Thirty thousand lives missing: this was the shameful legacy of Argentina’s last dictatorship (1973-1983). When democracy was restored, the network of organisations created by the victims of state terrorism took the form of a peculiar family. The Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are some of the most well-known associations created by those directly affected by state violence. This paper, however, focuses the attention on the activism developed by the children of the disappeared, who, by the mid 1990s, founded H.I.J.O.S’ organisation (which means “children” in Spanish). Drawing upon the work of Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick and Henri Bergson, I make the case that humour worked as a form of “coming out” for the descendants of the victims, which helped them to cope with the loss of their parents, when legal justice was exempt from the political arena. Through glimpses into their rituals and ceremonies, I argue that the dark sense of humour that permeated the group contributed to reverse individual feelings of shame, eventually empowering the descendants with a new generational language to deal with loss.
During a series of interviews conducted with H.I.J.O.S.’ members, I’ve noticed that the descendants usually employed the language of the closet to articulate the feelings of shame that they had experienced during their childhood. Once inside the group, those abject feelings of injury regarding their burning backgrounds became reversed. Drawing upon a queer theoretical framework, as well as recent theorisation on affect and political emotions, I explore how the moment of joining H.I.J.O.S. emerged as a turning point within individual biographies; a significant life event that changed the ways in which the descendants conceived their own stories and those of the others. In close contact with their peers, the descendants also learned to rebuild their relations with their missing parents in a sort of reverberation from one to the other. I contend that political activism provided the children of the disappeared with a new platform for survival, which could be compared to the transition of queer subjectivities from individual shame to collective pride. Drawing on the contagious character of shame addressed by Seadwick (1993), I suggest that the children’s ‘escraches’, which involved the targeting of the military personnel at their own homes, enabled the descendants to redirect the public shame they experienced during their childhoods to a collective action against the military repressors. Furthermore, this reworking of shame was crucial to spread the militant energy beyond those directly affected by violence. Ultimately, the expansive mood inaugurated by the descendants’ activism helped to establish a public culture of mourning in which the whole society was invited to take part. To some extent, I contend, humour was children’s biggest rebellion. It built a non-normative position to resist violence while reinventing a politics of shame for the new generations.