The ESMA: a producer of perverse sociability

ANA GUGLIELMUCCI

Valencia

Conferencia; Reliving, Narrating, Showing, and Repairing the Mass Crimes through Space. Fifth International Conference on Perpetrators of Mass Violence; 2023

Universidad de Valencia y Reprecri

The description of CCD ESMA social dynamic shows how the perverse logic of terror spread outside the confines of the clandestine center, affecting the detainees-disappeared in their subjectivity, their perceptions of gender, masculinity or femininity, the family and solidarity networks of which they were part, and the political-militant project they embodied. At the same time, it allows me to show how ESMA was also a scenario where the heteropatriarchal and violent structures that preexisted and persist were expressed in an extreme way. The magnitude of a political-military and cultural defeat was inscribed In the women's bodies. As Ana Longoni (2007) points out, the military sought to make the children and women of the defeated their own through sexual and reproductive abuse. At the same time, they wanted to impose a single code of femininity. However, this also generated various forms of resistance.