Introduction

From 1976 to 1983, a devastating regime commanded by the Military Junta ‘vanished’ 30 000 lives in Argentina, those infamously known as the ‘disappeared’. In the wake of loss, the network of associations created by the relatives of the victims took the form of what I have referred to as a ‘wounded family’ (Sosa, 2011a). Mothers, Grandmothers, Relatives, Children and Siblings of those missing have evoked their biological ties to the missing to make their claims for justice. For three decades, this lineage of relatives broken by violence has led the national mourning. Their right to grieve has been animated through bloodline ties. However, I argue, in the last decade the experience of grief has been displaced. Far from dismissing the pain of those directly affected by violence, within my research I have been interested in exploring how the traumatic experience of loss has circulated and been transmitted among less implicated audiences. Drawing upon disparate materials – including memoirs, interviews, theatrical pieces, films, jokes and even cooking sessions – my book suggests that the experience of violence has shed light on a new sense of ‘being together’ in the wake of loss (Sosa, 2014).

Within this essay, I shall focus on some particular biographies touched by trauma and some cultural productions related to loss. These seemingly minor cases also stand as a method, a queer method, for uncovering the non-normative affiliations that have emerged in the wake of violence. As I will show, these are stories that speak about the unconventional forms of pleasure that have developed in the face of grief. Together, they suggest that forms of dealing with trauma do not set the past behind, but rather they allow ‘queer forms of becoming’ (Blackman, 2011, p. 193). Ultimately, I show how they have made room for non-normative feelings of kinship that contest a landscape of mourning, traditionally dominated by the relatives of the missing, and enact feelings of kinship that go beyond blood.

In particular, I want to explore how recent artistic production has become a critical medium that circulates those expanded feelings of kinship in Argentina’s aftermath of violence. In this vein, I will focus on the film Los rubios (Carri, 2003), the theatrical piece Mi vida después (Arias, 2009) and the TV show 23 Pares (Carri and Dillon, 2012). By critically drawing upon Hirsch’s (2008) ruminations on ‘postmemory’, I will show how this spectrum of ‘postmemorial’ production manages to introduce a creative turn in the perception of the past. In so doing, I hope to trace the emergence of an alternative language of loss; one that has mobilised expanded affiliative ties among those who have not been directly affected by trauma.

After ‘Blood’

The military regime shattered both families and the idea of family in Argentina. With thousands of lives having vanished and no bodies to be mourned, traditional kinship ties have been broken by violence. To some extent, the wake of loss recreated a landscape that irradiates the echoes of a Greek tragedy, in particular the Antigone myth. Somehow, in Argentina’s family drama, the mythical figure of Antigone seems to be encrypted deviously. Yet, different to Sophocles’ play, the eerie figure of the ‘disappeared’ has left, in principle, no material remains. In her beautiful study on kinship, Butler argues that the fictional figure of Antigone does not point towards politics as a question of representation but rather to the ‘political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed’ (Butler, 2000, p. 2). By pushing this association further, I want to explore what comes after a mass experience of violence that uncovered the limits of politics and exposed kinship at the threshold of its dissolution leaving no material traces, no bodies to be grieved. If Antigone represents kinship and the power of ‘blood’ relations (Butler, 2000, p. 4), what subjectivities might emerge in the post-Antigone era in Argentina? In other words, what comes after blood?

‘Our Children gave birth to us’, claimed the Madres [Mothers] of Plaza de Mayo at the beginning of the 1980s, signposting a wounded lineage. In this embryonic form of kinship, biological ties seem to have been reversed (Sosa, 2011b). In fact, the Madres did not exist as such before the event of their children’s disappearance. It was the ongoing crime of their off spring’s kidnapping what constituted them as a collective subject. Even so, their activism has not been ‘naturally’ reproductive. Rather, by raising a claim based on blood, the Madres have put forward a political fight, which was attached, from scratch, to the most public of spaces. In doing so, they have showed how affect – particularly, emotions considered as ‘negative’, such anger, pain or loss – could be productive for creating alternative forms of associations that redefine the public sphere.

Furthermore, the Madres also contested reproductive temporalities. By presenting their offspring as giving birth to them, they have suggested a new sense of community between the dead and the living. This reversion of kinship can also be read in tune with Edelman’s work on queer temporality. In particular, Edelman (2007) argues that heteronormativity acts as ‘the guardian of temporal (re)production’. In this vein, the Madres also showed how time could be deferred, refused and contested from a non-biological perspective. Thus, these Argentine women presented themselves as subjects not constrained by a logic of reproduction, but rather capable of proposing an experimental temporality. In doing so, they have given room to a non-normative form of kinship in the face of loss.

Three decades later, elder Madres still circle around the Plaza de Mayo Square. Also the Abuelas [Grandmothers] of Plaza de Mayo continue searching for their grandchildren, who were stolen as babies from clandestine detention centres and have already become young adults.Footnote 1 To some extent, the broken lineage initiated by the Madres persists in being displaced, countersigned and even expanded in contemporary times. As I have argued before, the ‘wounded family’ signposts a paradoxical and even a queer turn in the realm of kinship: by speaking in the name of blood, the network of kin associations enacts new affiliations that certainly transpose biology (Sosa, 2014).

