The marches of silence: post-dictatorship and social movements in Argentina


Bergman, Marcelo and Monica Szurmuk. “Gender, Citizenship, and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.

This article deals with the case of the murder of a young, dark-skinned, working-class woman in Argentina —in which the son of a senator was involved— and the following movement of "marches of silence" that emerged to demand justice. The authors make the argument that in post-dictatorship Argentina, ideas and expectations about citizenship have changed, and that the way of doing politics has been profoundly impacted by the Madres as they inaugurated "public grieving and public suffering as political praxis" (391). While in other times this case would have been quickly dismissed as an individual crime, in this new context it became profoundly politicized, and triggered broader demands to change a corrupted political and economic system that conceived working-class women's bodies as disposable. Moreover, this case represents a change in the gendered conception of citizenship and democracy: in this context only becomes possible to claim citizenship and rights for a sexually active young woman, and to challenge the distinction between subjects who are deserving and undeserving of state protection.

Comments

  1. JonSeptember 8, 2009 at 11:30 AM

    There's no exact equivalent of the Madres in Chile, is there? Perhaps the arpilleristas, but they have nowhere near the public visibility (and continued presence) of the Madres in Argentina. How would you account for this difference?

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  2. Manuela Valle-CastroSeptember 10, 2009 at 2:28 PM

    In Chile the equivalent is the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD) created in 1974, and formed mostly by women who reclaimed to know where their children, husbands, partners, siblings, etc. Their first actions consisted in hunger strikes with close support from some sectors of the church and international organisms. In 1979 they also chained themselves to the gates of the Ministry of Justice. None of these actions had a response from the military's regime. They also regularly started having a presence in protests and political events, in which they carried photographs of their relatives with the words “Dónde están?” (Where are they?). They also performed the “cueca sola” in certain events, in which the women would dance the “cueca” (traditional folkloric dance, national symbol) by themselves to mark the absence of their (mostly male) relatives (later on Sting wrote his song “They dance alone” as an homage to these women and their dance). In this way, as the Madres in Argentina they also performed public grief and used already gender notions of sacrificial motherhood to demand for justice, while invoking images of female respectability to defend themselves from repression. There are, however, differences in the particular strategies and political effects that the Madres and the AFDD's public performances had in terms of justice and cultural transformations that need to be explored in more depth.

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  3. JonSeptember 12, 2009 at 9:46 AM

    Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about the "cueca sola." Still, for some reason the Argentine Madres have been much more successful, at least in achieving visibility.

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