Wounds as weapons: Agency, performance and gender in Argentina's Madres

Image from: http://www.larepublica.com.uy/mundo/256063-madres-de-plaza-de-mayo-cumplen-hoy-30-anos

Taylor, Diana. “Opening Remarks”, pp. 1-16 and "Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo", pp. 275-305. In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latina/o America. Edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

In the introduction, Taylor points at the complexity and contradictions of using the terms Latina/o and Latin American, as they are themselves contested sites of signification. One cannot think "that Latino/as occupy any one positionality (be it in terms of ideology, class, gender or sexual preference, or race) or that they occupy it in any one way." (6) Taylor is investing on the politics of community —as opposed to identity— with the concept of cultural competence at core as a notion that would enable to speak across divides. The position as Latin Americans can be thought then not as an essential category of identity, but rather a political one that derives from the shared historical experience of oppression from colonial and imperialist powers.

In the chapter on the Madres, she notes that it is useful to expand our understanding of performance to include not only different kinds of performance art and public performance, but also daily roles that have been internalized associated with gender, sexuality and race. For example, Taylor uses this notion of performance to analyze politics of oppression and resistance in Argentina in two gendered "spectacles": the theatrical tragedy of the Motherland saved by the military (with its associated narrative), and the performance of the Madres in the public space that brought national and international visibility to human rights violations. Taylor argues that the strategy of performing the Mother in this movement has been both their limitation and their strength, and that we need to pay attention to the kinds of subjectivities produced in the process of these public performances.

In the first case, we have the gendered language of the military that declared itself the "supreme organ of the Nation" (277) and exalted masculinity in saving the bleeding feminized nation, which was present in multiple performances that included: constant display of weaponry and hardware, parades, staged confrontations, and the displaying of religious images that associated the military with (Catholic) sacredness. The narrative of the military re-founded the nation upon a national romance that looks more like an act of rape, and that in fact, this narrative rationalized and legitimized rape as an action against "las putas and locas". [Could this idea be key to understand the sexualization of torture?] In fact, military discourse reduced the female body to the maternal body, and opposed the suffering image of the virgin to that of women as the embodiment of evil: as crazywomen, witches and bad mothers, who deserved complete elimination in order to save the purity of the Patria. They did this by feminizing the enemy in general, and by reducing women to their sexual and reproductive parts in torture practices, sustained by this distinction virgin/whore. Taylor points that furthermore, female submission is a pre-requisite for the plot of male individuation in the military's narrative (and the individual subject is functional to the new plot of neoliberalism). And as the ideological conflict is prefigured in term of sexual difference, actual bodies experienced the effect of misogynistic fantasies in Argentina's "dirty war": "Thus, individual and collective fantasy of control and domination, played out against castrated, feminized, and penetrable bodies (literally and/or metaphorically), meshed into a highly organized system of terror in which hatred of the feminine was not only the consequence but simultaneously, its very reason for being." (285)

By performing motherhood in the public space the Madres both politicized motherhood and at the same time, reasserted motherhood as the only socially valued and authorized role for women to speak from. Taylor sees the limitations of this strategy but also points out that performance allows for a transition from the performance of this role unquestioningly, to the conscious performance and manipulation of these images (the use to control them). If they had to resort to feminine images of passivity, and even in their performance to the image of the suffering virgin, it is not so much because the Madres held themselves an essentialist view of gender, but because in the military's grammar, public women are crazy or whores and good mothers are at home: "Insofar as they could not control the discourse, those involved in oppositional movements, like the Madres, had no choice but to manipulate its grammar, logic and vocabulary". (302)