Homonationalism,LGBT desaparecidos,and the politics of queer memory in Argentina

The rise of homonationalism in Argentina during the 1980s

Defined by Jasbir Puar (2017), the concept of homonationalism was originally developed to understand political trends in the Northern Hemisphere. As LGBT identities embraced respectability and became socially acceptable in Europe and the United States during the last decades, queer politics were increasingly associated with “ideas of life and productivity” (Puar, 2017). By contrast, after 9/11 fear of terrorism and non-white immigrants led to an opposite association of Islam and the Middle East with “figures of death.” According to Puar, homonationalism emerged in this intersection between Orientalist misrecognition of Islam and Middle Eastern/North African migration, on one hand, and the acknowledgment of Western queerness as an allegedly positive civilizational drive, on the other. Defined in these terms, homonationalism could not be observed in Argentina. Long-standing prejudice against darker-skin immigrants persisted in the country for more than a century, but for the most part immigration has been absent from the agenda of mainstream political parties. Moreover, most immigrants to Argentina since the 1930s have come from nearby Spanish-speaking countries and are not perceived as representing a different “civilization,” even if they are often portrayed as lacking work ethic, education, or cultural sophistication. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Argentina is not driven by Islamophobia and is not informed by a civilizational understanding of the “other” as a “figure of death.” While homonationalism in Europe and the United States implies the idea of an unassimilable group of outsiders who pose a violent threat to the very existence of civilization, such an idea is not even legible in Argentina.

While in the Northern Atlantic homonationalism is part of a growing emphasis on the clash of civilizations that defines the West in opposition to Islam, in Argentina homonationalism is a strategy to cope with the crisis of white national identity as it began to emerge in the transition to democracy toward the 1980s (Alberto and Elena, 2016). A brief historical overview of national identity is necessary to understand this 1980s crisis and the role that homonationalism played in “restoring” national and racial identity through the incorporation of a new approach. During the twentieth century, the dominant understanding of Argentine national identity as embraced by the urban middle-classes consolidated what Laclau (2005) conceptualizes as a “chain of equivalences.” This chain associated together disparate features, such as whiteness, economic prosperity, high levels of educational achievement, political stability, technological development, Europeanness, cultural sophistication, and other terms vaguely related with “progress” and “modernity.” Each of these features has been perceived by the Argentine middle class as equivalent and inextricably dependent on one other. Any of these features constitutes a trope symbolically standing for the others. Therefore, whiteness and Europeanness in Argentina have not merely been understood as resulting from complexion. For instance, negro de alma or “black in the soul” is a term used contemptuously in Argentina to refer to those who lack middle class status and cultural capital “in spite of” being white (Aguiló, 2018; Bonvillani, 2019; Cordero, 2021). Despite the positive connotations of lighter skin, to reaffirm whiteness requires the simultaneous presence of the other features in the chain of equivalences. Many Argentines historically understood their country as white and European-like because socioeconomic indicators were imagined as substantiating such claim. As long as Argentina effectively exhibited an economic development that differentiated the country from the rest of Latin America, the representation of the nation as white endured. Yet, when decades of economic decline led to the erosion of the quality of life by the 1980s (Adair, 2020), the urban middle class understood its own social discontent in racial terms, through a crisis of the chain of equivalences that led many to ask themselves how a white European-like country could lose its edge over the rest of Latin America (Aguiló, 2018; Alberto and Elena, 2016). It is important to note that this overall description of Argentine nationalism only represents a dominant trend among the middle class and has been historically challenged by multiple alternative views (Aguiló, 2018). It is not the goal of this article to provide a multifaceted description of Argentine nationalism but, instead, to delve into some of the major ideological threads that constituted the context for the rise of Argentine homonationalism as it began to emerge amid a crisis of white identity since the 1980s.

