From different fields and perspectives, both local and international scholars such us Diana Taylor, Elizabeth Jelin, Judith Filc and Ana Longoni, among others, have called attention to the familial inscription of the process of loss in Argentina's post-dictatorship. By iterating a misleading overlap between truth and lineage, most of these studies ultimately stage a false equation between the universal abstraction of human rights and the particular position of those ‘directly affected’ by violence. As Jelin argues, ‘truth came to be equated with testimony of those “directly affected” first and foremost in the voices of blood relatives of the “disappeared”’. This particular entanglement between kinship ties and groups of victims has characterised the human rights field in Argentina, explaining why normative discourses of memory have been mainly processed as a family issue. I argue that this biological restriction has disbarred the responses of all those who had not been touched by violence. In order to contest the biological normativity that marked Argentina's post-dictatorial scene, it is necessary to explore first how it was constituted.

In the wake of loss, a ‘wounded family’ has been conformed in Argentina. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres), the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas), the Relatives (Familiares), the Children (H.I.J.O.S.) and the Siblings (Herman@s) of the ‘disappeared’ have evoked their biological ties to the missing to forge their claims for justice. Biological kinship has been the motor of their political activism.