By Diana Taylor

“De qué se reí Diana….O mejor dicho/ de que no se reí Diana?” the feminist playwright/cartoonist asks in her Manifesto 2000 of Feminine Humor. She answers her own question: “Diana laughs at all things serious.” But her laughter is serious. Her writing has got her into trouble since she was a child. She tells, laughing, of the time she was six, in first grade in Buenos Aires. She was chosen to recite her poem to Evita Duarte on the First Lady’s official visit to the school. As a reward, Evita gave Diana a bicycle, which the child proudly took home. Diana’s parents, avidly anti-Peronist, made her get rid of the bike. She took the bike to a friend’s house and continued to ride it secretly. Since then, art for her has always been linked to defiance.

Diana Raznovich’s trajectory as a playwright, which began in Buenos Aires when her first play won a theatre contest in 1967, has been characterized by humor, intelligence and unwavering defiance of delimiting social systems. She laughs at Argentina’s authoritarian military dictatorships--“the military and their medals” --at coercive economic systems, and at the far subtler but nonetheless restrictive systems of gender and sexual formation. “An educated woman,” she writes in her Manifesto, learns lessons in repression. Throughout her work, she indicates how the various systems interconnect in creating and manipulating desire even as they define, position, and control desiring bodies. As a playwright and a cartoonist, she uses her art to critique and transgress the restrictions imposed by her society, which have been considerable to say the least, for a Jewish, bisexual, Oscar Wildesque woman coming of age during the time of the Dirty War (1976-83).

Early in her career, Raznovich began defying Argentine theatrical norms. She rejected the ponderous realistic style so popular among her fellow dramatists. Plaza hay una sola, her second production, was a performance piece comprised of eight different scenes taking place simultaneously in a public park. The audience walked around, encountering a series of situations--a woman about to commit suicide, another person giving a speech from a soap-box and so on. The scene about the woman determined to commit suicide (a motif that runs from this first play to her most recent) illustrates the social forces that drive women to self-annihilation. The reporter, who follows her around the park videotaping her despair, tries to reassure her that life is worth living. He plays a heroic role in her ordeal until she starts believing him. As she decides that she can, in fact, go on with her life, he realizes that he’s lost his show. The question becomes how he can get her to commit suicide and still preserve both his show and his protagonist role in it.

Since the 1960s, Raznovich’s work both as a cartoonist and in the theatre has been marked by her sense of humor and her love of disruption, inversion, and the unexpected. But her career as a playwright was stalled when repeated threats on her life by the Armed Forces pressured Raznovich into exile in 1975, shortly before the military coup that initiated the Dirty War. She lived and worked in Spain, teaching dramaturgy in an independent theatre school until she returned to Argentina in 1981 to participate in the ‘Teatro Abierto’ (Open Theatre) festival.

Teatro abierto brought together dramatists, directors, actors and technicians—all of them black listed and fearing for their safety—to produce a cycle of one-act plays that demonstrated that Argentina’s artists had not succumbed to the dictatorship’s silencing tactics. How could she resist such an important act of collective defiance? Still, even this act of oppositional solidarity sought to control the range of ‘acceptable’ defiance—for several of the other committed playwrights found her contribution (the one act, one woman play El desconcierto/Disconcerted) to the ‘open’ and contestatory theatre cycle inappropriate. Who could possibly be interested in a play about a female pianist who can’t make sound come out of a piano in the context of the censorship and general silencing of the Dirty War? While Raznovich’s intentions were (and are) always to challenge and transgress repressive limits, it was not always in a manner that her more openly political colleagues could always understand or appreciate. Though she was asked to withdraw the play and submit another, she refused.[1] The military reacted more violently not just to her work but to the entire project, burning down the Picadero Theatre on the night that Disconcerted was presented.[2] Teatro abierto moved to another locale, and continued to stage its productions in the face of growing governmental opposition and growing popular support. Yet, some of her fellow artists “started saying that I was frivolous. I took it as a compliment. There was no permission for my stance or style, and I found it wonderfully transgressive.”[3]

Disconcerted, far from being frivolous, depicts a society caught up in the active production of national fictions—fictions that ultimately render all members of the population silent and complicitous. The pianist, Irene della Porta, is paid handsomely by her manager to play Beethoven’s Patetica on a piano that emits no sound.[4] The audience buys tickets to watch Irene wrench sounds out of nothingness: “It is as if the woman and the audience, although knowing that the Beethoven Sonata cannot be heard, were mysteriously capable of composing ‘this other non-existent concert’” reads the opening stage directions.[5] At the end of the play, the piano regains its sound as if by magic. But after so many silent concerts, Irene della Porta no longer knows how to make ‘real’ music. Desensitized fingers produce harsh, discordant notes. Shocked and defeated by her ultimate failure as an artist, she rejoices when the piano once again becomes mute.

