A mother’s love: mobilization of feelings and affections in supporting a missing person’s report and rebuilding daily life

Abstract

For mothers and relatives of victims of the State, the chances of experiencing grief are closely linked to public acknowledgement of a missing person’s report. However, mobilisations and demands are met with retaliation; deaths and disappearances are not fully perceived as social problems or acknowledged as homicides. By means of a fifteen-year case study still legally unsolved, my aim is to interpret the expression of motherly feelings as a political and sensitising resource. My contention is that a moral and affective biography is a discursive and emotional enlargement of motherly experiences that are triggered and constructed throughout the perception of an enforced disappearance as a critical episode. Moreover, I analyse modalities of assertion that take place whenever violence is performed at the border between a missing person’s report and current relations.