Afterword

Summary

While presenting my work at a conference in Cambridge at the beginning of 2012, I was accused of being an ‘infiltrator’. ‘Who are you to challenge the experiences of those who suffered if there were no victims in your family?’ The accusation came from a daughter of disappeared parents who was in the audience. The young woman went on to say that my intervention reminded her of a short story written by Julio Cortázar in which an old lady spends her days attending vigils she has not been invited to. ‘All the more in Argentina's case,’ my accuser said, ‘when there are no bodies to be mourned.’ To some extent, she was right. This book proposes a non-normative reading of Argentina's post-dictatorship to explore the unconventional forms of intimacy that have emerged in the aftermath of violence. In this search, my perspective has always been that of a ‘deviant daughter’ with no credentials whatsoever; an ‘infiltrator’ of the bloodline narratives of grief.

My argument does not mean to be a mere justification for ‘infiltrators’ to engage with painful and complex processes they have not directly experienced. After all, we are all strangers to our ‘objects’ and somehow always de-centred by them. Yet since that conference in 2012, the process of circulation and dissemination of Argentina's experience of loss has not stopped countersigning itself. To some extent, scripts have changed. Nowadays there are more and more ‘infiltrators’.