From Silence to Radical Politics: Ethics, Affect and Becoming-disobedient

This article seeks to map out the notion of disobedience as it is conceptualised and practiced by the recently formed Argentine collective “Historias Desobedientes. Hijas, hijos y familiares de genocidas por la memoria, la verdad y la justicia” and its eponymous Chilean counterpart. To do so, it explores the published writings and artistic expressions of some of the collective’s members, as well as citing recent ethnographic work with some of the women who have publicly broken this “family mandate” by openly condemning their own fathers’ crimes against humanity. The analysis aims to better understand the complex interactions between ethics, affect and politics in these disobedient becomings. The article takes a comparative, transnational approach. By exploring dialogues that have been opened up between the Argentine collective and disobedient women located in Chile and Germany respectively, it asks what has enabled the emergence of these new public actors within the local sphere of human rights activism decades after the dictatorships ended? It considers not only how the Historias Desobedientes have been shaped by local human rights struggles, but also the ways in which they offer their own contours to the increasingly intersectional and transnational agenda. Particular attention is paid to the seminal influence of contemporary, intersectional feminism in articulating this specific praxis of disobedience as a non-violent challenge, not only to the resurgent discourses of reconciliation, impunity and/or denial, but furthermore to the long-embedded patriarchal and capitalist structures underpinning them.