On the most obvious level, Disconcerted is a critique of Argentine artists and audiences alike who were willing to go along with the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship, convincing themselves that, in fact, they were engaging in meaningful communication. What draws the members of the audience into the theatre night after night is, in part, a sharing of collective complicity that they can interpret as ‘resistance.’ Although they produce no sound, the reasoning seems to be that by their presence alone, audience members defy those who impose censorship and self-censorship.[6] The idea that public presence at a theatrical event functioned as an act of resistance in part underlay the entire Teatro Abierto project. The fact that thousands of people lined up to see plays “bajo vigilancia”[7] (under surveillance) was interpreted by the military leaders and by the population at large as an oppositional move.

Disconcerted, however, seems directed at those Argentines who were complicitous with the dictatorship and whose passivity in the face of governmental brutality made a new social order—the culture of terror—possible. The ‘show,’ far from being oppositional, is produced by the powerbrokers themselves. By their very presence and willingness to be part of the performance, the spectators contribute to the construction of a new community, one that is grounded in fictions. But the spectators do not recognize themselves in the scenario—they are blinded to their situation and think that the drama (which seemingly eludes them as the sound eludes Irene) is taking place someplace else. Yet this silencing and displacement was precisely what the Dirty War was all about.

The performative process of communal binding/blinding depicted by Raznovich points to two forms of gender violence. On one level, ‘femininity’ is a performance that Irene enacts on a daily basis. Clad in her low-cut, tight red gown and dripping with jewels she becomes the Other that the audience pays to see. She even speaks of herself in the third person, as Irene della Porta, as a commodity who has agreed to play along with her objectification and degradation because she gets some tangible benefits out of it: “Endless years of comfort by agreeing to be Irene della Porta playing silently” (569). Raznovich presents gender as performative, much along the lines developed by Judith Butler in her early writings: “gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”[8] Few roles available to women in patriarchy offer any visibility—the ‘star’ being one of them. But, the ‘star,’ as Irene explicitly notes, embodies the male spectators’ desires. It is ‘Woman’ as a projection of patriarchal fantasies that performs on-stage. She no longer recognizes herself in the mirror—there is no ‘self’ to recognize.

On another level, the project of community building undertaken by the junta is also gendered. From the beginning, the junta made explicit that state formation was inextricable from gender formation. In its first pronouncement, published in La Nación on the day of the military golpe on March 24, 1976, the Junta declared itself the “supreme organ of the Nation” ready to “fill the void of power” embodied by Perón’s widow, “Isabelita,” Argentina’s constitutional president. The maternal image of the “Patria” was both the justification for and the physical site of violent politics. The very term ‘Patria,’ which comes from Padre or “father,” does not mean fatherland in Spanish but rather the image of motherland framed through patriarchy. There is no woman behind the maternal image invoked by the military. Yet the feminine image (Patria, Irene della Porta) serves a real function in community building by uniting all those who imagine themselves bound or loyal to her. However, the ‘feminine’ is only useful to the power brokers as long as she remains an image without real agency. As such, ‘she’ gives the spectators their identity. Just as the Armed Forces defined ‘true’ Argentines by virtue of their loyalty to the Patria (and by extension, to the Armed Forces as her defenders), Irene della Porta’s fans form an “imagined community” through their relationship to her: “Who am I? Who are you?” The nature of this community building is circular—the feminine image is the creation of the patriarchal order, but ‘she,’ in turn, gives birth to the nation’s image of itself. So too, Irene della Porta candidly admits that she is the creation of her fans: “[they] have made me what I am today. But, who am I?” And yet, her tenuous, rehearsed ‘identity’ unites the audience. [FIGURE: RAZ 6]

While the woman ‘disappears’ in the image of Patria, Raznovich will not allow her audience to overlook the misogynist violence of this community-building discourse. Her character makes it clear that what draws the audience to the theatre is also the ‘show’ of public humiliation that Irene della Porta performs on a nightly basis. The themes of collective complicity, silencing and disempowerment are played out on the exposed and humiliated body of ‘Woman’: “What do you want of me? (Suddenly she opens her dress and begins to disrobe). Do you want to unravel hidden truths? Do you want to see me without any more disguises? (She disrobes down to her underclothes.) [...] Now that you see me this way, stripped down to my teeth, do you know more about me than before? [...] Does my nakedness bring success? What is a naked woman? A skeleton out in the open covered with a fragile vital membrane?” As a feminist, Diana Raznovich understood an aspect of the cultural production of community and silencing that other playwrights reproduced but failed to recognize—that the social pact between power brokers and complicitous audiences is being negotiated (both in the military discourse and in ‘art’) on the body of ‘Woman.’ The audience searches for its identity in her bodily interstices and looks for ‘truth’ on her naked flesh. Her body functions as a text on which the community’s fate is inscribed.

