Abstract
The last military regime in Argentina (1976–1983) ended over 35 years ago. Yet, like many countries that have gone through periods of gross human rights violations under authoritarian regimes, the country still struggles with how to remember what happened and ensure that it never happens again. Barbara Sutton’s book Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina makes an important contribution to these scholarly and practical efforts toward transitional justice and collective memory.
As Sutton notes (p. 9), collective memory is an ongoing and relational project in which those who support and oppose the past authoritarian regime contest each others’ narratives. But contestation also exists among those who oppose the regime. Sutton’s book contributes especially to the latter by including and analyzing the voices of women survivors of state-run clandestine detention centers (CDCs). As she puts it, “This book focuses on the (embodied) voices of women because their diverse and complex stories are vital to social memory” (p. 15).
Methodologically, this is a unique book. Most studies of collective memory explore truth commission reports, monuments, museums, books, films, and art. These are public collective memory projects, and the open debates regarding the creators’ choices are often part of the analysis. In addition, these more abstract presentations of the past provide a buffer for the researcher (and the audience) from the details of the traumas of the past.
Instead, Sutton’s choice of methods required many hours of watching and taking notes on 52 video-recorded testimonies of women survivors of CDCs, each of which between one and six hours long. She speaks of the physical and psychological challenges of such research. But, more importantly, what she has done is bring these voices into a much more public realm than they were before. These testimonies exist as part of a larger collective memory archive run by Memória Abierta (Open Memory) in Buenos Aires. However, Sutton explains, the video recordings can only be watched at the archives and cannot be recorded. Thus, Sutton’s work allows for these voices to be heard and discussed in a significantly more public way than before.
Using a sociological lens and a feminist analysis, she brings these women’s voices and experiences into discussions of the meaning of torture and human rights abuses. That is, often debates on human rights and torture use abstract language or limit their meaning to the dominant forms of torture experienced by men. She notes that in Argentina this has centered on electrical shocks and waterboarding. Certainly, many women also experienced these forms of torture. Yet many did not and often feel shame that their experience of torture (and continued trauma) is not publicly viewed as equally extreme or even as torture (p. 70).
Sutton argues for a broader and more gender-encompassing definition of torture based in the experiences of women in CDCs, while acknowledging that, if stretched too far, the concept of torture could be diluted from a legal standpoint. From the testimonies she analyzed, she adds to the definition of torture the following (as well as many other experiences): sexual violence, public nudity (worse for women due to their added vulnerability to sexual abuse and social norms around public nudity for women), lack of privacy, the disappearance of children, the damage done to bodies (visible and invisible), and the enormous stress caused by the constant need to perform acceptable emotions to avoid punishment and protect others.
It would have been helpful if the book had included a summarized re-definition of torture detailing the full range of experiences Sutton’s work uncovers. However, the careful reader can certainly put together such a definition themselves. That limitation aside, Sutton’s expanded description of torture not only brings us to a better understanding of the concept; also, the complexity of life in CDCs is exposed. This complexity challenges easy glorifications of heroic acts by political prisoners and the problematic shaming, as traitors or whores, of those who survived.
However, Sutton’s work is not just a book about the past. Indeed, time is an issue addressed throughout the book. As she notes, most survivors’ testimonies are found in truth commission reports and trials, both of which occurred not long after the return to democracy in Argentina. Yet, these structures and the social and political context shape survivors’ testimonies. Speakers often include or omit that which is acceptable or unacceptable to discuss at the time of the testimony. While the testimonies Sutton examines were also shaped by the structures within which they were given and the questions asked, they reflect the context of a different time, having been recorded between 2001 and 2011.
In particular, it became more acceptable in the 2000s for survivors to speak of their past and present activism. Sutton takes advantage of this to show women as not only victims or mothers (prominent acceptable presentations of women’s experiences of the dictatorship) but as political actors and subjects with agency beyond dominant gender roles. While not all the interviewees were or are political activists, many were. Her book presents the joys and challenges of this activism. She examines survivors’ reflections on their past activism, often based in utopic ideals, and the challenges their experiences in CDCs posed to their faith in humanity.
Sutton brings us to the present through not only offering victims’ hopes for the future but also by linking the many continuities in human rights abuses that blur the line between dictatorship and democracy. This includes showing the similarities in the persistent acceptance of the sexual abuse of women and transwomen, femicides, prison and police abuse, and state control of women’s reproductive choices. That is, her broader definition of torture can be useful for understanding a wide range of human rights abuses beyond authoritarian regimes.
Sutton is always careful and thorough in her intersectional and non-binary analysis of “women” and gender. This adds to the rich analysis and highlights both the similarities and differences in the experiences of survivors. Given the limited identity descriptions of victims in Argentina’s CONADEP truth commission report, it would have been interesting to have seen a statistical breakdown of the range of identities of the women whose testimonies she heard. That said, her qualitative overview certainly includes the voices of a wide range of women.
In sum, this is an important book for anyone interested in collective memory, transitional justice, human rights, state violence, and the gendered experiences of all of these.