In response to the crisis of whiteness and Europeanness toward the 1980s, the promotion of sexual diversity gradually emerged as a form of status/distinction that “compensated” for the lack of economic development and supposedly restored Argentina’s Europeanness despite the economic downturn (Ben and Insausti, 2021; Insausti and Ben, 2023). This symbolical compensation now widespread across the political spectrum did not consolidate overnight. In fact, in the 1980s many Argentines associated Europeanness with Christian values and thus rejected the idea that a culture of sexual freedom expressed whiteness. Yet, among some groups of progressive urban professionals, sexual/gender diversity increasingly came to stand for Europeanness (Adamovsky, 2009; Goldar, 1994). Therefore, the acceptance of such diversity cemented the otherwise severed chain of equivalences that had historically substantiated Argentine whiteness. This embracing of diversity by a small but influential minority in the 1980s offered a window of opportunity for gays and lesbians to gain acceptance (Ben, 2021; Ben and Insausti, 2021). For instance, a wave of new porn magazines like Destape, Viva, and Shock, mostly catering to the urban middle-classes began to praise the “tolerance” of European sexual mores, proposing to emulate them (Insausti and Ben, 2023). The emerging gay/lesbian movement also increasingly joined this trend and articulated its political demands as attempts to mirror developments in the “civilized” corners of the planet, supposedly represented by the United States and Europe. During the 1980s, however, the Argentine police systematically harassed homosexual men and the government never officially embraced the association between sexual/gender diversity, on one hand, and Europeanness/modernity/whiteness, on the other. Therefore, homonationalism as it would emerge later, remained in the margins during the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, the crisis of white/European identity among the middle classes was deepening and President Carlos Menem sought to achieve legitimacy by proposing to make Argentina part of the First World through the adoption of free-market neoliberal policies aimed at bringing an imagined modern globalization to the country (Aguiló, 2018; Rocha, 2012). Against this backdrop, the Argentine state took the first step into a path that would eventually end up incorporating what could now be termed homonationalism as an official ideology. For several years the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA), or Argentine Homosexual Community, had demanded legal recognition, but faced repeated rejections, ultimately sealed by a 1992 Supreme Court decision against it. As President Carlos Menem traveled to the United States to portray Argentina as a First World democratic country during the same year, he was challenged by a gay/lesbian demonstration denunciating the violation of human rights in Argentina (Meccia, 2011; Sebreli, 1997). Back in the country, Menem then granted legal recognition to the CHA. Moreover, as police harassment of homosexual men was casting a shadow on Argentina’s international image regarding human rights, police persecution for gay men ended for the first time in decades, although travestis continued to be harassed by the police. Throughout the 1990s, the Argentine state would increasingly assert the association of progress with sexual tolerance, acceptance of homosexuality, and European cultural sophistication (Ben, 2021). Therefore, sexual diversity and homonationalism entered the chain of equivalences that substantiated Argentina’s fragile self-perceived Europeanness. Intertwined with the ascent of the related homocapitalism (Rao, 2020) to be examined later, this trend further consolidated in the twenty-first century, enabling the LGBT rights revolution.

As Argentine homonationalism “proved” that Argentina continued to be a European-like society, the memory of the queer past in the country experienced a considerable resignification. As a wide array of political forces across the spectrum gradually embraced LGBT politics, they realigned their imagined past with a teleology moving national history toward increasing queer acceptance. Meanwhile a temporal displacement reimagined most instances of state violence against queer people as happening within a condensed and exceptional period of 8 years of military rule between 1976 and 1983. Police raids against homosexual men ordered by Perón during the 1950s were remembered by many until the 1980s (Somos, ca. 1974; Insausti, 2019), but references to these raids increasingly vanished in the twenty-first century, while Peron’s first wife Evita was increasingly reimagined as a queer icon (Croizet, 2019). Not only did Peronism reimagine a queer-friendly past for itself, politicians from the center-right Radical party who had systematically ignored LGBT pleas to stop police harassment throughout the 1980s when they were the official party refashioned themselves as queer friendly in the twenty first century. In the twenty-first century, the same politicians presented the 1980s as a welcoming era for LGBT people.

As state violence against queer people was condensed in the twenty-first century to fit the hyper-memorialized 8 years of military rule between 1976 and 1983, those years were increasingly imagined as an exception to an otherwise longer progressive history of increasing tolerance toward LGBT people that characterized Argentina as a nation. In fact, the 1976–1983 dictatorship was increasingly imagined as an “other” to the nation (Guglielmucci, 2013). In other words, those dark years of military rule illustrated the opposite of what Argentina was supposed to be and had attempted to achieve throughout the rest of its history. Therefore, this imagination of the past downplayed long-term state-sanctioned hostility as it appears in alternative memories, and in doing so, it facilitated the association of Argentina with tolerance toward LGBT people. In this context, documents and testimonies about the queer past only became legible if framed as proof of a military plan to carry on a genocide against LGBT people between 1976 and 1983. In the twenty-first century, claims about the oppression of LGBT people not fitting this chronology have become illegible, and they can only exist as a mere curiosity, raising little to no interest in public opinion.

