Acting across violence: H.I.J.O.S., practices of trans-action, and biopoetics in post-dictatorship Argentina

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s in Argentina, H.I.J.O.S., an activist group formed by the children of those disappeared during the military dictatorship of 1976–83, staged public protests across the country. These demonstrations, known as escraches, served to reveal and denounce the perpetrators of past crimes that were still living among them. Their performances filled the city streets, challenging the silence of the public and the state in relation to the past through acts that this article calls co-embodied practices of trans-action. Practices of trans-action traverse and transect space and populations through the movement of bodies across swaths of territory, using their affective power to exemplify Arendtian forms of political action. This article analyzes the work of H.I.J.O.S. as a co-embodied practice of trans-action that served to process past state-sponsored violence, particularly the affective and emotional force of that violence, by providing an opportunity to rewrite what it means to be a normative body in the public sphere. These acts of crossing work to lay new claim to public space by undoing the power of state terror not only to atomize bodies but also to paralyze them. Finally, if Foucault’s biopolitics work to discipline and restrict bodies in various ways, this article uses Argentinean poet Julián Axat’s concept of biopoetics to describe how these acts of crossing space can work to reorient relations of power through “poetic” uses of the body.