Mourning, Activism, and Queer Desires: Ni Una Menos and Carri’s Las hijas del fuego

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988699
• Author: Cecilia Sosa
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20988699

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 137–154

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988699

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

137

Mourning, Activism, and Queer Desires

Ni Una Menos and Carri’s Las hijas del fuego

by

Cecilia Sosa

Argentina’s neoconservative backlash (2015–2019) has rather paradoxically been

marked by an unprecedented entanglement of ongoing memory struggles and a recent

feminist awakening. A critical reading of this entwining traces the queer reworking of

dictatorship trauma during the Kirchnerist administrations (2003–2015) and explores

the way the post-2015 cycle nurtured a feminist irruption that contested long-standing

forms of patriarchy. The feminist movement Ni Una Menos has transitioned from vic-

timization to joy. Albertina Carri’s lesbian-porn fictional film Las hijas del fuego (2018)

can be read as an expression of a novel amalgam of disappearance, sexuality, and politics.

The spirit of contagion radiated by the film sheds light on the “revolution of the daugh-

ters” now taking place in the streets.

La reacción neoconservadora de Argentina (2015-2019) se ha visto paradójicamente

marcada por una vinculación sin precedentes entre las luchas de memoria en curso y

un reciente despertar feminista. Una lectura critica entrelaza una reelaboración queer

del trauma de la dictadura durante las administraciones kirchneristas (2003-2015) a

la vez que explora la forma en que el ciclo post-2015 alimentó una irrupción feminista

impugnó viejas formas del patriarcado. El movimiento feminista Ni Una Menos ha

pasado de la victimización a la alegría. La ficción pornográfica lésbica Las hijas del

fuego (2018), de Albertina Carri, se puede leer como la expresión de una nueva amal-

gama de desaparición, sexualidad y política. El espíritu de contagio irradiado por la

película arroja luz sobre la “revolución de las hijas” que tiene lugar en las calles.

Keywords: Argentina, Dictatorship, Feminism, Ni Una Menos, Albertina Carri

On October 19, 2016, during the so-called first International Women’s Strike,

more than 250,000 women took to the streets of Buenos Aires in Argentina

(Figure 1). Ignoring the torrential rain, they demanded the “end of patriar-

chy.” As the demonstrations multiplied in the interior of the country and

across Latin America, recognized local theorists and intellectuals announced

the end of “CEOs feminism” (a reference to the hierarchical nature of the

women’s movements). They predicted, instead, a festive spilling over of

“feminisms of all colors” (Peker, 2016).

Cecilia Sosa is an Argentine sociologist and cultural journalist. She holds a Ph.D. in drama (Queen

Mary, University of London) and works as a postdoctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of

London, on the British Academy–funded project “Documentality and Display: Archiving and

Curating Past Violence in Argentina, Chile and Colombia” (Grant: SDP2\100242)

988699LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20988699LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESSosa / MOURNING, ACTIVISM, AND QUEER DESIRES

research-article2021

138 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

The episode was greeted in local media outlets as a reverberation of the

first national icons of women and mourning, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,

with their famous rounds in the square that is the political heart of Buenos

Aires. As the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky (2016), president of the

human rights nongovernmental organization the Center for Legal and

Social Studies, argued, “It was possible to witness the birth of a phenome-

non that, like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo or October 17, would transform

the entire political system.”1 Some months later, on May 10, 2017, the Plaza

de Mayo was covered in white: 50,000 anonymous protesters, followed by

human rights and political organizations, adopted the Mothers of Plaza de

Mayo’s traditional headscarves and waved them in unison in the crowded

square. The spontaneous demonstration evoked the 1983 Siluetazo, the

artistic intervention that signposted the final stages of the military dictator-

ship, in which thousands of ad-hoc activists lay down in the Plaza de Mayo

so that their bodies could be traced and transformed into full-size posters

that evoked the haunting presence of the disappeared. The silhouettes were

left out overnight as a dramatic reenactment of loss, confronting viewers

with the “voiceless screams” of those disappeared by the military (Longoni,

2007). But the adoption of the Mothers’ scarves in 2017 was also a specific

response to an extreme provocation: the Supreme Court’s attempt to reduce

the sentence of Luis Muiño, a military perpetrator convicted of crimes

against humanity.2 With the ruling threatening to benefit other oppressors,

the public took to the streets.

Only six months separated the two demonstrations. Against the backdrop of

the businessman Mauricio Macri’s new conservative administration, which

began in December 2015, an unprecedented encounter was beginning to

emerge: two experiences of mourning were enhancing and strengthening each

other. In these pages I set out a reading of this entanglement. I argue that, far

from being a “local exception,” as suggested by Verbitsky (2016), the cross-

fertilization of these different experiences was part of a dense history in which

local and global tensions became intertwined in a moment of failure. I examine

how contemporary resonances of the military dictatorship (1976–1983)

Figure 1. Umbrellas in Plaza de Mayo: the first International Women’s Strike, October 19,

2016. Photo © Mariana Leder Kremer Hernández