Abstract
This article forms part of an emerging body of scholarship on the sex/gender politics of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, turning specific attention to Argentine trans and travesti politics and rights claims as these articulate with legacies of authoritarianism. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup d’état and established a dictatorship, perpetrating mass civilian murder until democratic transition in 1983. Drawing on state intelligence archive surveillance documents, the artist-activist intervention Campaña DESAPARECER, and travesti and transgender testimony, this article argues that the enduring social and political legacies of interwar fascism not only persisted into the years of dictatorship, but that they also continue to animate and mediate post-dictatorship transgender politics. That is, in democracy, the enduring afterlife of fascism creates conditions of possibility for activists to mobilize the language of anti-fascism and shared memories of fascist state violence in the service of contemporary transgender rights claims. Such rights claims reveal illiberal state violence’s deadly imbrications with the politics of sex and gender during dictatorship and, at the same time, challenge present-day liberal narratives that relegate state violence to a distant illiberal past.