Mainstream Argentine homonationalism as it emerged in the twenty-first century resulted from the intersection of goals pursued by a variety of social groups and institutions, coalescing into a trend larger than its constitutive parts. For the LGBT movement, homonationalism facilitated the crafting of an LGBT rights revolution, while for the Argentine middle-class it offered a unique opportunity to reclaim an otherwise challenged progressive Europeanness. Homonationalism also contributed to representing the Argentine state as a human rights advocate at home and abroad. References to homonationalism have also helped politicians lure their constituencies and garner votes. In other words, a nuanced analysis should not reduce it to a political move performed by a specific political actor. Instead, in this article we understand the unfolding of homonationalism as the emergence of a hegemonic approach to the relation between sexuality and politics that became effective because it was productive for a variety of agents.

Alternative homosexual memories and the 1976–1983 military dictatorship

The twenty-first-century reception of a 1979 report about the situation of homosexuals during the dictatorship provides an example of how homonationalism led to the erasure and reframing of alternative memories. Although the document was penned by Nestor Perlongher, a highly memorialized homosexual activist, his claims about the absence of a military plan to eradicate homosexual men have sparked no recent public debate. Titled “The Repression against Homosexuals in Argentina,” the 1979 report written by Perlongher was discussed and agreed upon by activists from the Comisión por los Derechos de la Gente Gay or Commission for Gay People’s Rights (Queiroz, 2021). The report concluded that “the persecution of homosexuals” did not result from a specific targeting due to their identity but, instead, it was “one more episode in the generalized violation of human rights that characterizes Argentina under the military regime” (Perlongher, 2021(1979) This claim openly defies the hegemonic queer memory of the LGBT movement and the Argentine state as it exists in the twenty-first century. According to the report, military task forces deployed car checkpoints, surveillance of passengers in trains and subways, stop-and-frisk searches in the streets, and raided bars, confectionery stores, restaurants, and cinemas. As much as these task forces curtailed civilian freedom; however, they were “not looking exclusively for homosexuals” who were arrested only if they were in the way. In fact, the report assures that “in spite of the panic, Argentine homosexuals still dare to wander—very discreetly—by the streets,” because “at the moment, the regime has not launched big anti-homosexual publicity campaigns.” Under the military, the report insisted, the harassment of homosexuals had only intensified measures that already existed under democratic governments in the previous decades.

Despite massive efforts to retrieve documents of Argentine’s queer past during the last two decades, this 1979 report only emerged in 2021. It is also important to consider that the report surfaced thanks to the private effort of Juan Pablo Queiroz, an individual curator who runs a queer history blog. Although academic studies of LGBT issues and funding for the creation of archives boomed in Argentina during the twenty-first century, this document was only recently retrieved, and its public presence has been quite timid. This is surprising because the persecution of homosexual men during the last dictatorship generates not only academic interest but is also a popular theme in public opinion. However, the memory of long-term state violence against queer people as described by the 1979 report fails to grasp the attention of a public opinion focused on identifying the 1976–1983 dictatorship as the only moment of repression.

Multiple testimonies of elderly homosexual activists are also actively ignored by mainstream memory. For instance, Alberto Nigro, an activist in the first Argentine homosexual movement founded in the late 1960s, the Frente de Liberación Homosexual or Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH), summarized the view of homosexual men like him who experienced the dictatorship in their own flesh. He declared that “homosexuals were not abducted by the military, it was the police,” adding “I would say that it was a persecution different from that of the desaparecidos murdered in concentration camps” (Queiroz, 2021). Other FLH activists confirm this view. In 2006, Héctor Anabitarte claimed that the police found FLH materials during the dictatorship but dismissed them as irrelevant. In his view, whenever homosexual men would become desaparecidos, it was because of their activism in left-wing organizations. ⁴ Zelmar Acevedo (1985) argued that “the military was looking elsewhere.” In fact, he believed that some effeminate homosexual men who were left-wing activists were probably saved by their appearance, as the prejudiced view of the military assumed that only masculine straight men could be interested in anti-capitalist politics. ⁵ Another activist, Marcelo Benitez, assures that “the persecution [against us] was systematic, cruel, and very violent” but “they did not think about applying to us the methodology of disappearing people and killing them later” (Queiroz, 2021).

The memory of these activists about the events was consistent during the dictatorship, in its 1980s aftermath, and until today in the case of those who are still alive (Acevedo, 1985; Anabitarte, 1979, 1982; Benítez, 1984; Jáuregui, 1987; Jockl, 1984; Sebreli, 1983). Yet, these testimonies have been ignored in the twenty-first century. While the activists themselves are remembered and memorialized, the tension between their claims and mainstream queer memory do not seem to merit an open public discussion. Instead, the Argentine state and the LGBT movement have launched highly publicized archival efforts focused on state violence during the last dictatorship. Through official acts and media representations these efforts inscribe the hyper-memorialization of the 1976–1983 period on top of ignored alternative memories claiming a longer history of state violence.

