Diana Taylor Disappearing Acts

one of the archival photos she analyzes as part of the spectacle of disappearing.


In this book Taylor analyzes the role of performance in and after the Argentina “dirty war” as a both a form of creating the effect of terror and submission of the population and as way of diverging or processing its effects, and act that she will show many times falls into some of the structures they are trying to avoid. The way the military did this is through the making of the disappearing of political opponents visible while making the torture and killings invisible. With this simultaneous move they were both letting the population know/see that the enemies of the regime were abducted with no possibility of escape, as they were keeping the torture in the shadow as a form of enhancing its violent effect. This is what she calls a politics of looking that forced people to look without responding, act to paralyze a society, break its social capacity to react as a whole. The fact that the military actions were visible indicates that “the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of that spectacle.” (123) People are positioned as witnesses and betrayals, if they talk they are likely to be on the stage as victims of the abduction the next time, if they do not talk they are kept with the responsibility of having watched a neighbor be taken away. This dynamic generated a growing depolitizing and traumatizing effect that quickly made social ties reduced to minimum.

At the same time this is an act of producing gendered identities, a gendered nation and operating on the actual bodies of the women. The military produce the nation as a women, a feminine mother, and attribute “her” the quality of vulnerability to “bad influences” that very easily threaten her, the incapacity to protect herself and the need of a masculine figure strong and determined to save her. This masculine figure is the military. It is them who are capable of cleaning the nation form the impurities that attempt to contaminate her, form the forces that attempt to take control of her. The advertising regimes as well as the public displays of masculinist power generated the framework making state terror possible, not as terror but as an action over the body of the nation in order to save her. This produces not just the nation as gendered but also the feminine as the site of constitution of the nation, and the making of national subjectivities as caught in this gender binarism.

In this play the body of the enemy is produced as a feminine body. Living no place for the actual bodies of women. Women are a dangerous matter, bodies are to be worked upon, exposed and over which to work the desired nation. It is this type of movement that Taylor sees even critical intellectuals producing theatre plays that attempt resist the dirty war, falling back into the “bad scripts” of the dictatorship play. Thus for example Pavlosky in his intention to immerse into the psychological world of a torturer he presents a tango dance that is both sensual and violent that ends up with a dead naked body. With this he exposes, subjects and ends up in a symbolic destruction of the feminine body, an act that is not only a representation, but that for Taylor reproduces and recreates this masculinist emptying of the female body meaning and force, and this masculinist appropriation of it. This is also something she examines in the plays of Teeatro Abierto, a counter dictatorship theratrical event.

Mothers of plaza de mayo occupy an ambivalent position as they make a political space out of the dominant principle of being a good mother and taking care of their children, but they are also caught in the bad scripts of assigning a dominant meaning to being a women. In this they cannot fully reapropiate their possibility of being women political actors.