‘Postmemorial’ and ‘Affective’ Turns

In this context, the current protagonism of a new generation of descendants–producers in Argentina has made Hirsch’s (2008) notion of ‘postmemory’ both timely and pertinent to the kind of discussion taking place in the country. However, there are some particularities that prevent us from simple translations. Unlike second-generation Holocaust survivors on whom Hirsch based her main framework, the children of the ‘disappeared’ have been actual witnesses of traumatic events – albeit too young to remember them. Yet, the creative flair of their artistic production stresses the affective displacements that operate when the traumatic past is ‘not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation’ (Hirsch, 2008, p. 107). If bloodline inscriptions of trauma have been particularly resilient in Argentina’s aftermath of loss, Hirsch has also accepted that her first formulations on postmemory strongly rely on the family environment.Footnote 2 I suspect this specific overlap could explain why the familial connections attached to this ‘affective structure of transmission’ might have become so attractive both for local and foreign scholars to understand the circulation of trauma in the country.Footnote 3 Furthermore, the use of the ‘postmemorial’ approach managed to touch sensitive issues around kinship and ownership in the local process of loss.

Nonetheless, Hirsch (2012) has recently moved beyond her original formulation of postmemory as inescapably entangled with familial transmission. In her latest work, she is not only interested in forms of affiliative witnessing by adoption, but also brings into analysis other transnational contexts of traumatic transfer that might be understood under the global, sometimes vague and always too overreaching, postmemorial umbrella. In her book, she insistently highlights the importance of incorporating an ‘intersecting analysis’, which can create a bridge among memory studies, gender and the queer fields (Hirsch, 2012, p. 18).

Indeed, Hirsch’s expanded framework offers renewed potential transnational dialogues with Argentina’s post-dictatorship scene. Still, I contend that the postmemorial model of the transmission of trauma fails to account for (i) the uneasy temporality that governs the local aftermath of loss, and for (ii) the urgency to bring back the work on affect to more grounded social and political contexts. Therefore, while keeping Hirsch’s insight in mind, I would like to bring into play a different approach, that of the American queer scholar David Eng. Eng has provided an appealing perspective to analyse the affective transmission of trauma within broader temporal frameworks. While examining experiences of grief and loss in the context of ‘queer liberalism’ in the United States, he has pushed forward the idea of ‘affective reparation’ (Eng, 2010). This perspective becomes central in his book Reparations and the Human (2015), where he investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia. As he argues, ‘unlike political theories of reparation, which seek to write history into a definitive past, psychic reparation does not delineate such a finite process, but rather a process of working through’ (Eng, 2010, p. 196; emphasis in the original). I am particularly interested in this idea of affective reparation to approach Argentina’s case, as it delineates the grounds of an ethics not relying on individual subjects but on a new emerging collective. More than this, for Eng, affect works as the ‘psychic glue’, the mediation between language and identity, between language and history, and between subjects and subjectivities (Eng, 2010, p. 192). In this return to the social, these ‘affective correspondences’ have an extra potential in Latin America’s southern cone: they ‘offer us the possibility of socializing melancholia, assuming a collective relationship with forgetting and loss’ (Eng, 2010, p. 188).

In the Argentine post-dictatorial context, I argue, an expanded theory of kinship and affect can also reveal a potential transformative power. In particular, this affective perspective can enable us to grasp how wounded subjectivities have reconfigured their relation to the world and inhabited it in a less sorrowful manner. In fact, by bringing Hirsch and Eng’s insights together, I seek to challenge conventional readings of the transmission of trauma. The richer possibilities of a combined approach enable us to examine the new subjectivities that have emerged in Argentina’s aftermath of violence. In this line, I will follow the movements of circulation and transmission of trauma of wounded biographies, as well as recent cultural productions attached to them in the hope that the ‘affective correspondences’ awakened by these series may bring to light how the experience of loss has circulated among vicarious and unforeseen audiences.

The Blue Jumper

In 2011, after 35 years of searching, Marta Dillon recovered the body of her disappeared mother, Marta Taboada, who was a teacher and a lawyer, and an activist in the Revolutionary Party of Argentine Workers during the 70s. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team found Taboada’s remains in a mass grave, alongside those of five other activists who were assassinated on the 2 February in 1977 on a street corner in Ciudadela, a marginal district in the city of Buenos Aires. When Dillon recovered the body of her mother, she was also given a bag with a pile of clothes that used to cover the bodies of these activists. She was told that some of these clothes might belong to her mother. In an article published in the newspaper Página 12 (where Dillon works as the editor of the feminist and LGBT sections), she wrote that when imagining what clothes her mother might be wearing the night of the kidnapping, she always thought of a striped jacket, one that she liked to wear when she was a girl, even though it was too big for her (Dillon, 2011a). Although Dillon could not find the jacket among the pile of clothes, something called her attention to a blue jumper. It was only while visiting ‘Brigada Guemes’, the clandestine detention centre where her mother was held captive during the late 1970s, that she discovered why. While touring the former camp with Cristina Comandé, one of her mother’s fellow captives, the woman suddenly stopped. Pointing towards an empty space, Comandé mentioned that she used to sit with Taboada on a bench, which was no longer there. She even recalled Dillon’s mother pulling up the sleeves of a jumper when the heat intensified. ‘Do you remember what colour the jumper was?’, asked Marta. ‘Of course’, said the woman, ‘it was blue’. ‘I found it!’, yelled Dillon, and the women hugged each other as long as they could (Dillon, 2011a).Footnote 4

In her recently published book Aparecida (2015) [Reappeared], Dillon recalls the same scene of the blue jumper. She adds that she cried in Cristina’s arms as never before, as if she would be crying ‘under the warm body of a just-lost mother’ (Dillon, 2015, p. 128, my translation) (Figure 1).

Figure 1
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From Lucila Quieto’s photographic essay Arqueology of the Absence (1998–2000).

