Testimonial Diffractions: Cultural and Legal Responses to Gender-Based Violence in Argentina (Illuminations) - Softcover

Forcinito, Ana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082296810X ISBN 13: 9780822968108

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

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© 2026 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. Not for distribution. Provided by the publisher University of Pittsburgh Press for review copy purposes only.

From the Introduction

This book examines the ongoing struggle against gender-based violence in Argentina in recent decades, exploring the intersection of legal, cultural, and artistic scenarios and drawing on feminist, transfeminist, and transgender theories. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book explores how testimonial voices have played a pivotal role in the ongoing struggle for justice, memory, and gender rights. Argentina has been often regarded as a global leader in human rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and, more recently, feminist movements; yet the analysis of legal and judicial responses to gender-based violence after the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), in contrast to cultural and artistic productions, reveals a slow and at times stagnant process, especially when examined through feminist and transgender perspectives. This book explores these delayed advancements while highlighting the crucial role of testimonial voices―legal, literary, and artistic―in shaping them. Primarily situated in the last decade (2010–2023) of activism and legal reforms, this book surveys the interplay between legal approaches to gender-based violence and testimonial practices in literature, film, and archival and curatorial projects. The testimonial component of the voices I analyze in this book is what most evidently brings together these two paths: the legal testimony that denounces gender-based violence, on one side, and testimonial expressions from literature, photography, and cinema, on the other.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082296810X
• ISBN 13: 9780822968108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292