Abstract
This chapter examines diverse performances of gendered family roles in works that counter bourgeois social imaginaries by conceptualizing the family as an institution of abuse and exploitation. The first section analyzes representations of women who take unconventional actions attempting to free themselves from violent male family members in Armando Discépolo’s Entre el hierro, José González Castillo’s La serenata, and Florencio Sánchez’s Marta Gruni. The next section addresses how F. Defilippis Novoa’s Los desventurados, Alberto Novión’s Los primeros fríos, Armando and Enrique Santos Discépolo’s El organito, and José González Castillo’s and Alejandro E. Berruti’s El camino del infierno reveal that material hardships and capitalist fantasies generated fractured and monstrous masculinities. The last section returns to Discépolo’s El relojero to suggest that when new alternatives for men and women are explored, their problematic endings underscore the absence of easy solutions for such precarious subjects of Argentina’s peripheral modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
Guy indicates that despite resistance to their employment, women sometimes benefited temporarily from depressions because they could be hired to work for less than their male counterparts (Guy 1991, p. 66). Consequently, women who left the home to seek employment threatened men’s ability to secure work and to fulfill their gendered role of sole breadwinner.
- 2.
Referencing works such as Dr. Carlos Carreño’s 1931 study of hazards for factory workers, La higiene en los talleres [Hygiene in Repair Shops], and Socialist senator Alfredo Palacios’s 1921 La fatiga y sus proyecciones sociales [Fatigue and Its Social Repercussions], Bergero describes in horrifying detail the effects of heat, humidity, and lack of air on factory workers, as well as the frequency of mutilating accidents and the precariousness of life for workers during this period (2008).
- 3.
As Bergero further elaborates, the imaginary of the femme fatale that was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite painters appeared with alarming frequency in the tangos and theaters of fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires as a “Satan…dressed in irresistible feminine clothing” (2008, p. 199). To explain the seeming paradox of the transgressive lifestyles of the men who depicted such seductive and dangerous women with the intention of protecting conventional norms for women, Bergero argues that “this sudden surge of Venus Victa, sirens, Circes, cobras, Salomes, and above all poisonous Medusas with unbearably glaucous eyes must be read in the context of the emergence of feminism—of women in the public sphere and of males who have ‘imploded’ or grown ‘weak’” (2008, p. 200).
- 4.
In this regard, we may understand the discourses around morality as struggles over invented traditions in response to the changes taking place in reality (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
- 5.
Sociedad Luz’s 1936 volume Educación sexual promoted such a critique of women’s dependency through essays like “Sabiduría de los padres,” written by US jurist Ben B. Lindsey, who was known for advocating controversial solutions like a trial or “companionate” marriage. In this essay he denounces the problem of “conjugal prostitution,” pointing out that only when both partners are economic equals will marriage cease to bear this form (Lindsey 1930, pp. 150–1).
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Garrett, V.L. (2018). Sex, Desire, and Violence. In: Performing Everyday Life in Argentine Popular Theater, 1890–1934. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92697-1_5
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