The Closet, the Terror, the Archive: Confession and Testimony in LGBT Memories of Argentine State Terrorism

This essay aims to make a contribution to the study of how LGBT people entered the postdictatorship memory regime (Crenzel 2008), a topic still neglected in the study of the transition to democracy in the Southern Cone. By mixing up different discursive practices stemming both from LGBT transnational political practices (e.g. public self-outing) and from the post-conflict and transitional culture (e.g. oral interviews with witnesses and the public display of past atrocities), how do LGBT people construct the memory of State Terrorism, join the human rights movement and reposition consequently their subjectivities? I will analyse a specific textual object: a section of the Archivo de Historia Oral (oral history archive) in Córdoba, devoted to the memory of the sexual repression. What I argue in the analysis is that the memory archive is a complex enunciative device that, through the oral history interview as a genre and discursive practice, allows the interviewee to reconfigure their own subjectivity. Passing from the police interrogation and the request for truth in confession during the dictatorship to the narration of their lives and the demand for testimony, the interview as an “interrogation of the subject” resignifies the very act of “coming out of the closet” and of disclosing the truth about the self (“I am gay”/ “I was born as a male”) and on State Terrorism (“I was imprisoned”/ “I was abused and mistreated”).