Discursively acceptable memory and accountability bottlenecks in post-authoritarian testimonial discourse

This article examines how post-authoritarian testimonial discourse can voice critique while limiting the public attribution of blame. Drawing on Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, I analyse 41 publicly available oral-history interviews in which speakers recount gender and sexual dissidence under dictatorship and its aftermath. Rather than treating testimony as transparent access to experience, the article identifies four recurrent discourse mechanisms across the corpus: ideological polarisation, agency and responsibility management, presuppositional and evidential framing, and strategic silences. These mechanisms converge at moments where institutional responsibility for coercion would otherwise require explicit naming, producing what I term discursively acceptable memory. In doing so, the article extends sociocognitive CDA by identifying discourse devices through which testimonial critique may be publicly voiced while institutional blame remains constrained, with implications for the study of testimonial discourse in other post-authoritarian settings.