Archival efforts and performative hyper-memorialization of LGBT desaparecidos

A year after the congress passed same-sex marriage with the support of the executive in 2010, a performative archival inauguration launched by a gay activist with a strong media presence sealed the twenty-first-century queer hyper-memorialization of the dictatorship. Named Archivo de la Memoria de la Diversidad Sexual (AMDS) or Memory Archive for Sexual Diversity, the new archive was created by Alex Freyre in December 2011 to document the experience of “those persecuted, assassinated, and disappeared for defending their [LGBT] identity” during the dictatorship. ⁶ Freyre was one of the gay activists who had convinced the government to support the passing of the same-sex marriage law in 2010. Together with his partner, he became famous for his media presence, and the scope of the archive he created was defined in homonationalist terms. Freyre’s inauguration words were performed in front of an audience of famous politicians and legislators and broadcasted nationwide on the government-owned TV channel 7. Interviewed about the AMDS, Ana María Careaga, who coordinates Argentine state archives on desaparecidos, emphasized the existence of a plan to eradicate sexual diversity under the 1976–1983 dictatorship. She claimed that “the genocidal apparatus persecuted those who proposed a political alternative in the struggle for sexual liberation, but they also went after [others because of their] age, skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.” ⁷

Following the model of other archives documenting the abduction of desaparecidos, the purpose of the new sexual diversity archive directed by Freyre was to produce evidence about LGBT desaparecidos for public prosecutors to pursue trials against the military perpetrators. While LGBT desaparecidos were hyper-memorialized, efforts to redress their fate through the courts received almost no attention. Ten years after its creation, however, the AMDS has not provided evidence used in a single court case. Moreover, as is the standard procedure for truth commissions in Argentina, scholars and journalists are barred from accessing the archive to preserve the safety of the victims. Given that the data allegedly produced by the AMDS has not moved through the courts, the very existence of records proving a 1976–1983 military plan to eradicate LGBT people is, for practical purposes, a well-guarded secret.

Although hundreds of trials against the military have taken place since 2006, the first judicial sentence accounting for state violence against travestis during the last dictatorship happened in April 2022. This one trial, however, has been framed by the press as proving that LGBT people were targeted within a systematic extermination plan launched by the military. ⁸ This framing relies on conflating police harassment with the torturing and abducting of desaparecidos for political reasons. Such conflation has been possible, not due to the existence of previous trials but, instead, because the AMDS and many other political and media organizations consolidated the image of the LGBT desaparecido as a focus of public attention.

By contrast, the alternative memories deployed by Nigro, Acevedo, Anabitarte, and Benitez lay outside this scope. Their stories do not fit data collection about “those persecuted, assassinated, and disappeared for defending their [LGBT] identity” during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. In fact, this definition implicitly renders 1940–1990s police harassment unworthy of archival efforts. Testimonies claiming that the motivation behind police harassment was the maintenance of public decency demanded by civil society, or the acquisition of bribes, can only be heard if they are reframed to count as references to an evil moral plan launched by 1976–1983 military task forces aiming to commit genocide against LGBT people. This is not to say that the claims made by homosexual and travesti activists testifying about police harassment are explicitly challenged because they do not fit a period or definition. The work of memory (Jelin, 2002) enabling the hegemonic narrative takes place amid a competition of performative actions, not through a scholarly discussion or public debate.

It is the constant iteration of performative memory efforts like the AMDS inauguration or the media interpretation of the Etchecolatz trial that end up reframing alternative memories and creating the conditions to hear something other than what they say. No declaration by the Argentine state or the LGBT movement has ever openly claimed that police harassment between the 1940s and today must be ignored. Nobody ever said or wrote that the abduction of LGBT people by military task forces is the only form of state-sanctioned hostility toward queer people that matters. In fact, the alternative memories of homosexual activists like those mentioned above have been preserved and curated by the very same people and institutions who hyper-memorialize LGBT desaparecidos.

