Poner el cuerpo: Gender, Sex, and Youth Revolutionary Politics in Argentina, 1969--1976

MANZANO, VALERIA

College Park

Conferencia; The Aesthetics of Revolt: Latin America in the 1960s; 2011

Center of Latin Americana and Caribbean Studies, History Department, University of Maryland

This presentation looks at the material and symbolic corporality of political militancy in early 1970s Argentina. In doing so, it follows the suggestion of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz, who proposed understanding the body as both a “surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed” and as lived, corporeal experience. This dual approach allows viewing that it is not simply that the body is represented in a variety of ways according to social and cultural exigencies while it remains basically the same: these factors actively produce the body as a body of a determinate type. Revolutionary militants in 1970s Argentina produced a resilient body, adapted to the requirements of an activist style of militancy. On that style and its attendant resilient body, key elements of a revolutionary political culture that cut across diverging groups resonated, notably a pervading feeling of “imminence.” Most fundamentally, an exploration of the production of that resilient body may help explain how the connections between sex, gender, and generation unfolded among revolutionary militants as well as begin to understand how their day-to-day experiences differed from the ideal figures of the heroic guerrilla.