Framing Plaza de Mayo: Photographs of protest

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Notes

1. Here I refer to Freud's seminal essay (1919/1955) on the uncanny in which he blurs the word heimlich and unheimlich, which suggests the ambivalence of the home and the familiar with the unhomely and the unfamiliar. Thus it is the home, or (un)heimlich in Freud's usage, which is the uncanny space open to possibilities and subversion.

2. For more information on a feminist critique of Habermas and the public sphere see Nancy Fraser (2002).

3. In 1955, military planes, in a failed coup, bombed the square and killed several hundred civilians (Wilson 1999). However, the local newspaper reports of the deaths, in La Nación, suggested an estimated 351 deaths and 600 wounded (Podalsky 2004, 46). Laura Podalsky states that ‘pro-government supporters waiting there for military planes to fly overhead in honor of Independence hero San Martin … and to show their support to Perón were surprised and horrified as they became targets of a military attack’ (45). In more recent occurrences at least seven protesters were shot in 2001 at the time of the Argentine economic crisis, which was the ‘worst economic, political, and social crisis in its recent history’ (Argentina World Report 2003; Azul 2001).