Diana Taylor's lecture about torture in Argentina evoked painful images of horror and provoked grave and complicated responses from an audience that had assembled in the Wren Room of Sanborn House yesterday.
The lecture, titled "Writing as Torture and Torture as Writing," related sexualized torture during the 1970s and 1980s under the rule of military juntas to Argentine national myths and fantasies.
Taylor, a professor of Spanish, Portuguese and comparative literature, worked from the premise that the torture was a multi-leveled writing of a national drama, and analyzed her own position as writer of such a subject.
"Who has the right or authority to write about torture?" she asked, responding to critics who had called her a "Yankee feminist" and a "fascist," for objecting to certain artistic representations of the disappearance, torture, and murder of at least 30,000 Argentines between 1976 and 1983.
Her objections were grounded in the notion that some representations of these horrors attempt to restore a positive national identity through dubious and detrimental symbolism.
The thrust of Taylor's lecture described how the military torturers constructed a gendered national view, with themselves as masculine nation-builders and the masses as feminized and inert. The sexualized torture of the disappeared Argentines, about one-third of whom were female, followed this pattern, and the torturers' invasion techniques, which stood as a metaphor for sexual events, feminized their victims.
Taylor read aloud a survivor's personal recollection that stunned and moved the audience with its descriptions of the force-feeding of electrodes. This torture, Taylor said, resembled writing in that both the literal body of its victims and the body politic were inscribed into a master narrative.
The torture also functioned as a literal inscription on the body of the torturers' message. Although two-thirds of the tortured were male, in the national drama it was the metaphoric female body that had to be eliminated or changed, Taylor said.
Currently Argentina appears to be struggling to order these atrocities in its national consciousness. According to Taylor, no definitive consensus yet exists that such torture actually occurred, and the creation of alternative scenarios to mass torture have hampered efforts to locate "the disappeared" and punish those responsible.
Taylor calls this "percepticide," explaining that the Argentines' "not-seeing" the atrocities ensured their well-being. Fundamentally, the torture silenced almost an entire population.
Taylor closed her lecture with a political reminder. "As U.S. taxpayers, we fund the training of Panamanian torturers through U.S. military programs," she said.
The author justified her authority to write about torture on the moral basis that spectatorship may involve complicity.
"How can I unknow what I know?" she asked, and after her lecture, a new group of witnesses asked this question of themselves and pondered the ramifications.