Disconcerted paradoxically signals both the failure and power of art in the context of the Dirty War. The play’s presentation of Irene della Porta’s body as exposed rather than naked and the grotesque sounds emanating from the piano defies the aesthetization of violence and the commodification of culture even as it portrays it. Raznovich decries the fetishizing even as Irene della Porta succumbs to it. Her play is a work of ‘committed art’ even as it laments the non-existence of such a thing. As Theodor Adorno noted in the late 1960s, “A work of art that is committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle pastime for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them, in an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.”[9] Diana Raznovich makes clear that non-committed, evasive art during periods of social catastrophe helps constitute and cement a culture of terror in which people ultimately lose their capacity for real insight. Even if restrictions were suddenly lifted, and the piano magically regained its sound, those involved in the production of fiction would not be able to re-establish real communication.

Diana Raznovich’s opposition to the limits imposed by the oppositional “left” itself, however, went beyond issues of her personal dramatic style. As a feminist, she objected to what she saw as the all-male nature of Teatro Abierto, made evident not only in the content of the almost entirely male authored and directed plays, but in the decision to stage Teatro Abierto at Tabarís after the burning of the Picadero. As before, Teatro Abierto started early, at 6:30 P.M. At night, the Tabarís continued its regular programming—a cabaret featuring scantily dressed show girls and livened up with misogynist jokes. When women in Teatro Abierto complained about housing their politically ‘progressive’ and oppositional theatre event in that location, they were overruled. The argument was that Teatro Abierto would ‘subvert’ the space and give it new meaning. But rather than ‘subvert’ the space of feminine degradation, Teatro Abierto decided to exploit it to ensure its own survival and continuity. The military males, who frequented the cabaret during its regular hours, would be less likely to destroy a space they associated with their own pleasure. This strategy of protecting political content behind or within the context of female sexual exploitation was not new to the period.[10] But the consequence, of course, was that gender inequality and female sexual exploitation could never be the topic of analysis since the transmission of the political message was seen as contingent on their continuing exploitation. Thus, Teatro Abierto set up a situation in which theatre goers, prepared to find a critique of their repressive society, would have to walk past the posters of semi-naked women to get into the theatre. The juxtaposition of the political event against the semi-nude female body reproduced the visual strategies used by pro-military magazines (such as Gente) that superimposed headlines of the atrocious events of the Dirty War on the female bodies in bikinis that graced half of their covers. Again, the female was reduced to pure body and backgrounded as the site of violence and political conflict. The female subject could lay no claim to political participation or to non-exploitative representation—she served as the scenario on which the struggle between men—political agents—could take place.

The struggle for a feminist playwright in Argentina during the Dirty War, then, was far more complicated than taking an anti-military stand—dangerous and heroic though that was in itself. It meant taking on not just the brutal regime but the Argentine imaginary, that imagined sense of community that defines ‘Argentine-ness’ as a struggle between men—fought on and over the ‘feminine’ (be it the symbolic body of the Patria or Motherland, Irene della Porta, or the physical body of a woman). The violence against women, both in fact and in representation, went beyond a straightforward ‘left’/’right’ divide. Thus this meant taking on the ‘progressive’ authors who themselves depicted the construction of national identity as predicated on female destruction. Even plays by progressive male artists that were intended as a critique of the macho military male still needed the woman’s naked body to express its objections and engage its audience.

In one of those examples of ironic inversions that Diana Raznovich is so fond of, the Dirty War ended, the military was more or less chastened, the rulers changed, and she still had plenty to laugh about. Unlike several important Argentine dramatists who could identify and address the evils of military dictatorship but who did not understand that the coercive system (not just the leaders) had to change, Raznovich had just begun to write about oppression in relation to issues of gender and sexuality that had so totally eluded most of her colleagues. Her brilliant plays, Inner Gardens (Jardin de otoño,1983), MaTrix, Inc (Casa Matriz,1991) and Rear Entry (De atras para adelante,1995), continue to explore the feminist premise that desire is created and constrained through the scopic and economic systems that supposedly only represent it, that gender and sexuality are performative, and that subjectivity is socially constructed. Just as the star-role enacted by Irene della Porta was a product of a patriarchal system that profited both economically and politically from her ability to make a spectacle of her humiliation, the other roles and sexual choices available to women were similarly produced.

In Inner Gardens, Raznovich shifts her examination of these constraining systems of gender and sexual formation to the telenovela or soap opera so popular in Latin America. Soap operas, too, of course are in the business of producing fictions. Like the silent concert staged by Irene della Porta’s manager, the telenovela is controlled by the power-broker behind the scenes—here the odious Gaspar Mendez Paz, the producer. The consumers of these fictions, like the audience in Disconcerted, live with the fantasy that they are actually opposing those in authority by participating in some romantic battle against the status quo, even as they submissively surrender themselves to the screen. The main characters of the play—two middle aged women who have lived together for twenty years named Griselda and Rosalia—spend every afternoon in front of the television passionately involved in the ups and downs of their adored hero, Marcelo-the-mechanic. Though lowly, rough speaking, and dressed in greasy overalls, he challenges the social barriers that separate him from the lovely, upper class, and engaged-to-another Valeria, the girl of his dreams. And the women live the drama with him, consumed with passionate intensity. Will the girl’s father have him thrown in jail? Will he end up dying there? This, as one of the women points out, is a “modern” soap opera, which means that things could turn out badly for the hero—no happy endings guaranteed. The telenovela, like the silent concert, provides these spectators with the fiction that they are participating in a [erotic] life that eludes their grasp. [FIGURE: RAZ 2]