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On 27 August 2010, Marta Dillon was finally able to re-bury her mother. The ceremony took place in Moreno, where Taboada used to live during the 70s. Family, friends, national authorities and representatives of human rights organisations attended the funeral. Dillon spoke briefly: ‘Moments like this when we are all together look a lot like victory’ (Dillon, 2011b).Footnote 5 Somehow, Dillon’s case also echoes the figure of Antigone. Instead of a brother, she managed to re-bury a mother that had been illegally thrown into a mass grave by a murderous state. If Antigone signposts the social deformation of both idealised kinship and political sovereignty (Butler, 2000, p. 6), the re-inscription of the mythical character in contemporary Argentina appears as a countersignature, a new fold in the deformation of the law of kinship. In this context, the reburial of Dillon’s mother comes as a form of reparation and victory. More than this, in the book she confesses that she found herself organising the delayed funeral ‘as if it were a party’ (Dillon, 2015, p. 153, my translation). At some point, she adds: ‘Now was clear, mum was returning’ (p. 188).

If it is ‘blood that stabilizes kinship’ (Butler, 2000, p. 13), I would like to make the case that Argentina witnesses an alternative form of sovereignty that is not secured by blood. Rather, it exposes forms of vulnerability and reparation beyond victimhood. This form of reparation relies on the expanded affiliative bonds that have emerged in response to violence. Dillon’s mother has been re-buried. Marta Taboada becomes the disappeared person who has ‘returned’. Now is ready to be mourned. The Mother has found a safe place to rest. She has reappeared. At the threshold of kinship, a new language of loss can be envisaged.

A Pile of Clothes

Clothes can be productive surfaces for the circulation of affects. They are ubiquitous objects, emotionally charged, inhabited by contested emotions. Clothes travel through time. They can become mediums with which to touch the past and glimpse the future. As Monks (2009, p. 3) argues, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the costumes and the actors’ bodies in the audience’s experience of a performance; or indeed between real life and the stage. When I first read Dillon’s article recalling the episode of the blue jumper, I realised how much it resonated with a theatrical piece, Mi vida después [My Life After, 2009], directed by Lola Arias, a celebrated avant-garde dramatist with no disappeared relatives. The performance was released in Buenos Aires and circulated around international festivals for more than 3 years. On stage, six actors, all born during the dictatorship, put on the clothes of their parents to perform real episodes from their parents’ lives. The production suggests that affect could be exchanged via a pile of clothes that works as a medium to step into a time machine. Dressed as former guerrilla activists, exiled intellectuals, bank employees, policemen and priests, the bodies of the actors enact a generational platform for the transmission of trauma. Somehow, the entire piece works as a live machine of affect, which manages to displace bloodline chains of suffering and bring new desires on stage. In this fantastic encounter of costumes and time, Mi vida después suggests that not only can past stories be recreated and even transmitted from one generation to another, but also that the re-examination of the past can be a means of recreating new affiliations for the future.

Yet, the circulation of intensities created by the piece goes far beyond the stage. As Monks (2009, p. 97) suggests, ‘theatre invokes and invents bodies through the act of crossing, and changing clothes can mean changing bodies on the stage and in the audience’. In this vein, the playful cross-dressing of the parental figures enacted by the younger generation during Arias’ performance can not only be read as a fight against the Oedipal ties carried by the traumatic past. Rather, the ex-change of costumes emerges as an affective pathway to connect with broader audiences. By filling these old clothes with their own stories, the performance offers the spectators the opportunity of adopting trauma in the present. The good-humoured mood that irradiates the piece, even to account for disheartening episodes, makes this passage possible. It shows how traumatic pasts not only travel along biological lines but also can circulate among unrelated publics, which can eventually adopt trauma as a new outfit in the present (see Sosa, 2012).

After researching on Arias’ production for a while, the episode of Dillon’s mother and her blue jumper sounded like an intriguing scene that could have been part of Mi vida después. The more I thought about these resonances, the more extraordinary they appeared to me. I came to believe that it might not be just a coincidence. Marta might have attended the show and the piece could have contributed to inspire her own self-discovery. I thought of asking her – we used to work for the same newspaper in Argentina, before I moved to the United Kingdom – but then I realised that the very possibility of such unexpected connections already embedded the local aftermath of violence. Although this affective tonality could not be properly articulated yet, it managed to enlarge the potentials of each encounter. In fact, these radiations also had a physical imprint on my own persona, a sort of ‘outsider’, with no victims in my family.

Thus, the episode of the blue jumper, and its reverberations throughout Arias’ piece, emerged as the perfect excuse to examine regular spectators own investment in the materials and costumes that were part of these stories. These ‘affective correspondences’ helped the spectators to engage with the performance in a more intense way. They not only make them part of the piece but also allow them to feel the capacity of bodies ‘to affect and be affected by others’, one of the main principles sustained by scholars working on affect (Blackman and Venn, 2010, p. 9). On a broader level, my turn to affect to approach contemporary Argentina is also driven by a conviction: the non-verbal and non-conscious dimensions of experience can help to re-think our political engagement with memory and traumatic pasts. In particular, the exchanges across bodies and time can help to trace the expansion of the experience of loss among unpredictable audiences.

