The debate about changing fashions and patterns of female beauty intersected with a second set of concerns, which revolved around the menace of “unisex dress” to the blurring of gender identities and the concomitant feminization of young men. Sociologist Julio Mafud, for instance, argued that one sign of the “Argentine sexual revolution” was the rising resemblance of young women and men in the realm of dress and hairstyle. To Mafud, that resemblance involved both a promise to “level the sexes” and a risk of “forgetting who the man and the woman are.” He asked women to be prudent and keep clear gender barriers.15 More tolerant, the psychiatrist Isaac Lubchansky asserted that the “ambiguity of dressing” was related to “the search for new styles, common to the sexes: long hair and jeans are the symbols of the ‘unisex’ youth world.” Other accounts focused on how young women’s new dress practices implied an “aggressive invasion” into the world of men, who “counterattacked” by wearing long hair and colored clothes.16 Thus, in contrast to the debates on how the jeans and miniskirts “oversexed” young women’s bodies, the discussions of the “unisex fashion” addressed anxieties about young men’s sexuality. At the most extreme level, the police raided bars and rock concerts and either imprisoned or scared young men with a “hippie” look, including blue jeans, colored shirts, and long hair. The imagery that informed those actions went as far as conceiving of unisex as an issue of national security because it prevented the police from identifying men from women.17 The “confusion” theme appeared in other milieus as well. A survey on “unisex fashion” published by the lifestyle magazine Siete Días, for example, incited a flurry of letters, pointing to the connections between dress, long hair, and “uncertain” sexuality.18
Both inciting and addressing anxieties with the new fashions, advertisements played with the “unisex” yet “sexy” characteristics of youth dress items. In fact, jean ads were the ones that most helped to eroticize the visual culture of late 1960s and early 1970s Argentina, since they heavily relied on the interaction between nude and dress (as the ad for Lady Far West had done) and, consequently, on the articulation of new patterns of eroticism. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has noted, it is the feminine image that “operates as a conduit and mirror of desire, reciprocally intensifying and reflecting the commodity’s allure.”19 Certainly, young women’s bodies became the emblem and lure of blue jeans. In 1972, one ad for Levi’s went as far as to show a picture of a nude young woman and to single out her left buttock, imposing over it an “imaginary” pocket. In large font, the ad announced that “The legitimate Levi’s is recognized in this way.” While in small font it indicated the technicalities of the actual jean, the message was clear: only Levi’s guaranteed a perfect (that is, almost total) display of the female, privileged, erogenous zone. This was the lure Levi’s offered to women and, especially, men.20 Significant in its literality, this ad was nevertheless unique. Other ads for jeans showed mixed-sex couples wearing the same clothes (although female bodies were supposed to catch the viewer’s eye and dominated the sexed-up atmosphere conveyed by blue jean consumption). Dynamic, joyful, and sexy: These were the sorts of attributes advertisers competitively strove to associate with blue jeans and youth consumption.
How do we explain that, while in 1967 the mayor banned an ad for miniskirts and blue jeans, only five years later (and still under military rule) an ad for Levi’s could occupy the third page of the most widely read lifestyle magazine? Advertising, in fact, is the key to unraveling the limits of censorship. Formally, in the 1960s and 1970s, the “censor ideology” relaxed for just a few months during the governments of Héctor Cámpora and, transitorily, Juan Perón. As I showed in Chapter 1, over those two decades, national, provincial, and municipal boards flourished and new legislation mounted. The rationale informing censorship entailed blockading the diffusion of “politically subversive” and “morally harmful” materials. Yet the enforcement of censorship was inconsistent, with books and films being the most monitored. Not surprisingly, as part of the “democratic spring” of 1973 Cámpora appointed a filmmaker as head of the Board of Film Qualification and soon authorized the release of movies that had long been prohibited, like Pierre Paolo Passolini’s Teorema (1968) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). As the humoristic monthly Satiricón put it, “our liberation begins when we can see nudity.”21 Before and after this short “spring,” however, other materials were far more elusive. Market forces were as powerful as moralistic forces and, as an advertiser stated, “sex sells nowadays.”22
“Sex” entailed primarily the display of the young female body within the most widespread representational realms: advertisements and lifestyle magazines. The year 1967 not only signaled the attempt to control advertisements in Buenos Aires, but also, more lastingly, it was a turning point for the industry at a national level. First, investment grew 50 percent in comparison with 1966, the largest inter-annual growth for the booming decade 1964–1974. Beginning in 1967, there was a solid recovery of the investment in printed advertising, presumably because lifestyle magazines incorporated color printing for ads.23 Second, amid the 1967 boom (and helping triggering it) an “erotic tide” hit the ads to the point that a journalist reported that “75 percent of the ads” relied on the “exposure of women’s bodies” to sell all type of products.24 Perhaps foreseeing the economic losses that censorship would have cost to their industry, in 1969 advertisers passed their own ethical code and promised to avoid showing “anything which goes against Argentine morals, or stimulates sensuality and obscenity.” Vague and formal, the code was dead upon arrival.25 A similar story happened with magazines. In the summer of 1968–69, Siete Días updated its self-promoting techniques: like many illustrated magazines in the West, it began to carry “cover girls” wearing bikinis. Concerned with the “tide of pornography,” Minister of the Interior Guillermo Borda threatened the directors of the most widely read weeklies with a ban for not only the display of female (semi) nudes but also for any article questioning marriage and parental authority over youth. Although they complained, the weeklies tried to comply with his prescriptions.26 Yet as soon as Borda resigned as a consequence of the popular revolts that erupted in May of 1969, the weeklies resumed their “hunting” for “sexy” cover girls.
