Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean

Radio Transvestism and the Gendered Soundscape in Buenos Aires, 1930s–1940s

18 Radio Transvestism and the Gendered Soundscape in Buenos Aires, 1930s–1940s Christine Ehrick In early 1932, a small item appeared in Argentina’s first popular radio magazine Antena. Carrying the headline “A woman singing what is meant for a man is ugly, but a man acting like a little woman is intolerable,” the article was the opening shot in a campaign against what we might call transgendered performance on the Argentine airwaves.1 This item is also a departure point for an exploration of debates and struggles over gender and vocality during the golden age of Argentine broadcasting. By breaching the boundaries of public and private and separating the voice from any immediate visual referent, radio technology itself was anxiety-provoking. Radio also intersected with the ongoing disruptions of traditional hierarchies of class, gender, and citizenship that characterized the era, amplifying and diffusing anxieties generated by these disruptions across a wide spectrum of society. In 1930s and 1940s Argentina, in other words, radio was a key forum within which shifting constructions of class, citizenship, gender and sexuality merged with the fantasies and fears provoked by technological modernization. ( ( ( 2 Radio Transvestism and the Gendered Soundscape in Buenos Aires • 19 In her book Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber writes of the transvestite effect, which she defines as “the overdetermined appearance of the transvestite” at moments of new and significant challenges to the existing social and cultural order: “The transvestite . . . is both terrifying and seductive precisely because s/he incarnates and emblematizes the disruptive element that intervenes, signaling not just another category crisis, but—much more disquietingly—a crisis of ‘category’ itself.”2 In the golden age radio press of Buenos Aires, Argentina (and to a lesser extent Montevideo, Uruguay), one finds evidence to support Garber’s ideas. Here, the appearance of the radio transvestite (real or imagined) personified a broader “category crisis” in politics and society in the region. Worries that feminism was creating a new generation of manhating marimachos, for example, coupled with neurasthenic suspicions that modern urban society was making men soft and perhaps even less heterosexual, intersected with the fantasy and anxiety evoked by the mysteryoftheradioreceiver .3 Argentinepoliticaldiscourseatthetimewasalso replete with suspicions about the pernicious influence of “foreigners”— immigrants, Jews, and others defined as outsiders—who were associated with and accused of gender and other subversions. Modernity, in other words, carried with it a number of overlapping threats to the Argentine national family. We often understand transvestism as being synonymous with crossdressing and visual constructions of gender. Yet, if we define transvestism as “a performance of gender” that complicates and subverts traditional binary notions of masculine and feminine, that performance can be vocal as well as visual.4 The (adult) human voice is immediately and deeply gendered ; in the case of radio, voice becomes a primary way in which gender is communicated. In different ways and with different connotations, 1930s Argentine radio featured women vocalizing like men and men vocalizing like women. Though we might more properly classify some of these performances in terms of androgyny rather than transvestism, the fact that critics classified them in terms of the latter helps to situate gender-bending radio/sound performances within the broader context of Argentine politics and related gender discourses. The radio/aural transvestite could assume many forms: a man singing “women’s songs,” a woman who dared to adopt male oratory style, and a suspiciouslyandrogynousfemalesinger,amongothers.Inthissense,radio transvestism has commonalities with blackface performance, a term that 20 • Christine Ehrick connotes the visual but which has always had strong vocal dimensions as well.5 In the same way that transvestism is a performance of gender, blackface is a performance of race. By separating the body’s aural and visual components , radio greatly facilitated such vocal sleight of hand. Despite these similarities, blackface performance did more to reinforce than subvert racial hierarchies and stereotypes, whereas transvestite/drag performances could be more slippery. As Matthew Murray argues, while so-called lavender gentleman radio performances in the United States ultimately reinforced homophobia and heteronormativity, radio transvestism could in some cases disrupt and complicate traditional gender constructions.6 In Argentina, these types of performances were met with campaigns aimed atassertingvocalheteronormativityaspartofalargercampaignto“professionalize ” Argentine broadcasting during the 1930s. This chapter explores ways in which radio voices performed gender, especially moments when those voices challenged and subverted the gendered order and disrupted the gendered soundscape via the introduction of unorthodox...