Wigs of Pain and Pleasure

The queer encounters did not stop there. They never do. More than a decade ago, in her documentary film Los rubios [The Blonds] (2003), the filmmaker Albertina Carri provided some gripping sequences of impudent past that still work as a turning point for the affective correspondences that I am tracing here. Until then, the sacred tradition of the so-called ‘cinema of the disappeared’ had stipulated that the memory of those missing should be honoured. During the early years of recovered democracy and the posterior neo-liberal backlash of the 90s no contestation was allowed. It was only by the beginning of the new century, with Néstor Kirchner’s administration already in place, that, for the first time, Carri featured the abduction of her parents – a well-known intellectual couple disappeared and murdered in 1977. And she did so through a provocative animation scene played by plastic toys suddenly kidnapped by a spaceship. In the last scene of Carri’s documentary, the whole crew – including assistants, producers, the director herself and the actor who plays her role – stand together in the middle of the countryside. They all walk together towards the sunset wearing blonde wigs. The wigs echo the testimony of an old neighbour, who in a curious passage of the film called to mind the Carris as blonde. The episode puzzled the director as her family had ostensibly darkish hair. More than a mischievous quote, the wigs work in the film as a powerful intervention to signpost a non-normative lineage, that is, the expanded breed of those who can partake in mourning (Sosa, 2011a, 2014). Somehow prefiguring the pile of clothes in Mi vida después, the wigs transform the experience of loss into an exchangeable costume – even a militant outfit. The blond extensions drew attention to a community beyond blood, which also worked as an inter-corporeal form of transmission, one that suggests the potential of embracing traumatic experiences experienced by others.

During Los rubios closing scene, a pop-song plays in the background: I can see and speak and fall asleep under your influence, I can say […] something has changed; what a pleasure this pain, I am not going to hide from my destiny.Footnote 6 The mix of pain and pleasure addressed by the song foreshadows a process of ‘countersignature’ (Derrida, 1999). This exercise of countersign shows how the very process of ‘adding something new’ to the experience of trauma becomes the miscellaneous tonality that impregnates the aftermath of violence. While blurring frontiers between pain and pleasure, it resonates across the spectators providing the ‘physic glue’, to use again Eng’s expression, which features the whole period.

One of the most intriguing questions faced by affect theory has been to establish whether that dissolution of boundaries should be read as ‘a promise or a threat’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2007, p. 10). Drawing upon the Argentina’s case, my answer encompasses both possibilities. As it follows, the mix of pleasure and pain recalled by the blonde wigs would have different radiations during the following years. By expanding the unexpected ties formed in the aftermath of loss, the wigs contest traditional forms of kinship governed by blood. To some extent, the song closing Carri’s film announces a new language that would mark the future decade, a new language in which pain and pleasure will be inextricable knotted. This language also speaks about the ‘in betweens’, the ‘blooming intervals’, in which pain and pleasure arising from the experience of grief cannot be distinguished anymore. Traditional binaries give room to a flow of intensities coexisting together and continually divulged through slippages, inversions and convolutions. The aftermath of loss colours all the period; it informs its anxieties, and even its sense of humour. This unfolding shimmer of contested emotions radiates from the wigs to the spectral community of those who can partake in mourning. Spectators are also invited to be part. Pleasure, in fact, is related to that possibility of sharing.

The Letter

On the night of the 15 of July of 2010, Marta Dillon and Albertina Carri stood together in front of Argentina’s Parliament. After an exhausting debate, the same-sex marriage law was about to be passed in the country. A big demonstration was taking place. Among the multitude, they might have spotted a flag: ‘We want Mum and Dad’, was written on it. The flag had been brought by H.I.J.O.S., the organisation created by the children of the disappeared during the mid-90s.Footnote 7 The slogan echoed the cards, which had been used by the conservatives, who claimed that only heterosexual families could fulfil parental duties. In this context, H.I.J.O.S.’ flag stood as a flagrant joke, a dark joke that managed to signpost the extent to which the ‘Mum-and-Dad’ family was no longer possible. As I have argued, by mocking their orphaned condition, the descendants exposed how traditional kinship ties had already been broken by violence (Sosa, 2013).

I wonder if Marta Dillon and Albertina Carri saw the flag that night. I wonder also if they might have laughed about it. In some ironic way, the uncanny ambivalences embodied by the flag seemed to be dedicated to them. This is not only because in both their cases their parents were ‘disappeared’, but also because they have a child together, Furio, who, thankfully, has two mothers, and a father. In July 2015 Furio Carri Dillon Ros’ triple filiation was legally recognised.Footnote 8

Once same-sex marriage was made legal in 2010, Dillon and Carri were finally able to celebrate their wedding. The party took place a couple of months after Dillon found her mother’s remains. In her recently published book, Dillon celebrates that the bones of her mother arrived on time for the weeding. ‘They [the bones] must have been dancing inside their little box’, she engraves (Dillon, 2015, p. 193). By that time, Dillon published another article. One of the passages reads like this:

I have just got married for the first time, and I am in love. I have an impossible but well constituted family: my beloved Albertina, my two children with a 21-year age difference between them; a granddaughter; three dogs; two cats; and a number of friends who I know I can collapse on, to then stand up again with my eyes closed. Nobody cares about these details except for me because they are the proof that I survived. It was by living all these years looking for you [her mother] that my family was crafted. Seeking justice for you, looking for a language through which I could name you.

(Dillon, 2010a)

Dillon’s words are particularly rich in this context. Her testimony is embedded in a disjointed temporality that stages a non-normative way of perceiving the attachments to the past. She explicitly refers to her mother as the ‘engine’ that helped her to re-invent the bonds that saved her present. ‘It was by living all these years looking for you that my family was crafted’, she writes. The very experience of loss framed her conditions of survival. Now, her ‘well-constituted family’ gathers together three different generations of relatives (including a child with two mothers), plus friends and animals. In her case, kinship has become ‘fragile’, ‘porous’ and ‘expansive’ (Butler, 2000, p. 22). Quite literally, Dillon’s expanded family has emerged from loss. Her feeling of being ‘given over to others’, to put it in Butler’s (2011, p. 382) words, was enhanced by her mother’s re-burial, which worked almost as a second death and also as a strange form of victory. By this time, her queer family had already made room for an expanded sense of hope (Figure 2).