Amid the sweeping tide of political radicalization initiated in May of 1969, however, almost no sphere of cultural and social life remained untouched, including fashion and clothing. At the most obvious level, fashion models created a union, which attempted to provide training, regulate working conditions, and discuss the role of fashion “in a changing society.”27 In 1972, models and journalists promoted a series of discussions on the relationships between fashion, dressing practices, and politics. Some claimed that, in a context of dependent capitalism, fashion represented still another arena where “neocolonialism” worked. In Argentina, they argued, the only “fashion” not colonized was that of the Peronist workers in the 1940s and 1950s, those who “Evita named descamisados [shirtless].” Fashion models, journalists, and psychologists concurred in a 1972 roundtable that fashion entailed individual and social oppression, “to be deterred in a future Socialist fatherland.”28 Yet these overt discussions constituted only one venue of the politicization of fashion. Most fundamentally, as they became involved in radical politics, young people rearticulated their dress practices.
Testimonies of young women who engaged in political activism alluded to the paramount importance changes in dress had, which they narrated as part of a conversion process. A former militant with the PRT-ERP named Pola, noted that her decisions regarding fashion and her body were particularly important. She was seventeen when she attended her first meeting with a political comrade from the party and decided to dress herself so as to better impress him: she wore a miniskirt, an elegant blouse, high-heeled shoes, and make-up. “Are you sure you want to become a militant?” he asked without waiting for an answer. Pola was sure and, after some weeks had passed, she asked for a second meeting. Meanwhile,
Pola underwent her bodily conversion, attending the new meeting in “blue jeans and olive-green shirt.” Laughing about herself, she concluded that it was then, when changing clothes, that she formally became a “party activist.”29 Pola depicted a conversion involving the rejection of what was regarded as fashionable. In doing so, she and other young activists embraced a new ideal of femininity, which tended to reinforce simplicity and to downplay the markers of eroticism and desirability.
Ironically, however, the requirements of revolutionary militancy sometimes implied staging performances in which the female body was called on to conform to prevalent notions of femininity and desirability. As happened in Brazil, newspapers and magazines were flush with stories of dangerous and alluring young women participating in armed action.30 Even though exaggerated, those representations were premised on the fact that some young women did utilize their “sex appeal” to facilitate armed actions like car or bank robberies and assaults on military garrisons and police stations (which were the most prevalent actions and targets from 1969 to 1972).31 Young women of “singular beauty,” who “looked like fashion models” and wore miniskirts and tight jeans as well as abundant makeup overflowed the chronicles.32 In July of 1970, for example, a Montonero cell made up of eight young men and three women took over a small town in Córdoba. The press reported that “a beautiful Amazon with a 38-caliber gun” had “initiated everything.”33 Interviewed by a television channel, the policemen of the small town indicated that the “beautiful, refined” young woman had entered the police station to ask for help because she said she had been “molested” on the streets.34 The policemen and the media felt deceived: they, “as anyone else,” would have been betrayed in their encounter with such a seemingly vulnerable, pretty, young woman.
Links between deception and sexualized bodies were further emphasized in some particular actions that other young women performed. In 1971, for example, the most widely read newspaper in Argentina, La Razón (in its daily column titled “Guerrilla Chronicles”) informed its readers of the actions of a PRT-ERP cell geared to get cars and money. Reinforcing the spectacular traits of the actions, the report focused on the main character, “a blonde woman about twenty years old, beautiful face, wearing a sophisticated, modern outfit: red mini shorts with a red blouse.”35 The young woman had apparently dressed in the most sexual fashion possible, including mini shorts, which had elicited controversy regarding morality, nudity, and femininity.36 The young woman appropriated the mini shorts, which unexpectedly became a politicized tool aimed at generating surprise. The gas station employees where the young woman initiated the action, for example, told the reporters that they would surely have yelled piropos at her on the street. When they realized she was a guerrilla, they thought, “We cannot trust anyone, anymore.” The strategies of self-presentation that exploited the sexualized body pointed to both lure and neutralize potential male witnesses or “victims.”
