Friday March  1st, 12pm, History Conference Room 529

Janey Fellow Emmanuel Guerisoli presented his most recent work based on the 2012/2013 Janey Summer Fellowship he was awarded. See title and abstract below:

Emmanuel Guerisoli: Targeting Women: Gendered Torture and Rape during Argentina’s Dictatorship

The paper discusses the particular ways in which women were interpellated as potential enemies according to the Military Junta. Based on interviews conducted with female survivors and archival research, I argue that torture in the case of women was exercised and ritualized in a gendered way. Rape in particular was systematically used as a torture weapon and was symbolically constructed as a cleansing method. In this paper an overview of the Messianic ideology of the regime is given and it is described how this ideology was infused into the methodology of torture and repression.