Like the purloined letter of Edgar Allan Poe (1844), alternative queer memories are hidden in plain sight due to the palimpsestic overwriting of 1976–1983 LGBT desaparecidos on top of testimonies of police harassment. This overwriting renders police harassment throughout the decades illegible to a wider audience. Under the aegis of a homonationalist ideology that presents Argentine history as a teleological path toward the progressive acceptance of sexual diversity, the testimonies of travestis also face a silencing effect. While Argentine homonationalism values acceptance of homosexuality as a civilizational standard, such acceptance tends to be circumscribed to respectable cisgender individuals who demand inclusion and legal equality as citizens. Up until recently, travestis did not fit well within this framework. Only in the twenty-first century, they have achieved an ambivalent recognition. Male homosexual activists demanding inclusion during the 1980s presented themselves in the mainstream media as well-dressed articulate professionals with masculine mannerisms who cultivated a respectable image and avoided public scandal (Insausti, 2018). Such an image provoked an empathic response among some people in the audience. Travestis, however, failed to garner such empathy.

Expelled at an early age from their homes, most travestis lacked formal education (Berkins, 2015). Although many were highly articulate when presenting their grievances against the police, public opinion perceived their language, appearance, and misdemeanor in ways that worked against their claims (Butierrez, 2022). In addition to the disadvantage posed by their work as prostitutes and their racial background, most dressed provocatively to attract patrons. While respectable white middle-class homosexual men could seek acceptance in a nation self-identifying as European and progressive, travestis were associated with the very low-class and dark-skin look (Di Pietro, 2016; Filc, 2003) that the homonationalist response to the crisis of Argentine national identity sought to reject.

Homocapitalism and alternative Travesti memories

By the 1990s the gap between the acceptance of male homosexuality and the abjection of travesti identity widened even more. ⁹ The very rise of homonationalism became intertwined with another closely related trend, homocapitalism. According to Rao (2020), homocapitalism “offers a shift of argumentative register in which the language of the market is deployed to repress an unresolved moral argument about the acceptability or desirability of queerness in the nation” (Rao, 2020: 25). During neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, the language of the market acquired unprecedented importance in Argentina. The decade was characterized by an urban renewal depicted by literary critic Beatriz Sarlo (1994) as leading to the Los Angelization of Buenos Aires. Like many other Latin American cities, during the 1990s the capital of Argentina witnessed the expansion of restaurant and supermarket chains, suburbanization in gated communities, and the ascent of the consumer as a political actor superseding the citizen. Against this backdrop, respectable gay identity gained even more acceptance as a consumer niche associated to the neoliberal urban renewal (Filc, 2003). A wide array of gay and lesbian businesses emerged during the 1990s, including discos, bars, coffeehouses, karaoke spots, bookstores, cultural centers, private clubs, saunas, and so on. While consumption-driven social acceptance benefited gays and lesbians, it had the opposite effect for travestis. Gay/lesbian venues were in line with gentrification and raised neighborhood profiles and real estate value while conferring the city an imagined modern and Western façade (Cutuli and Insausti, 2022).

Meanwhile, travesti prostitutes did not enjoy the same opportunities within the rising specter of homocapitalism. Travestis were hard to integrate as a consumer niche. In fact, they became an obstacle for real estate development. For instance, in Buenos Aires travestis fled the Panamericana outer highway ring during the 1990s to escape unaccounted rampant police brutality. They began soliciting in the more centrally located Palermo neighborhood. In this new location they could stand on the sidewalks of abandoned warehouses to solicit passing cars while quickly running away to visible residential spots whenever the police showed up. Although neighbors were often hostile to travestis, the visibility of police brutality in the residential area ameliorated violence. However, Palermo was gentrifying at the time, and the presence of travesti prostitutes depreciated real estate value and challenged development projects (Di Pietro, 2016; Schwartzmann, 2009). Against this backdrop, the very same homocapitalist framework fostering the acceptance of lesbians and gays undermined the inclusion of travestis, exposing them to a coalition of neighbors and corrupt police officers who threatened their physical integrity to achieve their gentrification goals (Boy, 2015; Filc, 2003).

