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

Book Reviews 209 Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War' Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997 By Diana Taylor Academicians ask ourselves from time to time what real difference the practice of scholarship makes in the larger scheme of things. When the media bombards us with news about social and political cataclysms such as mass starvation, genocide, and unspeakable and systematic political acts of repression and terror, how does our published research serve the common good? Do most of us, in fact, continue to write and publish for an elite— and very tiny—readership even when our scholarship does focus on the societal ills that plague our contemporary world? There are, of course, a multitude of answers to the dilemma that such questions raise. Diana Taylor's answer is a fascinating and politically engaged book which aspires to "academic activism," her abandonment of the comfortable corner of scholarly objectivity. She actively provokes her readers to reexamine how the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1970s—along with a largely complicit citizenry—used the historical linkage of gender and nationalism in Argentina to carry out an orchestrated campaign of excess. The dictatorship's tactics included the prohibition of public protests against the regime, the sweeping of neighborhoods by heavily armed soldiers, the arrest and kidnapping of suspected subversives by the secret police, the torture and "disappearing" of leftists, the propagandistic manipulation of public spectacles such as the World Cup Football championship, and the cynical use of electronic and print media. Taylor relates how her inadvertent crossing the actor/spectator line years after Argentina's Dirty War had resulted in a kind of intellectual crisis that led her to write her book, a broadly interdisciplinary work that draws on the theory of performance, feminist theory, and Latin American and cultural studies to analyze how gender and nation-ness are interrelated and played out during the most intense period of the 1970s military dictatorship commonly known as the Dirty War. The writing of the book constitutes for Taylor an act of witnessing in a most positive and potent sense. She considers herself a cultural critic whose "goal is to make visible again, not the invisible or imagined, but that which is clearly there [women's pain and her extermination] but not allowed to be seen (27)." (Emphasis in the original .) Taylor provides a cogent and persuasive analysis of how public political spectacles and aspects of spectatorship such as military parades, soccer games, the weekly marches of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Buenos Aires' "Open Theater" festival served to create the state-organized "disappearance " of civil society. At the same time, opponents of the regime used 210 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies public spectacles to resist the military's agenda. She succeeds admirably in showing how "systems of terror emanate throughout the public sphere, rippling through newspaper headlines, magazine covers, films, ads, and TV spots." Although she does not develop this point, Taylor believes that Argentina's 1970s political crisis is not an aberration or an isolated outbreak of neofascist ideology but rather it resulted from Argentina's "entry into the global economic market; thus it is very much a product of a broader agenda, indeed Our' imaginary and 'our' global economic system." Because it may be a regional manifestation of a global phenomenon, an understanding of the dynamics of political spectacle and spectatorship in Argentina is potentially useful to our understanding of other how other authoritarian regimes function to control a passive public imbued with its own versions of nationalism. One of the most insightful aspects of the study is Taylor's lucid development of how Argentine culture since its inception has depicted "the construction of national identity as predicated on female destruction" (16). She provides convincing examples in each of the book's eight chapters of how this insidious relationship is played out not only as an unstated goal of the military dictatorship but also in its inadvertent—but no less destructive— presence in the works of prominent and even progressive Argentine playwrights such as Eduardo Pavlovsy's Paso de dos. Taylor asserts that understanding and recognizing gender performances is central to our...