Figure 2
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The queer family. Marta Dillon, Albertina Carri & relatives. Photo: Fernando Gutierrez.

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Therefore, Dillon’s testimony shows how the past is not rigid, but malleable and textured, written from the affective investments of the present; almost like clothes. She writes that during the past years she was looking for a language to ‘name’ her mother. In the article, she literally speaks to her. It is a delicate, intimate, yet public letter (see Dillon, 2010a). This letter stands as the proof that Dillon actually found a language to name her mother. It is indeed a language dressed by loss. It is also inhabited by a new joy. This language will fully inform Aparecida. As a preannounced sample, Dillon’s letter also names the insupportable but also the expanded ties to deal with it. It ultimately exposes how much bodies depend on others as the condition for their own survival. This language of loss has been put in circulation, and now is also available to share.

Nonetheless, I should take a brief detour here. Whereas post-structuralist theories have traditionally perceived affect and language as oppositional to each other, my suspicion is that Argentina’s contemporary scene can help to challenge these traditional boundaries. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler (2000, p. 3) criticises Lacan’s perspective by arguing that in his work kinship and language appear to be removed from the social, a mere relation of ‘blood’. In tune with Butler’s critique, Eng encourages us to conceive affect and language as ‘supplemental’ to one other. ‘Affect might help to recalibrate the afterlife of post-identity politics’, he asserts within his scholarship on queer kinship (Eng, 2010, p. 192). In my impression, both Butler and Eng’s perspectives are productive to allude to the subjectivities that have emerged in contemporary Argentina.

In fact, Dillon’s letter encourages us to imagine a collective language of loss for times in which cultural intelligibility has been challenged by violence. This alternative language frames the conditions of an expanded social survival, even among less implicated audiences. As Dillon’s letter shows, this language recalibrates an expanded form of memory; one that also circulates through Arias’ performance of clothes, Carri’s blonde wigs and H.I.J.O.S.’ Mum-and-Dad flag. In all these cases, the language of loss vibrates among those who are not related to the missing by blood, but who can still partake in trauma. In doing so, it also shows how the heritages left by the dictatorship have re-entered the realm of the social while proposing a multidirectional exchange between affect and politics.

Kinship across Time

There is an extra layer that I would like to uncover in relation to Dillon’s story; one that helps to grasp the extent to which the dependency on others also relies on the ‘affective correspondences’ constituted across time. A year after her wedding, Dillon published another article. There, she wrote:

Many times we wonder [she and her partner Carri] what our disappeared mothers would say about our family and our love. They, who were so strict in their revolutionary morals – and he, I have to add my father-in-law, would they have come home to cuddle our little boy with ease and detachment? ‘Yes’, is our answer. And it is not just a response forged by illusion. It is the realization of their voices in the voices of their surviving comrades that fill us daily with love from a distance.

(Dillon, 2010b)

This time, Dillon draws upon the complicity she found in her partner, Albertina Carri, to re-examine the differential values attributed to activism by different generations. She subtly teases the political commitment of their mothers and also their ‘revolutionary morals’ during the 70s. These ‘touches across time’, to use Dinshaw’s (1999, p. 3) expression, also propose a form of forgiveness in the face of the impossible. As if moved by the time machine of clothes that operated in Mi vida después, Carri and Dillon’s mothers also travel through time. They have friends who are also willing to help. They use the bodies of their extemporary comrades as surface and medium. In a similar counter movement as reported by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with their tagline ‘Our children gave birth to us’, these other ‘revolutionary mothers’ come from the past to take care of their little grandson. This time the contorted journey works as a form of affective reparation, as I will now explore.

Dillon’s letter is located between life and death, precisely in the realms of kinship, as Butler (2000) asserts. Dillon’s letter portraying the spirits of the dead mothers travelling through time locates the readers at the edge of a haunted history. Yet again, the plurality of space and times co-existing together defies conventional modes of signification and inscription. In his analysis of the documentary History and Memory (Rea Tajiri, 1991) – which revisits a mother–daughter relationship after the Second World War – Eng (2010, p. 184) argues that stories of loss ‘must be channelled through the realm of affect in order to gain epistemological and ontological traction’. Looking for similar traction, I draw upon Dillon’s story to explore how Argentine memory struggles have become embedded in the levels of the inter-subjective as a question of wounded kinship. The image of Carri and Dillon’s mothers travelling through time carves out juxtaposed, in-between times, in which the past is kept alive in the present, an unusual temporality that goes against chronological orders and can be described as queer (Dinshaw, 1999). From the perspective of affect theory, I suggest that this ‘queer temporality’ also manages to expand traditional understandings of kinship while giving room to new inter-subjective attachments emerged out of loss. Indeed, Dillon’s description of those anachronistic coalitions of relatives and friends does not follow straight narratives. It draws alternative forms of intimacy, which help to envision how the bloodline circle of the Argentine ‘wounded family’ of victims has been expanded. More than a restrictive community of relatives, the reworking of kinship that I am here proposing takes the form of a spectral community, one that follows a queer historical impulse by gathering past and present, loss and pleasure.

This assemblage of flesh, costumes and time not only acts as Dillon and others’ individual condition of survival, but also of those who might feel touched by the uneasy winds of the past, allowing them to mobilise unexpected encounters. In this series, we can inscribe the blonde wigs, the blue jumper and the Mum-and-Dad flag. By taking Eng’s (2010, p. 185) invitation of naming these kind of encounters as ‘affective correspondences’, I want to stress how a perspective based on affect can provide not only a site for both individual and collective reparation in the Argentine context. Rather, these forms of affective encounter provide a non-kin alternative to official strategies championed by the ‘wounded family’, which still rely on fixed forms of identity, as I will now explore further.

