PEDAGOGÍAS GRISES. SUBJETIVIDADES, MILITANCIAS Y SADISMOS EN LA PRODUCCIÓN CULTURAL DEL CONO SUR

This dissertation explores how radical militancy and State terrorism in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the sixties and seventies are represented in recent fictional and nonfictional films, novels, and testimonies. These texts suggest a revision from the perspective of a younger generation (my own) of the standard representation of political violence in this period as involving a strict logic of victims and victimizers. Central in my account is the idea of “gray zone,” coined by Primo Levi, who describes the concentration camp as a site wherein victims and victimizers sometimes interchange roles. I argue that similar processes of subjective transformation occurred among the myriad actors involved in the “Dirty Wars”. These processes are what I call, building on Levi’s concept, gray pedagogies. The first chapter, centers on the question of revolutionary militancy. I look at the “Thou shalt not kill” (No Mátaras) debate in Argentina about revolutionary violence and the documentary The Hour of Furnaces (1968) by Pino Solanas and Osvaldo Gettino. In the second chapter I analyze a group of texts centered in the idea of militant women as traitors because of their affective identification with their torturers, through a process of what I call tyrannical sexual pedagogies, specifically La vida doble (2010) by the Chilean Arturo Fontaine, El Infierno (1993) by Luz Arce, and Luisa Valenzuela’s novel La travesía (2001). The third chapter highlights the ways in which texts by two younger Arentine artists -- the novel Los Topos (2008), by Félix Bruzzone and Albertina Carri’s docu-film Los Rubios (2003)--address the interactions between State terror and revolutionary militancy, emphasizing issues like sexual diversity, racial questions, class or generational differences. This perspective proposes an ironic “queer pedagogy” as an alternative to the standard testimonial representation of victimization and trauma. The last chapter deals with how the societies involved in the periods of state terror “learn” in the process to be a willing, semi-sadistic spectator. My focus here is on the novels París (1980) by the Uruguayan Mario Levrero and Historia del llanto (2007) by Alan Pauls