While presenting itself as welcoming toward queer people, homocapitalism also promoted the expulsion of travestis posing an obstacle for neighborhood gentrification. As a result, the twenty-first-century memory of travesti grievances since the 1990s remains hidden in plain view. Travesti activists who organized the resistance against police brutality at its height in the 1990s have now become integrated into the LGBT pantheon. The most salient cases are those of Lohana Berkins and Diana Sacayan, highly memorialized travesti leaders who fought against the police but are not always remembered for doing so. Their lives are remembered either vaguely as symbols of the struggle against prejudice, or more precisely in terms of their work toward the passing of the 2012 Gender Identity Law and other LGBT-rights legislation and policies. Their actions against the police have, however, failed to captivate the attention of those who remember them. This is particularly noticeable in their Wikipedia entries; while not an appropriate source for accurate biographies, they are extremely useful for exploring the construction of hegemonic memories because Wikipedia is subject to anonymous collective editing. In Berkins’ Wikipedia entry, there is no mention of conflicts with the police, even if she was constantly detained by the police to the extent of having spent a total of approximately 7 years in prison (Fernandez, 2020: 91). The entry on Sacayan includes a passing reference to the police, diffused by presenting her as a victim of the code of misconduct in force at the time in the Province of Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Sacayan’s resistance against police abuse is absent. The forgetting of travesti anti-police activism in the case of Berkins and Sacayan reveal a lack of accountability when it comes to state violence against queer people under democratic rule. Within the hegemonic queer memory framework as it currently exists, the existence of such violence after 1983 is either omitted, not imagined as plausible, or mentioned in passing without drawing further conclusions. In contrast with mainstream idealized memories of Berkins, a recent biography by anthropologist Josefina Fernández (2020) provides ample evidence of police detentions. Fernández was a close friend of Berkins and interviewed numerous travestis who knew her, but this biographical account is often ignored.

Violence during dictatorial rule is imagined as always potentially related to a deep-seated trend involving the entire political regime, while state violence under democratic rule is compartmentalized as a qualitatively different phenomenon unimaginable as a symptom of the repressive nature of a regime or state. This becomes apparent when examining the travesti testimony of Valeria del Mar Ramírez. While the biographical representations of Berkins and Sacayan after 1983 drive the focus away from violence at the hand of the state, the testimony of Valeria del Mar Ramírez captured significant media attention precisely because the focus was on state violence committed under dictatorial rule. A closer examination of her story reveals the features that render a testimony memorable. She was illegally detained in 1977 in a clandestine detention center where she shared a cell with political dissidents who were tortured and assassinated (Lewin, 2014). Ramírez survived and was convened at the 2011 AMDS inauguration to provide testimony of her experience during the dictatorship. Official institutions and the press placed this incident in the spotlight and repeated it throughout the years. Given how extensive police violence against travestis was after 1983, however, the absence of references to Ramírez’s interactions with the police in this later period is noteworthy. Highlighting the abduction in 1977, the repetition of her testimony hid the intense police persecution of travestis after 1983. Although Ramírez was interviewed numerous times, her life after the abduction was never the focus of attention. The absence of interest about her interactions with the police after 1983 shows the extent of chronological compartmentalization operating within the hegemonic memory framework.

Even when state violence during democratic rule surfaces in memory efforts, it is often reframed as evidence standing for what happened during the military regime. This temporal displacement is apparent in the media reception of the documentary Los Maricones by Daniel Tortosa. The director engaged in a tangible effort to avoid imposing his narrative over the testimonies of travestis. All interviewed travestis experienced the same arbitrary and violent police detentions under both dictatorial and democratic rule and they effectively mention numerous examples after 1983. Moreover, Tortosa openly stated that such violence did not vanish with the transition to democracy. Despite this explicit statement, when the media reviewed the documentary, it was reclassified as dealing exclusively with the dictatorship. This symbolic transposition of post-1983 testimonies into evidence of brutality under dictatorial rule stands out as emblematic of a wider unintentional tendency to overlook human rights violations under democratic rule while scrutinizing the same events when happening during a military regime (Oliva, 2018; Sgarella, 2020).

Multiple forms of symbolic displacement and condensation serve to downplay police violence against travestis during the democratic period: hyper-memorialization of violence between 1976 and 1983, sanitation of travesti activists whose incorporation in the LGBT pantheon relies on forgetting their anti-police struggles, reframing of testimonies by making post-1983 stories count as events that took place under military rule, and, as we will see in the biographical account of Ivana Tintilay, scripting travesti life stories into narratives of self-improvement. Tintilay’s testimony was featured by the famous online news service Infobae to tell a story of personal growth. While she recalled being detained by the police 96 times between 1992 and 1995, the online article mentions this issue briefly and devotes most of the attention to praising Tintilay for her current respectable life as a scholar conducting research at the National Library. Tintilay recalled one detention in a police station when she was only given stale bread and water for 30 days and had to sleep on a cold floor with no mattress and insufficient clothing. Yet, the sordid nature of this example is not used to draw conclusions about the repressive character of the police in democratic times. On the contrary, police brutality stands in the online article as a form of abjection that Tintilay successfully overcame through hard work, self-improvement, and upward mobility.

