Political prisoners in Rawson penitentiary: a treatment for Argentine desubjectification (1970-1980)

• Autor(a) principal: D´Antonio, Débora Carina
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anos 90 (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/anos90/article/view/29304
• topic: Presos políticos; Represión; Desubjetivación; Desmasculinización; presos politicos; represión y género; Political prisoners; Repression; Desubjectification; Demasculinization

Rawson Penitentiary, located in the province of Chubut, Patagonia, developed as a unique prison facility within the penitentiary network, were political prisoners were interned during the dictatorships of the sixties and seventies. The technology of discipline applied in Rawson was based on a variety of torments deliberately anti-constitutional and alien to the regulatory framework of the Argentine penitentiary system. From a gender perspective, this article argues that although the explicit goal of the military regime in breaking prisoners’ subjectivity was their ideological and political obliteration, desubjectification was carried out in terms of a demasculinizing gendered logic that contradicted the public rhetoric of masculinity of the military and the penitentiary officials. This reveals the inconsistency between their public, family-centered gender discourse and their disciplining practices in private spaces of internment.