Abuelas and the ‘Right’ of Identity

In 2013, Argentina celebrated 30 years of recovered democracy. It was also Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo’s 36th anniversary. So far, the organisation, which stands as a global reference for human rights, has managed to recover the identity of 116, out of the estimated 500 missing children who were born within clandestine detention centres and appropriated by families close to the military during the dictatorship. For the 2013 anniversary, the organisation launched and broadcast new publicity to bring attention to the young adults who still live under falsified identities. The 1-minute broadcast shows a young woman holding a newborn during a visit to a medical consultant (see www.abuelas.org.ar/). An older woman – presumably her mother – accompanies them. Quite insistently, the practitioner requests all the medical history of the baby and also that of the family. ‘Is this all important?’, complains the young woman while exchanging odd glances with the older one. Eventually, the audience learns that the older woman has been the illegal appropriator of the young mother. ‘Don’t leave your children a heritage of doubt. Sort out your identity now’, is the final remark of the broadcast (Figure 3).

Figure 3
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Abuelas’ institutional video (2013).

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Abuelas’ video is as touching as it is compelling. The slogan is also consistent with the group’s public strategy. Emerging out of a context marked by violence, for more than three decades, the ‘right to identity’ has been the core of the organisation’s fight. Nonetheless, as the video shows, bloodline bonds appear for them as the only true form of identity that needs to be ‘sorted’. In a non-attended manner, the broadcast champions a conservative idea of identity, which relies on traditional forms of heritage, blood and the family. Gatti (2008) has also addressed this arguably conservative background of Abuelas organisation. Still, the 2013 anniversary video emerges as particularly flagrant. It deliberately dismisses, or at least overlooks, broader experiences of fertilisation, egg-donation, let alone other non-normative forms of reproduction, procreation and attachment currently in place. They all endorse expanded forms of love and care that surpasses the limits of the nuclear family.

To some extent, it could be argued that political urgencies have ‘blinded’ Abuelas to a more attentive response to the expanded feeling of kinship, which has emerged precisely out of the experience of loss. Although the demands of the relatives of the children who were kidnapped during the dictatorship and those of same-sex couples cannot be strictly compared, the reverberations of this affective encounter seem to suggest a powerful form of intersecting activism. In fact, the expansion of rights to traditionally marginalised communities that featured the last decade in Argentina – including the same-sex marriage and the Gender and the Fertilisation laws – still have to reveal its potentialities and wide-ranging imbrications of spheres.Footnote 9 From 2003, the so-called ‘most progressive’ government of the new democratic period adopted the demand of the victims as part of its own political agenda. Encompassing this process, a cross-fertilisation of non-heteronormative and memory politics has begun to take place. This has been confirmed not only by H.I.J.O.S.’ Mum-and-Dad flag in 2010, but also by the increasing presence of LGTB groups at the demonstrations for the ‘National Day of Memory’ on the 24 March (the anniversary of the military coup) during the following years. This hybrid, imbricated atmosphere also embeds the upcoming cultural productions, which I will now explore.

A Soap Opera of Blood: 23 Pares

The non-normative imbrications between memory and sexuality have been magnificently addressed by 23 pares [23 Pairs], a collaborative project launched by Albertina Carri and Marta Dillon in 2012.Footnote 10 In an unattended manner, the show develops the affective encounters between the personal and the collective, which I am trying to address in these pages. More than this, 23 pares displays a distorted soap opera of blood, which calls into question both genres and genders. The show is written, directed and performed mostly by women. As Carri points out, it features mature women ‘fighting for justice but also defending their enjoyment. And they are not alone. They know how to build solidarity ties, their own family of peers’ (quoted in Yuszczuk, 2012). I shall suggest that 23 pares also offers an alternative pathway for considering the reworking of kinship currently at sake in the country. Let’s explore this argument further.

The plot follows the intricate cases that come to be examined at Genhuman, an institute that specialises in DNA tests. Although the stories tackled in the show are mostly fictional, they also draw upon real cases. The institute belongs to the Iturrioz, a prestigious scientist couple. Since they both die considerably young, their laboratory is passed into the hands of their descendants: Helena, an independent lawyer, mother of two and married to an architect, and Carmen, a passionate and maybe pan-sexual biologist who eventually falls in love with a policewoman specialising in forensics. The siblings have also a brother, Gustavo, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and is fascinated by the history of royal dynasties. Actually, Gustavo’s royal passion somehow recalls the obsession with blood championed by the relatives of the victims in post-dictatorial Argentina. After all, in the country to be part of the ‘wounded family’ has surreptitiously become a form of ‘blue blood’ (Figure 4).

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23 pares [23 Pairs], a TV soap opera directed by Dillon and Carri (2012).

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Through various modes of affective displacements, contested heritages of loss appear intertwined in the show. 23 pares features a total of 13 episodes. Each one recalls disparate nuances of identity matter that come to be assessed at Genhuman Institute: a middle-aged man who discovers he has been adopted; two baby girls who have been swapped at the moment of birth; a trans-gender child who fights medicalisation; a pregnant 15-year-old girl raped by her father; a TV star trying to get out of a paternity suit; a daughter of the disappeared who discovers that her only relative has become a Nazi supporter; and so on. If all these cases disrupt conventional genealogical trees, scientific discourses also become undermined in the series. As much as the past is never closed, Genhuman Institute displays an experimental laboratory to test the alternative subjectivities arising in the aftermath of trauma. Moreover, the soap opera eventually exposes how traumatic stories can be digested, processed and put into circulation beyond the boundaries of the biological family.

