Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (review)

In one sense, Disappearing Acts is a local study; Taylor’s main focus is on a distinct historical moment and on a specific geographical region. Disappearing Acts traces and analyzes the multiple ways that performance was utilized during Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976–1983) to both structure and resist a nationalist ideology responsible for one of the most horrific periods in contemporary history. However, Taylor’s book—much like her topic—resonates beyond the specificity of its local context. Disappearing Acts will be of interest to all readers curious about the role of theatre and performance in shaping and controlling the social and the political. This is a book that speaks to informed specialists in various fields—Latin American studies, theatre and performance studies, and feminist studies—as well as readers new to the methodologies and bibliographies of these areas. Taylor’s impressive interdisciplinary capabilities combined with the rigor of her archival research makes Disappearing Acts an exemplary piece of scholarship.

Taylor discusses a wide range of materials and cultural events: conventional plays staged by Argentina’s leading progressive artists, the public spectacles mounted by the military junta, the torture practices of the military regime and the public testimonios that described them, and both the abduction and murder of countless of thousands of Argentines and the demonstrations of las Madres de Plaza de Mayo against this mass disappearance. In each of these cases, Taylor is interested in unpacking the way that Argentine national ideology and identity were formulated and gendered by a historical legacy of “bad scripts.” These “bad scripts” (or political scenarios) construct “Argentina” as feminine, an embattled site fought over by men invested in rigid gendered binarisms of national identity. In chapter 1, for example, Taylor surveys modern Argentine history to reveal how “thinking about origins, destiny, citizenship, and gender became set in performative traditions deeper than any explicit political position” (34). From nineteenth century dictators such as Juan Manual de Rosas, to the more contemporary figures such as Juan and Eva Perón, national politics relied on public spectacles to stage and gender national subjectivity. These gendered (and often militarized) performances invested in a symbolic idealization of the feminine—Argentina as Motherland—that depended on masculinist and homosocial performances for its defense. Simultaneously, these performances conflated the feminine with all undesirable social groups, including political rivals. Such a seemingly contradictory gendered ideology, Taylor argues, set the groundwork for the militarized performances which disappeared thousands of Argentines during the “Dirty War” years. These performances and the various resistant struggles against them remain the subject of the eight chapters which follow.

Throughout her study, Taylor is interested in theorizing the “politics of looking,” how we see or choose not to see the world around us. How is it that we are disciplined to notice or to not notice human suffering? How does spectatorship comply with or resist the political positioning of oppressive regimes? What model of spectatorship is available to resist “bad scripts” or at least begin to identify those scripts as such? These questions haunt Disappearing Acts. Consider, for example, how Taylor discusses the public atrocities of the “Dirty War” and how these extremely disruptive military spectacles of terror relied on spectatorship for their effect:

The triumph of the atrocity was that it forced people to look away—a gesture that undid their sense of personal and communal cohesion even as it seemed to bracket them from their volatile surroundings. Spectacles of violence rendered the population silent, deaf, and blind. . . . The military violence could have been relatively invisible, as the term disappearance suggests. The fact that it wasn’t indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of the spectacle.

[122–23]

People, as Taylor points out, were forced to deny what they saw for fear of being the next military target. While on the one hand, the spectator is positioned as...