Abstract
Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina by Barbara Sutton foregrounds women’ bodies and voices as analytics to understand how state violence, resistance, and collective memory are embodied, thereby expanding the normative gendered frame that situates women as mothers, grandmothers, teachers, or victims. By focusing on the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) and the testimonies of women collected by Memoria Abierta, a consortium of human rights organizations, Sutton unearths the ways in which gender ideologies and practices structure the power of the state, its methodologies for silencing particular versions of the past, and the ways in which bodies are made vulnerable and how they resist. Sutton’s work is both timely and pressing, illuminating how state violence is not simply a matter of perpetrators and victims but is connected to persistent discourses and practices of violence aimed at turning captive people into humiliated, objectified, and sexualized bodies, stripped of identity and rights. What is at stake are lessons about human rights, transitional justice, and collective memory that move between the past and the present and across geographical boundaries to connect gender discourse to materiality, survival to resistance, and embodied memories from survivors to memories about the body that are culturally produced.
Drawing on the voices of 52 women survivors of state-run clandestine detention centers, Sutton asks questions about whose bodies and, even, which kinds of bodies are permitted to speak which truths when the discourse of national security is evoked. Through a collaboration between women survivors, the oral archive researchers, and Sutton herself, she asks questions such as what does it take for a testimony of rape or torture to be believed? What demands are made by the body for such claims to be considered credible? What are the limitations of relying on the body as the basis for truth? Which bodies are accounted for or erased in collective memory and historical trauma narratives? What are the risks of making the body overly visible in such stories? Indeed, this idea of putting the body on the line or giving the body to a cause is highlighted by the women survivors of state terror themselves through the notion of poner el cuepo or, in English, “to put the body” (61-63). Sutton further connects her methods of archival investigation to her embodied experience as a testimonial witness through what she calls implicated research. Her positionality as a woman, Argentine citizen, and feminist, ultimately implicates her “as a human being confronted by atrocities committed by other human beings” (37).
Through her analysis of women’s testimonies, Sutton positions gender as an implicit script to show how the deployment of torture collides with social constructs of femininity, including the treatment of women as just bodies, femininity as vulnerability, of women necessarily remaining hyperaware of their bodies, and the association of women with monstrosity. Some forms of violence on political prisoners’ bodies were explicitly gendered like the rape of women and the sexual, physical, and verbal assault of pregnant women. However, Sutton argues that torture is always imbedded in gender systems that subordinate some groups. Whether explicit or not, such violence incorporates cultural imaginaries associated with embodied experiences that are gendered and sexualized.
By speaking about seemingly taboo topics like sexual violence, survivors also use embodied work to reframe passivity and vulnerability into resistance. Through the process of recuperacion (or recuperation, in English), captive women abandoned their political performances of femininity to take up a model of domesticated femininity to survive. While survival was never guaranteed and enforced disappearances were often used to get rid of the body evidence associated with state crimes, women turned symbols of oppression and enforced vulnerability like the torture hood (head- and face-covering hoods meant to deprive detainees of sight) into ways of “leaving the body” to emotionally and psychologically survive atrocity. Even as these forms of agency may appear compliant to norms, rules, regulations, ideals, and expectations, Sutton argues that binaries like active/passive and vulnerable/invulnerable are not useful in understanding the nuances of embodied experiences.
Sutton concludes by creating a mandate for sociologists to trace the workings and the effects of state power on the body, including the social body, the body politic, the embodied experiences of people, as well as fleshy bodies. As Sutton argues, memories can be fragile, yet body memories are powerful in how they connect social construction with corporeal experiences like torture, confinement, and other forms of violence. By paying attention to the embodied voices of women survivors and the memories they carry, readers can see not only how disciplinary power works to target the body but also how to imagine and build a country centered around human rights, dignity, and hope. This text is appropriate for any advanced course on bodies/embodiment, gender, social inequalities, state and sexual violence, and qualitative methods.