Sexing and Gendering the 'Enemy within' in Argentina

MANZANO, VALERIA

Amherst

Conferencia; 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women; 2011

Berkshire Conference of Women's History

In the early 1970s, when the five major guerrilla organizations began to widely act in the largest Argentine cities, myriad reports to the press informed that “beautiful blonde girls” and “almost effeminate boys” were the most common participants in armed attacks. Written with unmistakable police rhetoric, the press reports highlighted the combatants’ class standing—usually by referring to their middle- to upper- class family background—as well as their apparent subversion of the gendered and sexual roles and mores. However, the gendered and sexed construction of an “enemy within” in Argentina neither began in the early 1970s nor was restricted to guerrilla combatants. Based upon the systematic examination of periodical press; police and military publications; recently declassified police reports; and the memoirs of former guerrillas and activists, this paper shows that a conservative, moralistic representation of the leftist revolutionary militants gradually expanded since the late 1950s, and had Catholic leagues, politicians from diverse political parties, and military and police think tanks as its most significant spokespersons. Most fundamentally, this paper examines how that representation informed the making of  censorship apparatuses throughout the 1960s and the gendered and sexed specificities of the police and military repression that escalated between 1969 and 1973, and again after 1974. In this respect, I contend that the sexed and gendered construction of the “enemy within” constituted a crucial—though often neglected—dimension in the creation of a broad societal consensus for the imposition of the last military dictatorship in March of 1976.