The Foundation of a New Issue: Gender, Human Rights and Memory

Abstract

I propose to trace the conceptual and historical background of the emergence of the concern for human rights, social memory and gender in the social sciences in Latin America. The search, that will take us from the mid-twentieth century until the turn of the century, has the objective of showing that the developments of these fields were not independent of each other; they took place in an interrelated manner, and implied a paradigmatic change that challenged the prevailing perspectives in the social sciences of the region. Furthermore, their origins were not predominantly a process internal to the academic field, but a process guided by social and political struggles. The three share the fact of being interdisciplinary fields, and the three involve institutional, symbolic and subjective dimensions. This genealogy has a clear autobiographical reference, since it constituted my own intellectual trajectory. I choose to present it as a counterpoint of ideas and paradigms rather than an autobiographical text. It could have been organized around names and networks of colleagues, meetings and debates, and the feelings and anxieties that were present in each moment of the story. No doubt, the autobiographical element is present. Should it be made visible and explicit? Or should it be left hidden behind the cover of scientificity and objectivity? The hypothesis of the linkage between studies of memories and a gender perspective, however, goes beyond the fact that they are intermeshed in the biography of a person.