A suspended time. Everyday Life and becoming feminist of Argentine women exiled during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983)

Abstract

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, numerous political organizations emerged in Argentina that openly questioned the capitalist social order and put into practice various strategies to generate an alternative to that social order. In these organizations, the participation of women was very relevant, both because of the number of militants and the level of hierarchy reached by some of them. Although their political organizations had no claims related to the modification of hierarchical gender relations, the militant women questioned, in practice, the place assigned to them by the patriarchal society (Oberti, 2015). As we can see in the testimonies compiled for this work, the daily life of exiled argentine women was strongly shaken by issues related to gender. On the other hand, we will see that, in some cases, in exile there was an approach to feminist theories and political perspectives, once their organizations had been fiercely repressed and disarticulated. The disappearance or ruptures of couples, motherhood, among others, were very deep “feminine” experiences of life and in front of which many had to position themselves, for the first time, in conditions of exile. This work aims to account for this trajectory from the analysis of oral testimonies of Argentine women who were exiled.