Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina

Abstract

On 24 March 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup d’état and established dictatorship. To eliminate radical left activists, the armed forces perpetrated mass civilian murder until democratic transition in 1983. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo emerged, protesting their children’s disappearance by mobilizing portraiture to make visible familial rupture and indict the state. This article examines the archival exhibit, Esta se fue, a esta la mataron, esta murió (2017), which displayed trans women’s vernacular photographs and family albums from the 1970s–1980s, the same years as dictatorship. Analyzing the exhibit’s curatorial choices and the photographs’ material and haptic qualities, this article reads the exhibit alongside the Mothers’ iconic activist visual culture and national narratives of family loss. In doing so, the author suggests the exhibit renders trans sociality familial and familiar to a national viewing public, thereby reinterpreting Argentine history by installing trans subjects as proper subjects of national mourning.