These strategies suggested the quandaries that young women may have faced when coping with the bodily requirements of revolutionary militancy, since the hyperbolic uses of sexualized fashions spoke of the logics of the disguise. As Georg Simmel noted in his classic study of secret societies, the disguise marked the bifurcation of their participants’ self, torn apart between the values of the secret and those of the open society.37 The revolutionary groups that embraced armed struggle in Argentina were, in some respects, secret societies—literally, from 1969 to 1972, and then again after 1974, when they went clandestine. Navigating the secret/open divide involved the negotiation of gendered and sexual understandings for members of these organizations. They were negotiating through the logics of disguise. At a general level, both women and men disguised in the sense that the Brazilian guerrilla Carlos Mariguella mandated when he wrote that “the urban guerrilla is an expert at blending in with the masses. . . . He wears the same clothes as any street man, and has a full time job.”38 There are abundant examples of men crafting their public personas according to the stereotypes of physicians, workers, or policemen. Women, instead, either drew on “traditional” images (faking indicators of motherhood, passing as nurses) or, more prominently, focused on associating themselves with markers of desirability attached to the most commodified variants of feminine sexuality.39 The insistence on that disguise perhaps indicates not only a rational manipulation of sexual stereotypes for political purposes but also the persistence of well-entrenched ideals of sexual attractiveness among revolutionary militants: armed actions were the occasions for performing those sexualized roles and at the same time for serving the revolution.
Sex and Revolution
“Sex” and “revolution” were keywords of a larger lexicon of the 1960s and 1970s that included terms such as “emancipation” and “liberation.” Part of a transnational movement associated with emergent cultural and political actors (youth cultures, feminism, gay rights movements, to name just a few), the most radical variants of sexual revolutionaries questioned the patriarchal family, gender- and age-based inequality, and heteronormativity. In North America and some countries in Western Europe, the mobilization of feminists and gay liberation groups crystallized in new legislation such as the decriminalization of homosexuality and the legalization of abortion.40 In Latin America at large and Argentina in particular, these actors were less relevant for defining the connections of “sex” and “revolution.” Disentangling the contested meanings of those terms entails going beyond the bodies on display or in disguise. In fact, the condemnation of the commercial aspects of eroticism was the only point of agreement among gay rights activists, feminists, and “new leftist” groups. They differed notably, however, in arguing for the very plausibility of a “sexual” revolution alongside a social and national revolution, which most deemed as ongoing. However, more resilient than these raucous claims, a “discreet revolution” unfolded among youth at the time, consisting of the disengagement of sex and marriage.
The commercialization of sexuality and the market-oriented display of the female body were the most evident aspects of the transformation of Argentina’s sexual culture, representing a key concern for emergent feminisms. The Unión Feminista Argentina (UFA, Feminist Argentine Union), Movimiento de Liberación Femenina (MLF, Female Liberation Movement), and Muchacha, among others, aimed at revitalizing a movement that, in their view, had been dormant between the 1920s and the 1970s. All of these groups tried to build up horizontal organizations and create “consciousness-raising” groups similar to the ones in Europe and the United States.41 They also established personal ties with American feminists: they invited, for example, Socialist-feminist Linda Jenssen to give lectures in Buenos Aires, which resulted in the growing media visibility of the admittedly small local groups.42 With about fifty members in 1972, the MLF (like the UFA) recruited its members among middle-class adult women. Muchacha, instead, targeted secondary school and university students. Perhaps because its audience was presumed to be young, Muchacha’s first communiqué was titled “[We are] No [longer the] objects at the hands of men and society” and revolved around the need to struggle against the “oppression articulated through consumption and its mediations (advertising, women’s magazines, fashion).”43 Besides denouncing the inequality in educational and job opportunities between women and men as well as the degradation of “invisible” domestic work, Muchacha focused its criticism on the persistent sexual double standard and the “commercialization of women.”44
Short-lived, these groups had difficulties in creating a feminist network and in establishing alliances in a political milieu whose dominant actors were unwilling to recognize feminist claims as “political.” Unlike what happened with gay rights groups, feminist groups could not create a network and carried out just a few activities in common. For example, they went to the streets together only twice. In October of 1972, the groups agreed on the distribution of pamphlets to protest against the commercial and “idealizing” underpinnings of Mother’s Day, an occasion that also served to reiterate t
he claims for access to contraception, abortion, and day care systems. Two months later, the three most important groups promoted a protest at Femimundo, a fair of fashion and cosmetics dedicated to “the young woman.”45 Yet the rallies went almost unnoticed: sexual politics, and other feminist demands, seemed restricted in the political atmosphere of the early 1970s.46 A roundtable joining a member of Muchacha with two left-wing Peronist women illustrated that atmosphere. While the feminists strove to assert that by no means were feminist and Socialist struggles irreconcilable, Peronist women dominated the discussion, insisting that they were indeed incompatible: “in dependent countries,” they argued, “feminism and the much-propagandized sexual revolution are other ways in which neo-colonialism acts.”47 Most groups identified with the revolutionary Left used those terms to reject an overt inclusion of gender and sexual politics in their agendas, and they were applied to both feminist and gay rights groups.
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