Ana Forcinito explores how testimonial voices have played a pivotal role in the fight for justice, memory, and gender rights. Through the concept of diffraction, she examines how these voices move through and reshape barriers to construct sonic spaces that connect bodies and create spaces for listening. While Argentina is sometimes regarded as a global leader in human rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and feminist movements, legal and judicial responses to gender-based violence following the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) were slow to materialize. This book explores these delayed advancements while highlighting the role of testimonial voices in shaping them. Testimonial expressions outside the legal scenario denounce violence and explore the edges of memory and the difficulties of narrating violent events and their aftermaths while exposing how gender-based violence is entangled with other expressions of violence.
About the Author :
Ana Forcinito is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of four books, including Intermittences: Memory, Justice, and the Poetics of the Visible, and the executive editor of Hispanic Issues.
Review :
Ana Forcinito is an exceptional literary critic and feminist theorist and an articulate human rights scholar of remarkable erudition and elegance whose previous books have illuminated testimonial discourse in Latin America. In this timely volume focused on Argentina, she brings to English-language readers landmark court cases of femicide, travesticide, and transfemicide. Forcinito analyzes feminist, travesti, and trans interventions and offers a superb reading of the Ni Una Menosmovement, rendering gender-based violence not only visible, but audible.
A thorough review of the impact of the diffraction of the voice as embodied affect: in testimonials offered in legal and judicial proceedings involving state gender-based violence, femicide, travesticide, and transfemicide; in cultural production foreshadowing paradigm shifts; and in neo-feminist public and political entanglements of nomadic and multiple bodies struggling for human rights—a tour de force.
Ana Forcinito has written an extraordinary book—a book whose resonances are incalculable. In it, she explores gender-based violence and the ensuing feminist and transfeminist struggles in Argentina in recent years, without losing sight of the testimonial dimension—one that captures not only the accounts of victims but also the resonance of the voice and the constitution of a sonic space in which différance itself manifests as diffraction. It is impossible not to listen to its urgency with both terror and fascination.