On one level, though perhaps not the principal one, the play engages the debates surrounding the political dimension of popular culture. Do the soaps, one of the best examples of popular culture on a massive level of production and consumption, instill an anti-popular ideology in its audiences, making them desire values and worldviews that reflect the industry’s interests rather than their own class interests? While the telenovelas might not overtly intend to control its audience (unlike the concert in Disconcerted), the product bears the ideological stamp of its producers. As John Fiske puts it, “every commodity reproduces the ideology of the system that produced it: a commodity is ideology made material.”[11] The simple David vs. Goliath plot of the soap opera seemingly confronts social bias (specifically class conflict). While the woman cheer their idol onto triumph, and hope that social barriers will simply evaporate, they certainly are not going to do anything about the problem. They may not even be aware of class conflict as a social problem, especially when they personalize it by concluding that the rich girl’s Daddy is a “rotten old man” and that the rude producer “hates the viewers.” The most they can do is call the producer and, as loyal viewers, demand that those in charge work out a satisfactory ending. Thus, the anti-soap argument goes, these programs encourage the working classes (who make up the bulk of the viewing audience for these shows) to dream about triumphing in a social structure that, in fact, is predicated on their exclusion.

Inner Gardens does not endorse this ‘anti-popular’ position outright. There is an element of playfulness in the way the women participate in the drama that supports Carlos Monsivais’s contention (shared by other analysts of popular culture such as Fiske, Rowe and Schelling) that popular audiences find a way to resemanticize cultural materials provided from above. Monsivais argues that “collectivities without political power or social representation … sexualize melodrama, extract satirical threads from black humor, enjoy themselves and are moved emotionally without changing ideologically…. The subaltern classes accept, because they have no alternative, a vulgar and pedestrian industry, and indisputably transform it into self-indulgence and degradation, but also into joyful and combative identity.”[12]

Monsivais’ contention that the subaltern viewers can engage ‘emotionally’ without ‘changing ideologically’ is the problematic crux of the issue—and the one the play most lucidly dismantles. But, in order to argue this point, I need to provide some more plot summary. Griselda and Rosalia, the two ‘old maid’ types, desire, long for, love and feel intensely, but they have no adequate outlet for this love. Griselda writes poetry and talks to her plants, Rosalia goes to the fortune-teller, hoping against hope that some handsome man will appear in her future. Meanwhile, they spend the afternoons lusting for Marcelo-the-mechanic, kissing the screen and wishing they were the adored woman in the picture. One day, they decide to kidnap Marcelo and live out their fantasy, even if they have to die afterward. So they do, and the play goes on to show their increased frustration as the star disappoints them. He is not the simple, good, honest, hardworking boy they’ve grown to love on the series. He is charming and nice, but far more complicated than they anticipated. He can’t make passionate love to them, as they had dreamed, though the women can’t seem to figure out why. Maybe he’s impotent, they ask each, maybe he’s gay. Well, maybe he’s not gay but rather homosexual. What’s the difference, they wonder, though they feel there probably must be some. And on they go until they discover he lightens and perms his hair and that he uses make-up. The ‘real’ man is more artificial, they feel, than the ‘real’ Marcelo on TV. So they turn the soap opera back on and let the actor find his own way home. The ‘real’ is a poor substitute for fantasy. They seem comfortable back in their world of safe, predictable, honest, ‘real’ illusion. So, this, it seems, illustrates Monsivais’ point that the viewers can engage emotionally and disengage ideologically.

However, it seems to me that Inner Gardens is specifically concerned with the constraints imposed on emotional and sexual expression by dominant systems of representation that not only reproduce scenes of desire (Marcelo and Valeria) but demarcate their limits. These systems of signification (for soap operas are not just products but systems) do not, I believe, offer as much space for resemanticization as one might like to believe. The ‘real’ love story going on here is not between Marcelo and Valeria but between Griselda and Rosalia. They live together; they love each other; they share a rich, funny, tumultuous domestic relationship; they cannot imagine life without each other. Yet, they have never been permitted to envision their relationship as anything beyond the banal labels that they have available: “my friend, my housemate—my tenant let’s say.” The idealized male soap-opera star serves to channel and contain the love and desire between them. Their desire circulates through him. Griselda’s most acute sensation when she is watching “the best episode of the year,” the one in which Marcelo kisses Valeria and admits he’s “got it bad” for her, is the feeling of disappointment that Rosalia is not there to watch it with her. This love on the screen is to be shared by them, even though they have momentary snits when each claims the divine Marcelo for their own. Thus, the soaps, as a dominant system of signification, validate certain forms of love while making others unthinkable. Class barriers might be the subject matter of the telenovela, but it cannot (yet) question the barriers that make heterosexual love the norm. Griselda and Rosalia, not surprisingly, are as blind to the nature of their desire as the society that created them. They can tell each other they love each, they can look at each other intently, hold each other and admit they cannot live apart, but only the fantasy of heterosexual passion allows them to do so without assuming the weight and shame too often ascribed to homosexuality. The women simply displace their passion onto the handsome movie star. The story of their lives isn’t theirs—it’s taking place on T.V.; their love for each other (which they allude to repeatedly) isn’t theirs—it’s happening between Marcelo-the-mechanic and the lovely, rich, engaged-to-another Valeria. The women can own their passionate intensity every afternoon precisely because they don’t have to recognize it as theirs. Towards the end of Act One, in one of the saddest moments of the play, the women pray for forgiveness for the life they haven’t lived:

Forgive me for what I haven’t done.

Forgive me for what I haven’t had.

Forgive me for what I haven’t taken.

Forgive me for what I haven’t felt.

Forgive me for not laughing enough.

Forgive me for not using up my tears.

The plot of Inner Gardens illustrates that emotionally, as well as ideologically, social subjects are produced and delimited by the very systems that, in theory, are there to excite desire. But the play also inverts the paradigm that positions the ‘feminine’ as the object of desire that serves to stabilize a male dominated community that Raznovich depicted in Disconcerted. In that play, the audience becomes a ‘community’ as it comes together to applaud Irene della Porta. In Inner Gardes, however, there is a more explicit sexual dimension to the mediation that, I have argued, is central to Argentina’s social imaginary. Again, we see the case of the triangulation of desire—channeling of erotic intensity through a safe symbol of either feminine or masculine sexuality that allows for proximity without incurring the stigma of a society as homophobic as the Argentine one. Yet, that triangulation is pivotal, both to the lives of these two spinsters as to the gendering of the nation as a whole. As I submitted in Disappearing Acts, “The feminine nation, or Patria, mediated the autoeroticism of the military’s performance. The armed forces obsessively conjured up the symbolic Woman to keep their homosocial society from becoming a homosexual one. The military men came together in the heterosexual language of ‘love’ of the Patria” (68-69).[13] Whether it’s the Patria, Irene della Porta, or Marcelo-the-mechanic, the discourse of passion circulates through a rigidly monitored economy of heterosexual love.

In her next play, Diana Raznovich extends her exploration of the ‘substitute’ and the supposedly ‘real’ (is Mariano anymore or less ‘real’ to these women than the actor who plays him?) to the social enactment of roles in general. Coming as she does from a society that values the ‘mother’ almost to the exclusion of all other women, it seems inevitable that she would choose that one. MaTRIX, Inc., a full length one-act play, depicts a ‘daughter,’ Gloria, who hires a ‘mother’ from an agency specializing in that service. The two women rehearse a series of roles. [FIGURE Raz 4] They range from the traditional long-suffering mother so popular in much Latin American literature, to the professional mother who jets around the world; from the cold, rejecting mother, to the transgressive one who vies with her daughter for the lesbian lover. Each ‘mother,’ of course, elicits a different ‘daughter’, and Gloria undergoes a series of transformations as she pouts, demands satisfaction, cries, begs for love and orders the substitute mother to give her her money back. Motherhood, so long essentialized as the natural condition that alone justifies the existence of women in Latin America is exposed as not only as a patriarchal construct, but as a commercial one as well. When the ‘substitute’ mother is asked to play ‘the long suffering mother,’ for example, she states that this is her most sought-after role: “Everyone, absolutely everyone needs to see me in the most menial state of servitude.” The show of female submission, just as in Disconcerted, continues to be a best-seller. Yet, the brilliance of the play lies in the performative distance that Raznovich establishes between the enactment and that absent referent that one supposes to be ‘the real.’ But even ‘the real’ is destabilized through the highly theatrical nature of the iterations. As the ‘substitute mother’ makes a show of crying that produces ‘real’ tears, she asks her ‘daughter’ to touch them: “You could not ask for a more tragic effect. I am the Suffering Mother par excellence. Dressed in black, cleaning, crying [...] Look at these enormous tears!”[14] Thus, the idea of ‘the real’ only lends weight to the representation—and not the other way around. That is, the show does not ‘represent’ the real—as in Aristotelian logic. Rather, ‘the real’ is produced through these constant enactments. So, too, the ‘substitute mother’ signals the constructed quality of the ‘real’ mother, that woman whose claim to identity and visibility depends on her ability to be a quick change artist—to be all things to all people. The motherhood role so lucidly deconstructed by Raznovich is crucial because it has both severely limited and afforded visibility to Argentine women as different as Evita ( the ‘mother’ of the Argentine homeland), to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As women they had no claim to power or redress but as mothers, symbolic or political, they launched the most visible political movements headed by women of their times. Only as mothers could they speak in a way that their fellow citizens could hear them. But the reality lies in the act itself—Evita never had children; the Madres, privately accepting the death of their own children, claimed to be the mothers of all the disappeared. Motherhood, thus, shifts from the realm of the biological to that of the socio-political. The efficacy of the role, then, lies not in its ‘natural’ essence but in its performance. And, in the ‘intimacy’ of the rental agency, Gloria pays the ‘substitute’ to produce real anguish and tears.

