Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón by Jean Graham-Jones (review)

Jean Graham-Jones’ monograph, Evita, Inevitably, captures Eva Perón’s ubiquitous and enduring spectre in Argentina following her death in 1952. Her presence in the nation’s imagination and in cultural productions continues to haunt not only Argentina’s past and present, but its future as well. What sets Graham-Jones’ study of performance pieces and historical materials apart from others, however, is how it engages a new discourse that seeks to move our understanding of Evita and previous/subsequent Argentine “femicons” (as Graham-Jones identifies them) away from stagnant and polarizing oppositions that dominate popular as well as critical discussion. These female figures have typically been defined by political and historical forces that break along lines that limit our view to facile dichotomies —ones reflected in Eva Perón’s image, which is at once venerated and reviled in Argentina. Graham-Jones utilizes “femicon” to encompass definitions of both “female and feminist iconicity” and takes into account cultural, contemporary, and gendered/gendering usages of our understanding of icons to demonstrate how these figures have been embodied and performed in the service of national and transnational mythmaking (8-9). Grounded in solid theoretical and historical research, she leads the reader into a more nuanced, balanced, and complex understanding of Evita’s relevance for our understanding of Argentine femicons and the contemporary performances that accompany them.

Building on longstanding views that allow for only a two-sided conception of women in Argentina, in chapter one Graham-Jones explores precursors of Evita’s towering legacy in the “proper” Manuelita Rosas and the “transgressive” Camila O’Gorman, demonstrating how O’Gorman in particular slips between or even straddles the divide between celebrity status and icon. Graham-Jones points out that adherence to early falsifications in the creation of her myth (it is unclear whether she was pregnant at the time of her state-sponsored murder) are refracted in myriad subsequent versions in text and on screen and stage. Over time, her story has been used to both entrench and resist female subjectivity in Marian-identified fertility, the mythologization of the past through historiography, and political as well as theatrical conventions in the country and on stage.

Chapters two and three form the core of the book and focus on Evita’s iconicity through versions of her life story and in her fetishized corpse and death. Graham-Jones parses competing inflections in versions of Evita’s biographies, and in some cases with the less-than-faithful translations of these biographies. She carefully contrasts international and national versions of Evita’s story as presented in musical versions by British Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Argentine Nacha Guevara, and she also compares Evita’s story before and after democracy returned to Argentina. These performances invoke other iconic female literary and theatrical figures like Victoria Ocampo, China Zorrilla, and Cristina Banegas and contrast, reinforce, and at times undo the historical binarisms that Peronism unleashed. Chapter three is an insightful look at redemocratization through construction of Evita’s effigy in performances. She discusses the emblematic play by Copi alongside Perlongher’s version of Evita, and it is here that we see how Graham-Jones really begins to undo the dichotomies attributed to Evita’s myth through her analysis of tranvestism. She uses this as a springboard for looking at lesser-known plays by Monica Viñao and Pista 4. Her presentation of Pista 4’s production is sophisticated in its tripartite analysis of post-post avant-garde poetry, theatrical staging of disappearance, and FM radio, particularly in its response to the “tyranny of visual representation in contemporary cultural production” and, of course, in stagings of Evita.

The fourth chapter and the conclusion transition the reader toward recent renderings of femicons with quasi-religious underpinnings and links to contemporary cultural and political settings. Building on well-worn iconography of the Virgen of Luján and the legend...