References to police harassment of travestis during the 1990s are available in the mainstream media but hidden in plain sight, as examples framed by narratives drawing attention elsewhere. Even publicly available evidence of police brutality against travestis deserves close to no consideration, as is the case with a 1998 report by Gays DC, an influential group of activists. This report denounced that beating up travestis in the police stations had become customary. ¹⁰ Sheriff Blanco, for instance, was famous for hitting travestis with a baseball bat. Blanco hit one of them so hard that he pulverized her knee bones. Policemen frequently used high water pressure hoses aimed at travestis to “calm their nerves.” In the 1990s many were tortured with electric prods that had been used earlier in clandestine detention centers during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. The evidence of 1990s state violence in this report was provided by travestis eager to tell their experiences of harassment, abduction, torture, and brutality, but the conditions for a wider audience to listen to their accounts did not exist in the 1990s and continues to be absent today. Because these examples of police brutality do not point to a plan by an evil military dictatorship, they are difficult to frame within the dominant human rights narrative.

Although less likely in the city of Buenos Aires today, where the strength of queer, feminist, and human rights organizations and nongovernmental organizations limits police brutality, violence against travestis continues to exist in the provinces and is often ignored (Malacalza, 2019; Wayar and Revista Iuris Dictio, 2019). Such violence is considered implausible by a national representation of Argentina as tolerant, opened to sexual diversity, and respectful of human rights. Like Marce Butierrez (2022) explored in a recent paper, the deaths of travestis at the hands of civilians or police is often ignored because they constitute “malas victimas” or “bad victims.” Travestis are often dismissed as victims when perceived as not being “innocent” because they trafficked drugs or were addicted to them (Cutuli, 2017; López Perea, 2018), engaged in illegal activities, solicited men in the streets, and, most important, because of their dark complexion. If perceived as darker, unsophisticated, lacking social status, and associated with the urban underground and prostitution, travestis are implicitly deemed responsible for their fate (Galligo Wetzel and Fernández, 2021). At times, the violence they suffer is tacitly narrated as inevitable and even necessary or deserved

The implicit blaming of travesti victims, however, coexists with attempts to make amends for violence against them. Reparation, however, has only been offered for cases that took place during the dictatorship. As recently argued by (Theumer et al., 2020) even after a protracted legal battle, redress has been granted to only a few travestis as monetary settlement to rectify treatment under dictatorial rule. According to the Amicus Curiae for a trial in Santa Fé, having lived as travestis under dictatorial rule sufficed as evidence to qualify for settlements. By contrast, cases of travestis suing the state for police violence committed against them during the democratic period are rare. In 2018 the judicial power in the city of Buenos Aires commissioned a report accounting for the systematic persecution of travestis by the police (Radi and Pecheny, 2018). The report lists numerous recommendations to avoid future police harassment but fails to demand an end to impunity. This is particularly noteworthy because the report’s subtitle claims to focus on “Hacer justicia” or “doing justice.” In other words, police agents break the law when they violate the human rights of travestis, the judicial power openly admits such violations in an official report, and the recommendations cannot imagine the possibility of prosecuting policemen who break the law. Meanwhile, trials against perpetrators of violence against travestis during the dictatorships draw media attention and become the focus of queer memory efforts. This is the case for instance with the above-mentioned sentencing of Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, convicted in April 2022 for brutality against travestis.

In the last decades, the Argentine state has atoned for the treatment of travestis by providing money for the creation of cooperatives to offer alternatives to prostitution, introducing hiring quotas for government jobs, and subsidizing cultural efforts and political organizations (Cutuli, 2022). Sometimes these efforts have helped the memory of state violence under democracy surface. One of the most important memorial enterprises created is the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, the first archive organized and curated by travesti and trans people who present the past in their own terms. The archive introduces an innovative approach by emphasizing agency and joy, directing attention away from victimhood, especially through the collection of thousands of images showing evidence of mutual support within travesti networks. Funded by the Argentine government and international agencies, this online memory archive shows that the Argentine state does not actively silence or repress travesti memories of victimhood after 1983 (Simoneto and Butierrez, 2022). Yet, when these memories surface, both the state and civil society ignore them. The presence of testimonies of police abuse under democracy in the Archivo de la Memoria Trans has not enabled demands like those emerging when military rule was involved. State violence under dictatorial rule led civil society to raise demands for truth commissions, trials, and reparations, but the same violence in democratic times has failed to produce the same results. The fictionalization of travesti life presented in the biographically inspired novel Las Malas by Camila Villalba Sosa (2022) presents an approach like the AMT where travestis suffer brutal physical violence at the hands of the police but also experience a life of adventure and fun. Both the imagination of travesti life in “Las Malas” and the AMT challenge to hegemonic queer memories exist in the margins when compared with the mass production of LGBT memory.