The economy of the ‘substitute’ normally serves to bolster the ‘real,’ for what would a ‘substitute’ mean, what possible function could it have if it did not replace, stand in for or somehow link up with the ‘real’? But the notion of the real, so privileged by the deployment of the ‘substitute’ is exactly what becomes shaken in this enactment. The ‘real,’ rather, is produced through the capitalist market system that trades in desires and emotions. Rather than allowing us to buy into the seemingly natural Mother/Daughter experience, to idealize it or psychologize it, Raznovich leaves all the performative strings showing. The set reminds us that the scene of the natural is highly produced, and that somewhere in the background of this (and perhaps every) fantasy, entrepreneurs continue to control the staging.

Nowhere is the complicated interconnection between the ‘act’ and the ‘real,’ between the performative and the so-called ‘natural’ more highlighted, than in Diana Raznovich’s De atras para adelante. Structured as a more conventional three-act comedy, this play is about a wealthy Jewish businessman, Simon Goldberg who comes on hard times as his bathroom and plumbing industry goes bankrupt. Everyone is in a tizzy—the young wife, the married daughter, the son-in-law—as the business and the fortune seem, literally, to be going down the drain. Simon, who cannot bare strong doses of reality, crumples in a faint/feint. Mariana, the daughter, insists they contact Javier, her wealthy brother whom Simon threw out of the house a decade ago when he found him in bed with Mariana’s fiancé. Help comes but, as always with Raznovich, not in the way that one recognizes or expects. On-stage comes the lovely Dolly—AKA Javier, a transsexual, who is now a gorgeous and loving woman with a husband and three daughters. Dolly saves the business by convincing Argentines that they love colored toilet paper (and that their bottoms deserve no less) but she has more trouble convincing her homophobic father that she deserves his love and support as his transsexual son/daughter, Dolly—not as Dolly, whom Simon is prepared to adore but only if she pretends that she is Javier’s wife.

Clearly, the issues posed here go far beyond the ideas of gender as performative posited both by Disconcerted and MaTRIX, Inc.. Gender, of course, is still performative, still an ‘act’ that the body comes to perfect over time, through the rigorous course of socialization. But the figure of the transsexual challenges the notion that sex (male/female) is ever a stable marker. What sex is Javier/Dolly? How can we even begin to think about, leave alone define, sexual difference? Does ‘difference’ lie in the reproductive organs (so that Javier ‘dies’ as Dolly comes to life)? Or does it lie in the hormones, or in the DNA? Are women (as in the Dirty War) no more than the ‘enemy’ or ‘dangerous’ other in a binary system founded on the sexual divide, part of a male/female dialectic as thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir suggest? Or, as the figure of Irene della Porta implies, are women simply the projection of masculinist fantasies and prohibitions in a closed system whose only referent is male, a monologic system or singular phallic order that denies that there even is an other. If so, female subjects are forever linguistically absent and unrepresentable. Does this absence signal the limits of discursive formations themselves and suggest perhaps the possibility of a negotiated existence between discourses, in the margins and fractures? Or does it put in doubt the material existence of real historical beings, situated in discursive formations that erase them? If subjectivity is produced by the entry into culture, as theorists such as de Bouvoir, Foucault, de Lauretis and Butler have argued,[15] then it is gendered and, more specifically gendered from the monologic male position in a closed system of self-reference. There are many absences here—the discursive absence of the ‘feminine’ in a masculinist imaginary; the absence of real, historical women in protagonistic roles in Argentina; the absence of the material bodies of the women who were permanently ‘disappeared’ from the political landscape.

The disappearance of Javier inverts the system that erases women as linguistic and protagonistic subjects. Dolly becomes visible—and so does the seeming cultural impossibility: a man socialized in a masculinist society like Argentina’s may in fact choose to be a “woman.” Sex is not a static given. Javier will always be a part of Dolly, as perhaps Dolly was always a part of Javier. Sexual identity isn’t simply an either/or—mark the M or the F. As Mariana says after she and Dolly go through their old costume box and perform some of the routines they acted out as children, “I think there are three of us, Mariana, Javier and Dolly.” There is no immutable ‘real’ that engenders a series of acts—but a series of acts that construct the ‘real.’ These performances including those linguistic performances that J.L. Austin’s refers to when he writes about speech acts that effect change.[16] Social systems only give permission for two acceptable performances of gender to be seen, and these are marked as dominant (masculine) and subordinate (feminine) in a myriad of ways. Language (in this case Spanish) also genders all nouns, and also subsumes the subordinate into the dominant. The duo, made up of Mariana and Javier, was called “Los hermanos Goldberg” (the Goldberg Brothers), a name that erased distinctions between the two. Now, the male Javier has disappeared behind the feminine Dolly, erasing all visual traces of his presence in her as the “Goldberg Brothers” erased the presence of Mariana. Thus, identities disappear and re-appear (more or less violently) through a whole series of systems—be they political and linguistic disappearances or through systems that dictate the appropriate enactments of gender and sexuality.

