Lindsay Smith, Northwestern University- "Identifying Democracy: Citizenship, DNA, and Identity in post-dictatorship Argentina"
Northwestern University
"Identifying Democracy: Citizenship, DNA, and Identity in post-dictatorship Argentina"
Abstract: In 1984, eight-year-old Paula Logares was called into a judge’s chambers and told that her grandmother had been searching for her. The judge explained that a new blood test had shown that the man and woman she lived with were not her parents. Her parents had been disappeared and now, using just her blood and that of her grandparents, scientists had been able to connect her to her family. Paula, thus, became the first “stolen” child in Argentina to be identified via a new technology using markers in the blood. It was a forensic first in Argentina and the world; the blood test along with the newly created statistical system called the Index of Grandpaternity, allowed for a child to be reliably identified by comparing markers in her blood to that of her grandparents, in the absence of either living parent. Scientists and activist groups in Argentina heralded the discovery as an example of genetic science in the service of human rights. They suggested that genetics, which for so long had been associated with eugenics and genocide, had now been redeemed as a science for the public good. In the last 25 years, this incipient forensic science, so-heralded in the eighties in the global south, has become a central tool of good governance the world round. From routine crime-fighting to international criminal tribunals, forensic DNA increasingly plays a crucial role in attempts to reckon with crimes of the body. As one kind of origin story for forensic DNA, Argentine human rights science provides an invaluable site of analysis for better understanding the relationship between forensics and publics. Drawing on eighteen-months of fieldwork with Argentine scientists, human rights workers, families, and identified young adults, this paper will explore the coproduction of an imagined post-conflict, ordered public and DNA as a forensic science in Argentina. Exploring the inextricable link between the public good and good publics, I suggest that forensic science increasingly emerges not only as powerful disciplinary site of biocitizenship, but also as a potential space to reimagine the social contract between the body, the public, and the state.
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