Contenu du sommaire : Femmes et militantisme politique contre les dictatures en Amérique latine

The 10th of March 1952 military coup d'Etat lead by Colonel Fulgencio Batista put an end to the democratic period that started up when the Cuban Constitution of 1940 was ratified. From that moment on, the opposition to the Batista's government evolved from pacific demonstration to urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare until the insurrectional movement managed to oust him in January 1959. Aside from the studies published by Sergio López and Francisco Pividal, or the testimonies given by Luis Buch, many aspects of the activities that were carried out by those clubs supporting the Cuban insurrection between 1955 and 1959 are still mainly unknown. This paper is based on Latin-American and American papers, as well as personal archives from Havana and Miami. By following the aforementioned researches, this article tries to define the role that Cuban women performed in this external groups and sections. Concretely, It will be examined the clubs and women activists in México, United States, Chile and Argentina.

Eleonora Menicucci and Angela Arruda follow trajectories committed with the creation of new methods of subjectification and a more philogynistic world. Arrested and tortured, Eleonora Menicucci had previous contact with the feminist movement in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil; leaving for the city of João Pessoa, Brazil; where she soon helped to found the Feminist Group Woman Maria, the first in the state. Angela Arruda, exiled in France, continued her militancy in left-wing organizations, got involved in the French feminist movement and acquired alternative lifestyle habits. She returned to Brazil in 1982, helping to found the Women's Group of Campina Grande/PB and inspiring the later Group Roots. Through these trajectories that link the resistance against the dictatorship to the strength of feminism, we intend to interlace threads of the history of resistance against the military dictatorship and against patriarchal and misogynistic structures, listing the emergence of the feminist movement in the state of Paraíba and in Brazil.

Women's testimonies regarding Uruguayan's recent history began broadcasted much later than men's testimony. The hegemonic memory has been masculine. In this article we analyze the letters addressed to their family by two woman political prisoners, between 1973 and 1979. More particularly, we study their autobiographic and emotional content, the diverse type of memories present in them and the form in which the letters were transmitted. These letters were published in different moments and places. The ones from Flavia Schilling were released in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1978 and 1980 during a political campaign toward her liberation. Those from Susana Pacific were published in Montevideo in 2015, after her dead, in order to disclose her life and actions to her daughters and the rest of the Uruguayan society. Both correspondences show some common characteristics, such as the description of their everyday life, the support their received from their prison- mates during critical moments, and the communicating of their experiences through feelings and senses, which often stimulate the reader's participation on their story. A distinct issue is that they are letters of pain during critical historic moments. We perceive that both women wrote in close contact with their prison- mates, thus generating a collective voice we intend to rescue.

The article aims to analyze the documentary Em busca de Iara (2014), directed by Flávio Frederico. The film aims to reconstruct the trajectory of political activist Iara Iavelberg, whose narrative is led by Mariana Pamplona, niece of Iara and responsible for the script, production and co-direction of this work. However, the focus of the documentary is the dismantling of the official version of the dictatorship, which attributed suicide to Iara's death in 1971. Thus, in the investigative urge to prove that Iara Iavelberg was murdered by repression, the documentary relegates a secondary plan his political militancy during the dictatorship. The central argument is that in the documentary the guerrilla Iara remains recognized for her beauty and for being the lover of former army captain Carlos Lamarca and not for her political activities, which contributes little to the discussion of the role of women militancy in organizations the left.

Women have historically occupied places of resistance against authoritarian regimes, such as the dictatorships experienced in Brazil and Argentina in the 20th century. In such periods, the military personnel responsible for persecuting, torturing and murdering government opposition perpetrated against women forms of violence, which sought not only to destroy political dissent, but also to conform them to socially defined gender roles. In the context of “re-democratization” in post-dictatorial regimens, a transitional justice that is silent regarding the sexual and gender violence perpetrated by regimen agents contributes to a perpetuation of sexist and patriarchal conceptions even within the newly established democratic rule of law. The present paper seeks to compare how the living experiences of Brazilian and Argentinean women during the military dictatorships and their political engagement in the moment of the transition of regimes reflected positive or negatively in the consolidation of women's rights in new democracies.

In this present work, we will analyze the experience lived by militant women in the clandestine confinement centres during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). From a gender perspective, we will investigate the characteristics of female subjectivity forged in confinement places. These women suffered, besides torture, sexual violence. This violence has had the purpose of disciplining, feminizing and setting the militants, again, in the role of gender from which they had moved away to have access to other experiences such as the militancy of the seventies. With the reinforcement of the dictatorship with a patriarchal mandate, we consider that masculinity and femininity were redefined in those confined places. Masculinity was represented by the absolute power of tortures over the bodies of passive victims. Femininity was associated with passivity: bodies (both women and men) subjugated to impotent, humiliating and dependent attitudes. The stories about crimes against integrity reported during the trials begin to be enabled today, due to in the decade of the eighties the violations were not visible in the judgments. They are the stories that make the public memory of the recent past and whose visualizations contribute to enrich it.

This study aimed to understand the socialization dynamics and maternal support for the political militancy trajectory of the people that protested against the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). For this purpose, nineteen semi-structured interviews were performed with former militants and their families. Based on the content analysis two thematic categories were defined: 1) Moral-political-ideological education; and 2) Person of support. The personal and common memories of those interviewed showed the mother as the main figure of help and support to the political militancy trajectory, and as an essential component for the moral-political-ideological education. The maternal influence reflected on the political views and actions of the next generation, fostering new possibilities and expanding the female participation in the public sector, through the participation of mothers and relatives of amnesty and Human Rights movements. Therefore, the research of these experiences revealed facets that collaborated to the construction of new versions that defines the historical memory of that period.

This paper discusses part of the regarding interviews carried out in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco, within the research “ Recognition and memories of the ‘years of lead': the reports from families of missing political activists and political prisioners during the military dictatoryship in Belo Horizonte, Recife, Brasília e Vitória”. In this data selection that is exposed here, there was the need to focus on understanding the impact of militancy against the military dictatorship in the family dynamics and in women and motherhood concepts. Nineteen interviews were accomplished and two were chosen as they highlighted the history of women in search of their children. The content analysis of those interviews led to the construction of two themed axes interrelated. In the first, the changes in social roles were studied, and, in the second, the occupation of the public space by the women/mothers. The impact that the military dictatorship had in the family dynamics was observed from the interviews setting up the role of the women within the family and the occupation of public space. As long as mothers of dead and/or missing militants displayed their traditional protecting role of their offspring, new ways to understand the women and motherhood were emerging and those women were gradually participating more in public life by exercising a political role and by modifying their position as woman and mother in society.

The article deals with the militancy of women, in the city of Osasco, during the civil-military dictatorship. Between 2009 and 2012, women were interviewed, who worked between the guerrilla and the domestic space. Without political involvement in student or union movement and without militancy in the guerrilla, told how the prisons of their loved ones affected their lives and domestic space. Moved by affection, by the will to defend the lives of friends and family, prisoners and tortured, they have developed innovative forms to achieve their goals, from defending their homes, hiding guerrilla material and evidence, visiting prisoners and ensuring communication between them and their families. They acted in the fight for the amnesty, too. Moved by passion, the interviewees demonstrated that militancy can be subversive in many ways, including using moral stigmas around women's representations to create practices of resistance.