"De två sjalarna"- En analys av sjalen som politiskt verktyg i Argentina

Sammanfattning: This study examines the use of the handkerchief and its political meaning in an Argentinean context. The objects of study are the white handkerchief that characterizes the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and the green one used by the “Marea Verde” movement. The political significance of the handkerchief is mapped through a discourse analysis and based on discourse theory, it is analyzed whether and how the handkerchief can be understood as a tool for discursive resistance and/ or as a tool for memory(re)construction. The study concludes that the white handkerchief, by challenging both the former military regime's discourse of history and, after the dissolution of the dictatorship, the state's discourse of impunity, can be interpreted as a discursive tool for resistance. The green handkerchief can also be understood as such a tool, since it challenges the discourse expressed by advocates of abortion criminalization. The white handkerchief can also be interpretated as a tool for memory(re)construction. The green handkerchief can, by an intertextual interpretation, be understood to reproduce the discourses that the white handkerchief articulates. Thus, the green handkerchief reconstructs the memory of the military dictatorship and the disappeared as victims of state terrorism.