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

Disappearing Acts by Diana Taylor offers a new perspective on the analysis of authoritarianism and state terrorism, on the one hand, and of practices of opposition against it on the other. The author starts by affirming that one can “read” the production of both coercion and consensus under dictatorship as a “public spectacle” that “both builds and dismantles a sense of community and nation-ness,” “stirs and manipulates desire” (ix), precludes “responsible witnessing,” and, ultimately, empties—i.e., eliminates—the public sphere. It is the crucial role of nation formation in the consensus-building process, moreover, what links state terrorism to gender oppression, a connection that, according to Taylor, necessarily affects oppositional discourse.

Taylor claims that Argentine history has bound together “nation-ness” and gender in such a way that national identity rests necessarily on the oppression of women: “real” Argentines are inevitably “male”:

Both gender and nation (which, I will argue, are the product of each other’s performance and therefore difficult to imagine separately) are oppositional and exclusionary . . . . Doing one’s nation-ness/gender ‘correctly’ promises privilege and a sense of belonging, yet involves coercive mechanisms of identification.

(92)

In this way, women are “disappeared” from the public sphere, a process that precedes and, in a way, contains, authoritarianism. In order to prove her contention, the author briefly surveys crucial moments of nation-building in Argentina, namely, the conquest, the unitarios/federales confrontation in the 19th century, and Peronism, to end with the last military coup.

Performance style and strategies have been key tools in the process of the construction of national identity. Taylor bases this claim in the fact that both collective and individual identity-formation depend on “a complicated play of looks: looking, being looked at, identification, recognition, mimicry” (30). The centrality of performance is also related to the characteristics of political leadership. Leaders “seduce and fascinate,” their power depends on a dynamics that recalls, in this author’s view, the patriarchal view of heterosexual eroticism, whereby an unequal power relation develops between a subjugating man and a subjugated woman. This

. . . staging and gendering of national subjectivity is perhaps nowhere more evident than during the two term of Juan Perón’s first presidency . . . . Populism . . . conflated love for the person of Perón with love for the state. The image of the Líder fused power and sexual prowess . . . . the “masses,” theoretically the privileged party in populism, were the ones feminized and seduced by this staging.

(44)

The specificity of the military’s public spectacle that differentiates dictatorship from democracy (even though the way Argentine democracy is depicted puts it in a dubious light), Taylor argues, is its violence: a violence against social space that parallels the violence against bodies. Throughout the book, public violence (explicit or suggested) and hidden torture are read in the same code—that of performance: “. . . violence . . . of the kind I describe here, is carried out according to a script with a thread of narrative logic . . . . those who control and protagonize the narrative, that is, those who are directly or indirectly responsible for the violence, encourage us spectators/readers to buy into the story, to identify with the protagonists . . .” (149). It is this power to produce identification what renders spectacle politically powerful. In the case of the Dirty War, its various “productions” provided their spectators/citizens with an illusion of a clear explanation and solution for the crisis that had brought about the coup, while placing the “audience” in a passive, submissive—feminine—role.

The power of the military’s script, in Taylor’s view, had a twofold origin. On the one hand, it depended on the connection, through ritual (performance), of the coup to the emergence of Argentina as a nation. In her own words, “the junta embodied the ‘national being’ . . . . A complicated play of looks marked lines and degrees of inclusion and exclusion . . . . Exclusion went in tandem with feminization. While the junta embodied masculinity, the masses were feminized” (71...