| Studies of trauma have developed mainly in two research sites: clinical studies of traumatized patients and studies of testimony in cultural production. By using a Performance Studies lens, this dissertation expands them by opening political activism as a third area of inquiry. I look at the actions of the Argentine H.I.J.O.S., a political organization started in 1995 by the children of those disappeared by state terrorism during the last dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. I research three areas: declarations in the public sphere, street actions, and everyday intra-organizational practices. H.I.J.O.S. intervened in the post-dictatorship public sphere constructing a collective political identity that reframed the political force field of the 1990s. For this, H.I.J.O.S. members draw on discourses of trauma, powerful in the 1970s, but whose political potency had been mostly neutralized. Among the street actions, I look at the escrache, H.I.J.O.S.'s main kind of demonstration, to which I pose questions about identity, violence, and justice. The escrache is an identitarian intervention as it works staging and changing the identities of the different actors involved, redrawing lines of alliance, and also encouraging active community involvement. I look at ways in which the escrache works with social violence, interrogating its meanings, uses, and connotations. Looking at the escrache's relations to the state judicial system, I track its evolution from 1997 when it emerged as a street alternative to state justice, to 2006, when it started accompanying court processes. The third area of my investigation, quotidian tactics, showed that everyday practices address trauma by intervening in affective structures, forging an affectively felt community. These various studies demonstrate that theories of trauma can help us interrogate the relation of politics and subjectivity but only if we can regard its subjects as agentic political actors, thus repoliticizing trauma. |
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