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Andrea Noble

we may not be able to put myself/ourselves in the place of the relatives of thedisappeared; but perhaps I/we can imagine that place relationally. It is, to invokeButler, in our affiliation with the meaning of the tie, the bond, the alliance – anact of recognition that takes place without the collapse of difference betweenus and them – that we have a role to play in the global drama of human rightsviolations.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to David Campbell, Claire Lindsay, Jason Wilson and Ed Welch forcommenting on versions of this essay. I would especially like to thank AlexiaRichardson for bringing the Tarnopolsky photograph to my attention.

Notes

1 Taken in the offices of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the photo opportunity took placeto mark the successful culmination of a seven-year legal battle in which Tarnopolskysought moral and economic damages from Massera for the suffering caused by the forceddisappearance and murder of his family members. As the accompanying text reports,Tarnopolsky donated the 210 thousand pesos of restitution money to the Abuelas dePlaza de Mayo. See O’Connell (2005) for a discussion of such legal actions in the sphereof human rights activism. The image can be viewed in colour in its original context at:http://www.clarin.com/diario/2004/08/24/elpais/p-01401.htm (accessed 3 October2007).2 For an extended discussion of photographic icons in US public culture, see Harimanand Lucaites (2007: 27, italics in the original), where they define photo-journalisticicons as ‘those photographic images appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widelyrecognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events,activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media,genres, or topics ’. The photographs discussed by Hariman and Lucaites are single imagessuch as Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ and their concern is with US liberal democ-racy. The images that are the subject of this essay are of a different order that I woulddefine as iconic gestures and they arise in contexts in which there is precisely a demo-cratic deficit. Nevertheless, Hariman and Lucaites’s approach to photographic icons,with its emphasis on the performative power of iconic photographs, their high level ofrecognizability and their activation of strong emotional response, is equally relevant fora consideration of the iconic photographic gesture.3 The literature on Argentine state terrorism and the Madres is vast. See, for example,Arditti (1999); Feitlowitz (1998); Guzmán Bouvard (1994); Robben (2005). See also theMadres’ official website: <http://www.madres.org/>.4 See Avilés (2004) for a report on the Mexican escrache . For more on the escrache as anArgentine phenomenon, see Kaiser (2002). Mexico, for so long characterized by polit-ical stability and quiescence engendered by the 71-year rule of the single party of state,the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), more recently initiated investigationsinto what, after its Southern Cone counterparts, has come to be termed its own guerrasucia or ‘dirty war’. See Scherer and Monsiváis (2002, 2004).5 I am indebted to Richardson (2008) for material in this section.6 ‘En el primer caso […] se trata de un sujeto normado por la ley que lo individualizaaíslando su identidad, separándola de su contexto de relaciones cotidianas para colocar