A glow of stars. The configuration of an abject memory in Marta Dillon's Vivir con virus and Aparecida

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the analysis of two books by Marta Dillon, Vivir con Virus (published in 2004 and compiling the columns she wrote for Página/12 from 1995 to 2003) and Aparecida (2015). We suggest that Dillon's poetics constructs an abject memory, on the one hand, because it narrates the experience of illness by tracing relations between the memory of the last dictatorship and the dreams of extermination (Giorgi), that is, the bio-political use of the HIV-AIDS virus. And, on the other hand, because it explores the interconnections between memories of the recent past and sex-gender dissidence. This is why it exceeds the discursive clichés of the second generation of HIJOS (children of the disappeared), and configures an anomalous memory that is composed as a politics of the intimate, a pedagogy of motherhood and a celebration of the contact of bodies.