Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood by Cecilia Sosa (review)

Sosa’s monograph is an admirable example of the best of current Hispanic studies scholarship. Eschewing traditional approaches based on author, period, genre, movement, yet emphasizing the internal coherence of specific national literatures, a healthy array of studies focuses on complex theoretical issues to deepen the sociohistorical importance of significant examples of cultural production and legitimate critical approaches that go far beyond superficial plot summaries and classifications. What is most salutary is the way in which such postulations underscore the ongoing productivity of cultural studies and how Hispanic studies programs, for at least the past thirty years, have far outstripped other so-called foreign language programs in achieving the intellectual level customarily associated with English programs.

Sosa’s study is predicated on a still rather underdeveloped proposition of queer studies: that we are not only talking about queering sexuality but about a queer de-construction of all cultural categories. It is reasonable that queer studies focus preponderantly on matters of sexuality, since our society is obsessed with legislating and policing sexuality, reserving usually the deepest forms of opprobrium for alleged sexual transgressions. But as Sosa points out, queer theory is not just about sex, but about all forms of social construction, and one notes, for example, that disability studies have become a very productive field of critical inquiry precisely because of how queer theory enables an understanding of the social construction of bodily ableness (which in turn, certainly, includes the sexual).

Sosa puts all of this to very productive use in questioning the overarching principle (often more implied than specifically articulated) in the ideologies of memory, redemocratization, and social justice that have prevailed in Argentina since the return to constitutional democracy in 1983 after the 1976–83 neofascist military dictatorship that the legitimacy of public voice belongs preeminently, if not exclusively, to those who are joined by blood to the victims. This trope is particularly evident in the iconic status of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who since 1977 have clamored for the return of their disappeared children. The consanguinity extends in both directions to the iconicity of the grandmothers on the one hand (those left to care for the children left behind by, typically, the forced disappearance of parents) and to the iconicity of the H.I.J.O.S. movement (the children who are the survivors of the forced disappearance of parents, including those known to have been stolen by the military and who only discover this fact about themselves years later).

By questioning this specific detail of family, Sosa undermines the cluster of ideologies the cultureme {family} possesses in Argentina, both for the Judeo-Christian right and for the left, for whom, despite strategic redefinitions of family (e.g., the revolutionary family) the high valuation of traditional concepts of family has been an effective tool in extending demands for justice, since an eloquent appeal to family (e.g., in the case of the stolen children) is likely to prevail. Sosa goes on to make use of the deconstruction of the culturemes of family in order to both bring forth new meanings for recognized texts and to show how those culturemes have been deployed or manipulated in order for official institutions – mostly notably the Executive Branch since 2003, under Néstor Kirchner and then his wife and subsequently widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – to maintain official discourses over the disappeared and social justice for them in a way that has been unique for the countries of the original authoritarian/neofascist Operación Cóndor military-dictatorship alliance.

Chapters deal with narratives with reference to the Mothers and expanded definitions of the relationships between victims and their families and allies; with black humor (humor approached from psychoanalytic concepts of compensatory coping) over the children of the disappeared; questioning regarding the cult of the disappeared, a cult that has meant the endorsement of a society...