Raznovich’s most recent play, From the Waist Down (1999) included in this volume, continues her ferocious ridicule of the construction of sexual identity and practice in Argentina. As night after night Eleonora sits awake, lamenting the lack of sexual activity in their marriage, Antonio snores placidly and dreams of investments. Antonio represents those stereotypical Latin American males whose bonds to their mothers run so deep that literally nothing separates them. The only night of the year that Antonio can make love to his wife is on his mother’s birthday—an homage to her. As the three of them end up in bed together, Eleonora realizes that she is the intruder in the erotic relationship. Once again, the woman and her right to sexual pleasure ‘disappear’ from the scenario. Eleonora’s attempt at suicide, albeit ridiculous, underlines the fact that even after the fall of the dictatorship, she, like Irene della Porta, continue to perform in a space of impossibility. There is simply no room for certain kinds of women (independent, sexual, non-maternal) in the social imaginary.

In From the Waist Down, the set (Antonio and Eleonora’s bedroom) links the six short acts, marking the interconnections between sex, capitalism, and militarism. In each scene, Eleonora, Antonio, and his mother (Paulina), try strategies either to enhance the couple’s sexual activity or, failing that, the illusion of sexual activity. In Act Two, Paulina takes charge of Antonio’s overdue sexual education. Eleonora finds to her disappointment that Antonio’s newly found theoretical grasp of sex does not involve a practical component. In Act Three, the sexologist that Eleonora hired turns out to be an ex-torturer making a new profession for himself after the fall of the dictatorship. Antonio proudly dons the macho gear he bought from the ex-torturer and chases Eleonora, forced into the outfit of an Egyptian slave, around the room with a whip. In Act Four, Eleonora and Antonio are back in bed, both in body casts from beating each other up. They discuss divorce as Paulina comes to inform them that they have become national sex symbols. A new business looms ahead, and Paulina asks to represent them. In Act Five, the bedroom has transformed into a temple of sadomasochism. The bed is turned upwards, like a torture-rack, and Eleonora, still in her slave outfit, hangs from the chains. Antonio pretends to brutalize her as an American Photographer asks for gorier, more sadist poses. Paulina holds journalists from the national press from banging down the door as they demand access for their national, popular, and patriotic brand of sadomasochism. Wasn’t the “Dirty War” –with its scenes of torture and rape—Argentine, after all? The closing scene, “Happy Ending,” leaves Eleonora crying, though resigned, to life of celibacy. Even their annual lovemaking ritual in honor of Paulina has disappeared. Though their sex life is non-existent, business is good. The fiction of erotic intensity proves more viable and marketable than any ‘real’ sexual relationship possibly could. The final moment shows Eleonora, Antonio, and Paulina joined in their misery and success.

Once again, Diana Raznovich insists that the fantasies that sustain the social imaginary in Argentina continue to be deeply misogynist and militaristic. While on the surface, Argentina exudes an air of glittering prosperity and cosmopolitanism, from the waist down things remain the same. The prevailing politics of repression, which had so conveniently been located and contained in the “dictatorship,” in fact go far deeper. The dictatorship is over, but the population has internalized the violence of a century of authoritarian domination. The childishness of the sexual education of Antonio depicted in the second act does not allow the viewer to conclude that this training is harmless. The words that Antonio associates with male and female genitals—‘rods’ and ‘boobs’—have a militaristic overture, especially following the period of the ‘Dirty War’ in which relatively innocent words became euphemisms for brutal practices. The violent fantasies that sustain the ‘macho’ link him to the torturer. Instead of annihilating ‘others,’ the post-dictatorship torture helps wanna-be machos annihilate their very own ‘others’—their partners. Now, however, in this newly re-democratized society that tries to distance itself from its past, the violence gets cast in terms of consent. Both partners, willing and armed, enter the fray. In reality, however, the consensual paradigm of S/M hides the same misogynist structure of power. Only now, the body of the violated woman which sustained the military discourse during the ‘Dirty War,’ has gone ‘global.’ National and international commercial and voyeuristic interests are being fought out on her exposed body. The photographer from the U.S. demands a dramatic show of violence, while the Argentine national press calls for equal access for “national and popular” sadomasochistic publications. The tortured body of ‘Woman’ is one more commodity circulating in an increasingly global system of representations that creates the very violence it claims to denounce. While Diana Raznovich had called attention to the culture of fiction and displacement that reigned during the “Dirty War,” this play shows that not much has changed. Women continue to function as ‘hinge’ figures in all sorts of different scenarios that deny them subjectivity. Eleonora (like Irene della Porta) serves as the ‘hinge’ between the male and his mother, the male and his homosocial society, the private and the public, eroticism and torture, love and business, the national and the international market. Little wonder that both Antonio and Paulina tell Eleonora to get back into bed. The fantasy can’t function without her.

