Argentine Countercultural Magazines in the 1980s: a Reading in Context

Abstract

Our task has been to analyse a set of so-called countercultural magazines from 1980s Argentina. These graphic publications constituted artifacts that constructed sensitivities by developing modes of dissent against the ruling power, forms of territoriality, and insertion into the public sphere that allowed for the possibility of building political-affective networks. The approach adopted in the analysis has allowed us to understand these periodicals as devices involving discourses and practices that reveal ways of conceiving the world that helped shape subjectivities. A varied body of textual, visual, and contextual elements has been considered for this study.

We put forward a few hypotheses about the selected period, which includes both the final years of the last Argentine civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983) and the early years of post-dictatorship, revisiting the main topics discussed in the literature on the period. Our analysis thus implies a consideration of the transformations that took place in these practices during this transition period from dictatorship to democracy, in order to account for ruptures and continuities in their development.