Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”

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Description

In Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor looks at how national identity is shaped, gendered, and contested through spectacle and spectatorship. The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor’s focal point is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 during which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation’s “Dirty War.” Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the war—concentration camps, torture, “disappearances”—in addition to the upward thrust of theatrical productions, demonstrations, and other performative practices that attempted to withstand and subvert the Argentine military.
Taylor uses performance theory to explore how public spectacle both builds and dismantles a sense of national and gender identity. Here, nation is understood as a product of communal “imaginings” which can be rehearsed, written, and staged—and spectacle is the desiring machine at work in those imaginings. Taylor argues that the founding scenario of Argentineness stages the struggle for national identity as a battle between men—fought on, over, and through the feminine body of the Motherland. She shows how the military’s representations of itself as the model of national authenticity established the parameters of the conflict within the 70s and 80s, feminized the enemy, and situated the public—limiting its ability to respond. Folks who challenged the dictatorship, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to progressive theater practitioners, found themselves in what Taylor describes as “bad scripts.” Describing the images, myths, performances, and explanatory narratives that have informed Argentina’s national drama, Disappearing Acts offers a telling analysis of the aesthetics of violence and the disappearance of civil society all the way through Argentina’s spectacle of terror.

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