Twenty-first-century LGBT politics and hegemonic queer memory

Hegemonic queer memory in Argentina during the twenty-first century has emerged as an outcome of the successful LGBT rights revolution (Diez, 2016). The production of memory happened as a powerful cadre of LGBT professionals and politicians crafted a powerful movement taking advantage of the growing importance of human rights under the presidencies of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández (2003–2015). Political scientists (Corrales, 2015; Diez, 2016; Encarnación, 2016; Pecheny and De La Dehesa, 2010) examining this form of “crafting” emphasize the agency of skillful activists deploying effective political maneuvers in a moment propitious for the advancement of LGBT rights. When Kirchner became president in 2003, he sought to address the undermined legitimacy of the Argentine state caused by the 2001 economic crisis that had pushed half the population below the poverty line (Pucciarelli and Castellani, 2019). President Kirchner considerably improved his image in 2005 after he successfully pressured the congress to annul the 1980s legislation granting impunity to military perpetrators of state violence during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. Against this backdrop the Kirchner presidency reshaped Argentine national identity by associating the country, his (Peronist) party, and the government with respect for human rights (Barros and Morales, 2017). Taking advantage of this shift, LGBT activists crafted a rights revolution by integrating homonationalism as symbolic compensation for Argentina’s economic decline over the decades. These activists claimed that the passing of legislation demanded by the LGBT movement was necessary for any holistic approach to human rights, a view eventually embraced by the Argentine state as part of its official self-representation. While identifying Argentina as an LGBT-friendly country cemented an alliance with center-left politicians, gay and lesbian businessmen sought an alliance with center-right politicians deploying a homocapitalist agenda. They created a Lesbian and Gay chamber of commerce, promoted queer tourism to Buenos Aires, and launched efforts aligned with the gentrification of several neighborhoods.

This multifaceted approach to a variety of parties across the political spectrum through homonationalism and homocapitalism would eventually lead mainstream political parties to perceive LGBT issues as an opportunity to lure disparate constituencies (Bimbi, 2010). This political context offered a great opportunity for the LGBT movement to successfully lobby the state (Ben and Insausti, 2021). As the trials against perpetrators of state violence between 1976 and 1983 resumed after 2005, the narratives about the existence of 400 LGBT desaparecidos began to circulate widely. ¹¹ This was not the only approach within the Argentine LGBT movement in the twenty-first century, as some activists continued to remember the repressive role of the Argentine state throughout the twentieth century while rejecting an agenda exclusively focused on pursuing rights.

Final words

Images of “bad victims” were rejected by activists responsible for crafting the rights revolution, who were concerned with respectability and for whom prostitution, promiscuity, and public scandal constituted a harmful stereotyping supposedly not representative of the lives of LGBT people. The slogan deployed for the 2010 same-sex marriage law stated that “el mismo amor, los mismos derechos.” In other words: LGBT people deserved “the same rights” because they engaged “in the same [kind of] love.” Paying attention to “bad victims” under democratic rule would have undermined the efforts to present gays and lesbians as respectable citizens. In fact, the most visible lesbians and gay activists fabricated long-term partnerships with others they pretended to love for the sake of publicity to promote the same-sex marriage law, a strategy revealed to the public after the passing of the law in 2010 (Bimbi, 2010). In this context, it became difficult to remember that the police in Argentina had systematically harassed LGBT people because they were associated with public scandal. The images of respectable gay and lesbian couples occluded the memory of homosexual men who had been detained for having sex in public bathrooms or travestis who had suffered police violence because they were prostitutes.

The crafting of an LGBT rights revolution based on respectability took place as homonationalism consolidated. LGBT people were redefined as worthy citizens, but only if they fit a sanitation of their identity and if they claimed victimhood exclusively under dictatorial rule. Denouncing long-term state violence against LGBT people would have undermined the very idea of Argentina as a society evolving toward increasing tolerance of sexual diversity. As a result, alternative memories that remembered violence at the hands of the police were buried in plain sight. State violence can now be memorable when identified as part of an evil military plan, but it has been erased when referring to police harassment of homosexual men and travestis who challenged heteronormativity and were exploited by corrupt police trying to make money from pimping prostitutes. By writing this article, we hope to render existing police violence against travestis visible and encourage a reframing of memory leading to demands for the prosecution of perpetrators since 1983 as is the case with state violence committed during the last dictatorship. This reframing could help strengthen and reinvigorate the long-overdue demand for a travesti reparation law.