,” in which the author proposes a relationship between two different scenes (of memory and of contact) concerning childbirth in 1970 revolutionary politics and dictatorship’s clandestine detention centers. First, the testimonies of militant women giving accounts of the conditions under which they delivered. Second, one particular scene, in the “gimnasio helado de la Facultad de Ingenería” (310) of 1984’s UBA, where one female survivor, Adriana Calvo, first spoke to the general public of the gendered experiences she endured during the dictatorship.
This proposed parallelism enables Oberti to problematize a twofold issue—first, “un tipo de lectura que ordena la narración de manera patriarchal” (308), and second, “la version estetizada de la maternidad” (314), in which childbirth was idealized beyond the material, painful, and solitary situations women had to endure during pregnancy and delivery. But this discussion also allows Oberti to take up a previous debate about how to think of the testimonies that the protagonists of the recent past were delivering, such as described in Beatriz Sarlo’s Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (Reference Sarlo2005), in which the author contrasts explanatory testimonies to the merely descriptive ones. Oberti highlights how Calvo’s testimony “a la vez … narra, explica, argumenta” (320).
The third section’s second chapter is “La experiencia de abortar hecho relato. Código rosa desde una genealogía feminista,” by Barbara Cornel Colombato and Paula Satta. The authors analyze Dahiana Belfiori’s Código rosa: relatos sobre abortos, a fictionalization of numerous women’s abortion testimonies. They contextualize Belfiori’s book within a feminist genealogy because “[el] pone en primer plano la experiencia y las memorias de las mujeres” (335). Therefore, the authors place themselves at the crossroads of the “relación entre género y memoria como eje teórico y metodológico” (336).
A thought-provoking example of the first point—how Belfiori builds a feminist genealogy prepending women’s experience and memories—is her fictionalization of an omniscient female narrator who, at the same time that she relates her experiences, reflects on them: “el tipo sonriendo, contento, como si gozara de mi llanto. Como si gozara porque logró que escuchara los latidos de mi bebé” (344). But once more, both in Belfiori’s literary work and in Cornel’s and Satta’s academic one, there is a reluctance to think of women in victim terms, following “el lugar común en que se victimiza a la mujer y se la despoja de su agencia” (350). Yet in contrast, in Belfiori’s dialogue with the writers of the chapter, there is the agency of writing, the empowerment of visibilization—“creo que escribí el libro para decirle a mi mama que aborté” (346). On the authors’ side, Belfiori’s comprehension gains clarity from the feminist standpoint—“las testimoniantes reconocen el lugar de oprimidas pero se ubican fuera de la posición de víctimas” (351).
Nayla Luz Vacarezza’s “Duelos reverberantes. Afectos y política por las muertes por abortos clandestinos en América Latina,” the book’s penultimate chapter, shapes a tripartite series of cases to scrutinize certain thoughtless associations between “happy” and “sad” affects: May 10, 1979, in Mexico City; September 28, 2014, in San Pablo, Brásil; and August 14, 2018, in Buenos Aires. These three enormous Latin American cities share the distinction that they were the stage of three feminist demonstrations against clandestine abortion deaths. But in the three of them (Mexico’s La Corona, San Pablo’s Cortejo de la Mujer Negra Muerta por Aborto Clandestino, and Buenos Aires’s Criadas Llevan Perchas, points out Vacarezza, we witness a militant problematization of affects’ potential for political action. As we read in Sutton’s contribution, not every joy is empowering, while not any “asco, secreto, dolor, miedo, culpa, sufrimiento, muerte, duelo y aflicción” (359) is saddening. We need to “cuestionar la pertinaz asociación entre sufrimiento y desempoderamiento/victimización” (260). The aforementioned public feminist mournings teach us how to deploy a “reversión de la vergüenza y del estigma” (375) without thereby falling into the opposite sublimatory operation of emblematizing the stigma. In any case, Vacarezza concludes, those feminist activists have created a “duelo, tristeza y aflición inadmisibles a los repertorios sentimentalistas de la victimización” (378).
The book’s last chapter is Ana Forcinito’s “Políticas testimonials de lo visible: poner el cuerpo y la voz en la transmisión de la memoria.” Here the author, drawing on Jacques Rancière’s reflections on “lo visible en un sentido político” (388), analyzes the Uruguayan juridical trials of its last dictatorship to address how women’s bodies were treated during the process. For doing so, the author proposes two concepts, “vulnerabilidad y consentimiento” (389), to problematize the “dominio masculino del régimen visual” (392). Particularly attention-grabbing in her analyses, in the framework of the dictatorship’s human rights violations, is the problematization of seduction, which, “en una situación tan objetiva de poder, no es ni más ni menos que una de las formas de la violación” (396).
This radical contextualization of the unexpected forms that rape can take, continues Forcinito, must also be analyzed for its consequences; for example, considering the case of “el marido de una compañera—al que le hicieron asistir a la violación de la misma, y que ella no recordaba—la dejó al poco tiempo de salir en libertad” (410). The male concept and practice of honor, and how even women’s rape resonates with it, is under interrogation. The problem here, warns the author, has been “cuáles han sido las imágenes que expresaron los cuerpos de las mujeres” (413). To conclude, a feminist visual politics needs to think, imagine, and carry out “modos de representación que no pueden ser traducidos literalmente al lenguaje visual sexista” (414). In other words, the need to change our ways of seeing but also our ways of re-pre-senting, of putting into images.
