Heroes, warriors and patriots. Masculinities around football in times of dictatorship. Argentina 1978

BOLCHINSKY MAYLÉN

Roma

Conferencia; CHE ?GENERE? DI SPORT? Prospettive storiche di lungo periodo; 2022

Società Italiana delle Storiche

In June 1978, the XI Soccer World Cup was held in Argentina, in a dictatorial and repressive scenario. The self-proclaimed “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (“National Reorganization Process”, 1976-1983) sought a political gain through a sports victory, following a propaganda strategy that put into play an ideal of national being aligned with the "re-foundational" pretensions of the regime. This policy promoted meanings of nation that were articulated within a sport nationalist matrix constituted since the beginning of the 20th century, and that was crystallized in an archetypal style of game: fútbol criollo. That figure demonstrated the potential of sports as an organizer of identities, as well as the privileged place that soccer occupies in the construction and reproduction of masculinities.Upon becoming champions of the 1978 World Cup, the Argentine team was praised by the press. The players became national heroes, warriors, masculine young patriots. The team was characterized by its performance, corporeality, qualities and life stories, housing a rhetorical-discursive mechanism through which regulatory gender narratives operated. Thus, our work aims at identifying the representations of masculinity and the imaginaries of nation associated with the figure of the Argentine players and technical team. In this paper, we will review a corpus of sources that includes specific magazines such as El Gráfico and Goles, journalistic reports and statements made by officials published in the national press. The purpose of this article is to unravel the different meanings that these representations acquire in the light of this sport’s identity matrix and in dialogue with the dictatorial politics of the military regime. In other words, it seeks to analyze the ways in which political and cultural sport’s nationalism were intertwined, evidencing the essentialist codifications of masculinity dominant in the period.