Abstract

In 1995, Argentine journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez published his novel Santa Evita as an account of the events surrounding Eva Perón's death, her body's subsequent embalming and eventual exile from Argentina. Instead of rectifying the historical discrepancies propagated during the seventeen years in which her body went missing, however, Martinez's novel works to further complicate and memorialize the myth of Evita. This textual memorialization has been buttressed by the Argentine government's publicly attributing one of Martínez's apocryphal phrases to Eva Perón, the inclusion of fictional material as biographical information by Evita's biographers, and the author's own reflections on the blurred and ideologically defunct boundaries between fiction, history and biography. This article is an examination of how these biographical appropriations, epistemological boundaries, and Eva Perón's body have been manhandled and coerced by those who attempt to tame them, an effort which, paradoxically, has only served to confirm their artificial nature.

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