Women's Testimonies and Militancy in Argentina: Revolution, Human Rights and Feminism

In this article, will examine a specific moment in the trajectories of both women's testimony and militancy, which have traced very powerful and certainly varied paths in recent decades in Argentina and Latin America, beginning at the beginning of democracy, after the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), with women's testimonies on the sexual crimes suffered in clandestine detention centers (CCD). They are part of a second wave within the literary and cultural tradition of Latin American testimony. In a first movement, the testimony of revolutionary matrix, which includes ethnographic, guerrilla and journalistic testimony, was institutionalized in 1970 by Casa de las Americas under the revolutionary model that spread throughout the continent from Cuba. In order to approach the corpus of women's testimonies on sexual terrorism, we consider it appropriate to point out the articulation of three matrixes that have permeated both testimonial texts and political practices: the revolutionary narrative, the humanitarian narrative and the feminist discourse.