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193 7 ► Poner el cuerpo the youth body between eroticism and revolutionary politics In preparation for the coming of the spring of 1966, an ad for Sportline jackets addressed a male readership with a challenging and alluring statement : “only if you brought together a guerrilla’s audacity and a playboy’s affluence, would you be ready to dress Sportline.” Six years after that ad, Para Ti introduced its young female readers to the changing fashions for the summer of 1972. It produced a photographic report in which two models exhibited new dress items (high-heeled boots and tight short pants) and colors, notably brown and olive green. The title for the report could not have been more explicit: that summer “Guerrilla Fashion” was “in.” These are only two examples of the ways in which youth, eroticism, and revolutionary politics were woven together in Argentina, a dynamics that this chapter aims at unraveling. In doing so, I follow the suggestion of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz, who proposed understanding the body as both a “surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed” and as a lived experience.¹ In the late 1960s and early 1970s Argentina, poner el cuerpo (to put one’s body on the line) acquired manifold, sometimes competing meanings, which taken together help explain how and why youth as a category and young people as actors became so fundamental to defining the politics, culture , and sexuality of the era. Youth, for example, “put the body” at the service of a profound renewal of fashion trends, which reformulated notions and practices of eroticism as well as debates over the limits and meanings of sex and authority. The youthful, largely female body that stood at the center stage of an extended commercialized eroticism was also located at the center of political debates over sex and revolution wherein new actors participated, from the emerging feminist and gay rights groups to the most varied groups of the revolutionary Left of the 1970s. Perhaps not deserving the “revolutionary” adjective (as it was understood at the time), 194 Poner el cuerpo most young women and men did participate in deep transformations of prevailing sexual arrangements, which included a practical redefinition of the legitimate age and sites for sex and the incipient, although embattled , struggle for sexual equality among men and women. Radical social equality was, without a doubt, the central component of the revolutionary projects of the time. As they unfolded in a political culture tied to armed struggle and reliant upon “action,” those projects practically required the shaping of resilient bodies. Young, largely male, and heterosexual, those bodies would be the carriers of a new revolutionary consciousness and the avenues that paved the way for a new time, which many youth envisioned as impending. Between Display and Disguise As in most Western countries, in Argentina during the second half of the 1960s new fashion and advertising practices located the young, “nude” body at the center of attention. John Berger, in his essay on the representational traditions of the body, famously concluded that to be nude “is to be seen naked by others, to be on display . . . to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hair of one’s own body, turned into disguise.”² Berger’s idea carries deep implications for reading the body. First, it allows for viewing a continuum, albeit symbolic, between dress and nudity, conceptualizing them as relational rather than oppositional terms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the intermingling of dress and nude paved the way for new senses of eroticism , whose attainment depended on meeting cultural mandates regarding slenderness and fitness, chiefly addressed to young women.³ Second, Berger noted that it was always the female body on display for, presumably male, viewers. Feminist scholars have long analyzed how the female body became a spectacle or, as Laura Mulvey has put it, an object for visual pleasure.⁴ In Argentina, it turned into a venue for discussing overly public morals as well, which illuminates the scope and limits of authoritarian censorship in an era of transnational, market-oriented eroticism. Third, amid that pervading “commercialization,” Berger’s ideas introduce the interplay between nudity, dress, and disguise. Although formally reacting against the prevailing fads, the young women who engaged with revolutionary politics drew upon clothing items marked by eroticism. Dress, nudity, and eroticism were then part of their disguise for performing the “guerrilla woman.” Well before the first guerrilla groups came to the surface, however, the [13.59.218...

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