Ser o no ser veterana: Disputas por la nominación en torno a la guerra de malvinas

In this paper I aim at exploring a series of discourses that question the ways of naming women who took part in the Malvinas War (1982) and whose experiences have been silenced by the official discourse on the recent Argentine past. By adopting discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary and interpretative practice, I inquire into different kinds of discursive manifestations starring military nurses of the Argentine Air Force who claim to be recognized as war veterans: dialogues recorded in documentary films, texts written by them, public and private interviews, comments social networks and legal documents that affect them in different ways. My starting point is that, by choosing for one or another form of naming them, discourse subjects express political positions on the role women played during the 1982 war conflict and, in doing so, they expose different interpretations of their warlike experiences. Then, my hypothesis is that those discourses are memorial exercises and, as such, they guide the process of dialogic construction of memories about women’s participation in the Malvinas conflict. In this framework, naming processes play a central role in the constitution of memories, while showing different stages of social recognition of the persons named. The main questions that guide this research are the following: which are the meanings disputed in the names used by women who participated in a historical event such as this war, and those used for referring to them? Also, how does naming affect the collective memory of Malvinas? To answer these questions, I will analyze the debates around the syntagma «Veterans of the Malvinas War», and I will observe how the nomination is manifested by analyzing its dialogues with the official definition of «Veteran» and with the genericization of this lexeme. En este artículo me propongo explorar una serie de discursos que ponen en cuestión las formas de nombrar a mujeres que participaron de la Guerra de Malvinas y cuyas vivencias han sido silenciadas por el discurso oficial sobre el pasado reciente argentino. Adoptando el análisis del discurso como práctica interpretativa interdisciplinaria, indago sobre manifestaciones discursivas de distintos tipos protagonizadas por enfermeras militares de la Fuerza Aérea Argentina que reclaman que se las reconozca como veteranas de guerra: películas, libros, entrevistas públicas y privadas, comentarios en redes sociales y disposiciones legales que las afectan de distintas formas. M