Enwrapping the controversial cases, tensions grow within the Iturrioz family. A haunting secret eventually is exposed: the incest taboo is no longer secure within the clan. The deceased parents – always in love, brilliant scientists and beloved carers of their children – turn out to be biological siblings. Indeed, they are half-brothers. In this dramatic twist, the siblings discover themselves as part of a broken, even abject lineage. ‘I used to be the daughter of two marvellous parents and now it appears that I have been raised by two degenerates’, wails Helena, one of the siblings. In a fictional knot of the Argentine family drama, the endogamous origins of the protagonist of the series seem to evoke the inside/outside logic of the relatives of the victims of the dictatorship violence. After all, Mothers, Grandmothers, Children and Relatives of the disappeared embody another form of infatuated and incestuous lineage. In this vein, the famous royal dynasties, which Gustavo dissects with obsession in the fiction become knotted and twisted with the actual genealogies that disrupt the local political arena. Building upon these intertwined heritages, the TV series delineates an unstable terrain of emerging affiliations. Bonds are not longer secured by the incest taboo and Oedipal myth. Instead, they offer a displaced operetta of blue blood, which mocks normative inscriptions of kinship providing a more fluid language for the family, heritage and loss.

In fact, the TV show can be read against the traditional politics of memory that has been championed by human rights organisations in Argentina. Whereas Mothers, Grandmothers Children, Siblings and Relatives of the victims still rely on conservative versions of the family, 23 pares envisages alternative non-normative arrangements where the very idea of truth becomes contested. If Abuelas’ broadcast provides a unique response to the fight for identity – in which blood appears as the only truth – in the TV series responses are always multiple and diverse. DNA does not work as conclusive evidence but only as a point of departure. During an interview, Albertina Carri, one of the producers of the series, admitted that her condition as ‘daughter of the disappeared’ enabled her to develop a special sensitivity for what seems to be written by blood:

DNA works as a metaphor for the legacy with which one enters into the world [….]. It is like a starting point, a raw material that you can use to model the place you want to be, your own place, your own identity. The distance between this zero point and this other point, which is never an arrival but a form of becoming, is 23 pares’ search.

(quoted in Yuszczuk, 2012)

By contrast, 23 pares provides no secure answers. Their characters might either contend that blood does not lie, or contest DNA as a unique form of truth. Despite the dramatic circumstances, each episode explores the nuances of the traumatic with a glimpse of humour, a bitter joke or, at least, a playful twist. Thus, the soap opera suggests embodied ways of acknowledging trauma, which are not rational but rather affective. As Massumi (1995) argues, they delineate a ‘pre-conscious’ and ‘pre-social’ form of knowledge, which, in this particular case, offers a collective pathway for symbolising loss. In this provocative still fictional ‘coming out’, 23 pares brings to light an alternative atmosphere, one that promises more fluid arrangements between kinship and loss.

More Relatives to-Come

To further address this point, I will briefly focus on one of the episodes of the TV show. The episode subtly echoes the reburial of Marta Dillon’s mother. It addresses the identification of the remains of a woman who disappeared during the late ’70, and on which the Iturrioz couple had been working unsuccessfully before their death. In resonance with Dillon’s case, the episode portrays a mother and her late-teen daughter unfolding the objects that belonged to the woman. They both look particularly perplexed in front of a pair of dance-shoes. Iterating the affective radiations raised by the blue jumper, the shoes finally appear as the cover of the invitation card for the funeral. Reparation occurs again, this time in the fiction. The audience can witness some lateral glimpses of the funeral. Echoing Marta Taboada’s reburial, this is also portrayed as an ecstatic celebration flowed by the Children of the Disappeared’s vindictive and joyful chants (Figure 5).

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Reparations (23 pares, Episode 12)

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Later in the episode, Carmen and Helena Iturrioz arrive at a different cemetery, the one in which their parents are about to be cremated. The siblings aim to perform a DNA test in order to confirm whether their progenitors were effectively half-brothers. However, Gustavo impishly manages to get away from scientific endeavours. The parental bodies are finally burnt. ‘Our secret is safe’, murmurs Gustavo, as though reassuring the dead. Quite paradoxically, Carmen, the expert in genetics, comforts her sister: ‘DNA is not the only way to know the truth. We have a long history, tons of new relatives to meet’, utters the biologist at the end of the episode.

I would like to make the case that Carmen’s statement could be read as a fine challenge to the identity politics performed by the Argentine ‘wounded family’. Whereas traditional groups of victims have championed an over-inscription of blood as the only reassuring strategy to cope with the traumatic past, 23 pares signposts an alternative approach. It suggests the emergency of distinctive forms of love and care stemming from non-biological attachments. While contesting the idea of truth as the merely biological, the TV show created by Dillon and Carri also provides an alternative response to the sanguine pronouncements championed by the ‘wounded family’. In the episode, this is framed as a promise: an enormous collection of non-kin relatives to-come, as Carmen suggests.

In this way, 23 pares pushes forward the paradox of the post-dictatorial period: an obsession with blood, which can arguably fall into a normative backlash, as Abuelas’ institutional broadcast signposts. Conversely, 23 pares envisages alternative forms of affective correspondences, which suggests alternative forms of inhabiting the world. In so doing, the show transports the spectators to the realms of fiction and forces them to imagine a sphere of kinship beyond the sanctioned boundaries of the Oedipus complex and incest taboo. As Manning (2010, p. 124) contends, ‘worlding occurs when the group-subject becomes expressive on the cusp of life itself, when it “brings forth the collective enunciations capable of forming new enunciation of desire” ’. Precisely, I would argue, each episode of 23 pares explores different forms of worlding, different forms and shapes of that collective desire. This finally reveals that different forms of affective reparation are still possible.