Is Diana Raznovich’s representation of these violent systems appropriate? Perhaps the word “appropriate” sums up the normalizing code of admissible behavior that Diana Raznovich so riles, jokes, and warns against. The military junta imposed and enforced rules governing appropriate behavior; the opposition dictated the terms of appropriate resistance. Society demands that citizens act their gender and sex appropriately. Economic systems—television, advertising and so forth—tell us what sells and what doesn’t, what cultural products can enter the market and which will be excluded (no censorship here, they say, they just aren’t ‘marketable’). And the way the appropriate becomes the normalized relates to desire. One of the challenges that faces authoritarian governments is that they must teach the population to desire a nebulous higher good (national unity, or a passionate defense of the motherland, for example) so that people will accept civil restrictions (i.e., loss of personal liberties—the right to vote, organize, strike, protest, etc.). Those who refuse to desire what they’ve been asked to are figuratively or literally ‘disappeared’ as citizens. Capitalist economic systems not only create desire and fulfill it by supplying the desired commodity but, as Marx argued, they erase the human labor that went into production. The worker disappears, leaving only the object whose worth lies not in its production value, but in its exchange value. Gender and sexual identities are produced and reproduced in similar economies. The male occupies the position of producer and consumer while the female’s worth rests in her exchange value. As star and as torture victim, she embodies the male fantasy to the mutual benefit of producer and consumer. As the ideal mother, she performs her act of servitude—an act, that Raznovich observes, is greatly in demand. As a ‘good’ woman, she embraces denial and accepts life without sex, life without laughter. The efficacy of these enactments, of course, depends on their naturalization—that is, on people’s willingness to see them as both normative and desirable. Those who fail to participate in the desirability of this socially constructed desire also disappear into some other category reserved for the ‘deviants’ and gender benders. And what is more violent, Diana Raznovich seems to ask in her humorous, provocative work—the self-inflicted violence of the one who tries to squeeze into appropriate norms? Or the other-inflicted violence (ranging from disappearance to ostracism) visited on those who fail to comply? There are different kinds of violence, different kinds of repression. A playwright like Diana Raznovich who sees the interconnection between the different kinds of systemic violence has her work cut out for her. However, to invert the normative, she turns to comedy. Humor is subversive; it is capable of challenging and unsettling the norm. “I wish people understood how subversive humor really is,” Raznovich says. “You can say a lot more with laughter than with tragedy.” So she goes on being ‘frivolous,’ defiant, and transgressive as she keeps on laughing.

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[1] Raznovich-Taylor Interview, Dartmouth College, Sept 1994.

[2] Juana A. Arancibia and Zulema Mirkin, "Introducción" to Teatro Argentino durante el proceso (Buenos Aires: Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico, 1992, pg. 21).

[3] Raznovich/Taylor Interview, Buenos Aires, 1994.

[4] I have written about this play extensively elsewhere, especially in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. However, a brief overview of the work is important here to lay the basis for Raznovich’s subsequent work.

[5] All translations from Raznovich's plays are by Victoria Martínez, unless otherwise noted. El Desconcierto was published as Disconcerted in The Literary Review, Summer 1989, Vol. 32, number 4, pg 568-572.

[6] It is interesting to note that muteness and public silence were interpreted both as an act of complicity and an act of resistance during the Dirty War. On the one hand, those who did not speak out against government brutality enabled the criminal practices of abduction, disappearance and torture to continue. However, not speaking was also seen as a heroic defiance against a system that demanded conformity, just as it was seen as defiance against the torturer who demanded 'information' during the act of torture.

[7] This is the term used by Miguel Angel Giella to describe Teatro Abierto in his study/anthology: Teatro Abierto, 1981: Teatro Argentino Bajo Vigilancia (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1991).

[8] Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Construction" in Sue-Ellen Case's edition, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: Juans Hopkins University Press, 1990, pg. 277) See also Butler's Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993.)

[9] Theodor Adorno, "Commitment" in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977, pg. 177).

[10] The eminent film maker Adolfo Aristarain, who directed Time for Revenge in 1981, admitted to doing the same. He included long and unnecessary sexual scenes in the film, he explained in an interview with Annette Insdorf, "'so the censors took five days and questioned things--not politics or ideology, but sex. All I had to do was cut a few frames at the end of some scenes, like one of a strip-tease. It doesn't hurt the scenes--especially if you made them longer than they should have been,' he said with a knowing smile" (Annette Insdorf, "Time for Revenge: A Discussion with Adolfo Aristarain," Cineaste 1983: 16-17, pg. 17).

[11] John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture. London, New York: Routledge 1989.

[12] Quoted in William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso, 1991.

[13] Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War.’ Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

[15] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980) and Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. Bloomingdale: Indiana U.P.(DATE) and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).

[16] J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

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