From Nunca más tu Ni una menos: Testimony and Fiction in Contemporary Argentine Narrative

Abstract

The expressions Nunca más and Ni una menos (“Never again” and “Not one woman less”) condense, each in turn, two important moments in Argentine contemporary culture. They crystallize the collective challenge that civil society has raised against the state repression deployed during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), first, and then against the multiplication of gender-based crimes against women. The phrase Nunca más emerges in the democratic transition of the 1980s: it was the title of the report on the dictatorial repression that the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, created by the then President Raúl Alfonsín, drew up on the basis of hundreds of testimonies from survivors and relatives of victims of forced disappearance (Crenzel 2016, 50). The process of producing memory, truth, and justice about the dictatorship’s past, which became central to the public agenda in those years, saw advances and setbacks in the following decades, crossed by multiple social and political disputes, and with the undoubted protagonism of the organizations of victims’ relatives and the human rights movement (Crenzel 2016). On the other hand, Ni una menos has recently emerged, as the manifestation of the rejection of serial femicides, promoted in 2015 by a collective of journalists, writers, and artists, accompanied by an entire movement of women that has since burst onto the public scene. The slogan that complements that collective clamour, “Vivas y libres nos queremos” (“We want us alive and free”), synthesizes the notion of femicide as a particularly brutal manifestation of a much broader plot of violence and inequalities, embedded in the roots of the patriarchal system, and which reproduction the feminist movement seeks to question (Gago 2019, 21).