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The collection of experiences and stories I here explored offers a different approach to memory and trauma, which seeks to contribute to expanding the vocabularies available for loss at the transnational level. Examined from the perspective of affect studies, these up-coming narratives help to give a sense of the new affiliations that have emerged in the wake of violence in contemporary Argentina. Drawing upon Eng and Hirsch’s works – and other scholars working on the field of affect – I have been particularly interested in tracing the ‘affective correspondences’ among subjects and narratives that circulate in post-dictatorial Argentina. I have ultimately argued that these cases manage to show alternative ways to relate to trauma and suffering. Rather than being victimising and disempowering, such they have succeed in stimulating processes of circulation and resistance among wider sectors of civil society. In doing so, they have helped to reanimate a sense of ‘being together’ beyond the restrictions of one’s bloodline.

I have been touched by the way in which, in the last decade, a young generation of Argentinians learned to explore legacies of trauma and grief by building new languages to relate to loss. Indeed, the TV series 23 pares and Arias’ theatrical piece show how an upcoming production does more than reproducing parental desires. Rather, it recreates alternative forms of memory, which add something new to the experience of trauma. As much as traditional scholarship on ‘postmemory’ has insisted on bloodline ties as a unique form of transmission and trauma, in Argentina the power of blood has also been countersigned. By providing original mediations to the traumatic, the cases explored here have also served as a way of counter-acting and repairing loss: they worked through experiences of suffering by offering different forms of ‘affective reparation’, to put it in Eng’s terms.

Building upon an approach that combines both affect and queer studies, I have looked for alternative forms of sociality that exist outside, around and beyond the network of associations of bloodline of victims in post-dictatorial Argentina. The stories I have analysed contribute to deconstructing the lineage of the ‘wounded family’, which has been enough victimised. These cases speak about novel attachments that have emerged from loss. In my analysis, I have relied on the force of queerness, both as a non-normative attachment and also as a form of critique of the bloodline normativity, which has framed the perception of the local aftermath of violence. Coming both from fiction and real life, the stories explored here help to bring both paths together. They show how certain lives, which come to be bound to each other under enforced conditions, may also bring a sense of reparation in the face of the unbearable.

Within trauma studies, it has been consistently argued that trauma cannot be properly represented (Caruth, 1991). Rather than ‘representing’, the different stories highlighted within these pages show how the resonances of the traumatic past can be moved, circulated and displaced; and finally re-enacted. Thus, the crew wearing the blonde wigs at the end of Los rubios, the cross-dressing of the parental figures in Mi vida después and each episode of 23 pares trouble conventional images of the family. In doing so, they offer disparate lines of reparation, which act as the reverse token of traditional endogamic (and maybe also incestuous) approaches to trauma. By embracing the deformation of the family forced by the violent past, the stories examined here suggest a new language of loss. The affective reverberations of this language defy both the murderous state and the sanctity of kinship, traditional sources of authority in the country. The collection of stories that this essay brings to light shows how the experience of mourning proposes the reassembling of communities, mobilising broader affiliative structures of transmission of loss.

To some degree, these stories expose the extent to which ‘what moves the collective is the affective tonality of a project in the making, a project always framed by the force of becoming’ (Manning, 2010, p. 124; Italics are mine). These resonances irradiate in between bodies, recreating new shapes, which encourage the emergence of alternative forms of becoming. Among these movements, the possibility of joy emerges maybe as the intriguing and always unspoken reverse of the traumatic. As Eng argues, ‘affective reparation’ does not occur on an individual level, but as a collective impulse that seeks the adoption of trauma in the present. In these pages, ‘affective reparation’ also accounts for the opportunities of working though the process of grief as an expanded form of kinship.

Both the biographies and the cultural production explored here show the various ways in which different modes of affective reparation are already taking place in contemporary Argentina. They actually provide the ‘affective tonality’ of current times. The reworking of kinship forced by violence generated expanded forms of familial ties that are not limited by blood. Rather, as Eng (2010, p. 198; emphasis in the original) also argues in a different context, ‘the feeling of kinship belongs to everyone’. In Argentina’s case, these expanded feelings of kinship work as an invitation to move back and forth through the vibrating resonances left by grief. In so doing, they have infused the future with new hopes and desires. These forms of ‘affective correspondences’ become more significant when they manage to hold new audiences in the work of mourning. They do not propose reconciliation with the perpetrators of the crimes. Rather, they speak about alternative modes of loss, grief and love.

Maybe this argument needs to be clarified once again: the often idealised and infatuated characters of the ‘wounded family’ have given rise to new forms of becoming. Drawing upon Blackman’s (2011) work, I suggest that these new forms of becoming can be grasp as queer. Of course, this does not mean to say that the Mothers, the Grandmothers or the Children of the disappeared are themselves queer. By contrast, I suggest that the bonds and subjectivities that have emerged within the work of mourning can be grasped as such. After all, they have contested traditional kinship ties based on blood.

Although the cases that I have explored here feature the aftermath of Argentina’s dictatorship, I am also interested in testing the transnational potential of these encounters, especially in other landscapes dealing with disparate traumatic pasts. I have the hope that in the very process of circulation, transnational audiences might also feel entitled to engage with wider forms of trauma transmission. This is specially the case when critical interventions encourage spectators to embrace more complex forms of heritages. The contested lineages stick; they are contagious. While mischievously blurring boundaries between those directly affected by violence and those seemingly not, these alternative lineages offer a glimpse of what might be coming after blood.