Document generated on 09/28/2021 11:20 a.m. Cinémas Revue d'études cinématographiques Journal of Film Studies Bemberg’s Third Sex: Argentine Mothers at the Dawn of Democracy Bruce Williams Entre l’Europe et les Amériques Article abstract Volume 15, Number 1, Fall 2004 The early features of Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg, Momentos and Señora de nadie, underscore the deployment of an ideology of motherhood in URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/011662ar service of bourgeois social structure and military dictatorship. In these films, DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/011662ar Bemberg posits the institution as balancing between containment and rebellion, her protagonists confronting the traditional ideological role of See table of contents mother and asserting a stance against the repression of the waning dictatorship. Although entrenched in a conventional film discourse, these films set into motion the dynamics of diegetic radicalization which would define Bemberg’s subsequent work and would anticipate the redefinition of the social Publisher(s) domain of the feminine for post-democracy Argentina. Cinémas ISSN 1181-6945 (print) 1705-6500 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Williams, B. (2004). Bemberg’s Third Sex: Argentine Mothers at the Dawn of Democracy. Cinémas, 15(1), 125–144. https://doi.org/10.7202/011662ar Tous droits réservés © Cinémas, 2005 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Cinémas 15, 1 24/10/05 13:59 Page 125 Bemberg’s Third Sex: Argentine Mothers at the Dawn of Democracy Bruce Williams RÉSUMÉ Momentos et Señora de nadie, les premières œuvres de la réalisatrice argentine María Luisa Bemberg, mettent en évidence l’utilisation d’une idéologie de la maternité au profit d’une structure sociale bourgeoise et d’une dicta- ture militaire. Dans ces films, Bemberg considère l’insti- tution responsable du partage entre répression et rébel- lion, les protagonistes remettant en question le rôle idéologique traditionnel de la mère et prenant position contre la répression qu’exerce une dictature en déclin. Bien qu’ancrés dans un discours filmique traditionnel, ces films mettent en place les dynamiques de radicalisa- tion diégétique qui définiront les œuvres ultérieures de Bemberg, et anticipent la redéfinition du concept social du féminin au sein de l’Argentine post-démocratique. ABSTRACT The early features of Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg, Momentos and Señora de nadie, underscore the deployment of an ideology of motherhood in ser- vice of bourgeois social structure and military dictator- ship. In these films, Bemberg posits the institution as balancing between containment and rebellion, her pro- tagonists confronting the traditional ideological role of mother and asserting a stance against the repression of the waning dictatorship. Although entrenched in a conventional film discourse, these films set into motion the dynamics of diegetic radicalization which would define Bemberg’s subsequent work and would antici- pate the redefinition of the social domain of the femi- nine for post-democracy Argentina. Cinémas 15, 1 24/10/05 13:59 Page 126 “The maternal is merely the projection of the masculinist ver- sion of maternity-paternity in drag,” so argues Diana Taylor (1997, p. 77) in a probing analysis of the specific context of Argentina’s “dirty war” of the late 1970s, early 1980s. Under a military dictatorship, the feminine indeed becomes entrapped in the masculine, and in the case of Argentina, this process follows suit with a longstanding deployment of the maternal in the ser- vice of the patriarchal. For Taylor, the very word patria implies an ambivalent convergence; it is a feminine word in Spanish, yet makes clear reference to paternity. During the years of the mur- derous military junta, “nationhood became as much a physical territory as a longing for heroic transcendence, as much a vagi- nal space to be penetrated by the men of the navy . as an aspiration to male greatness” (Taylor 1997, pp. 77-78). Such a metaphor is moreover applicable to another act of aggression— Argentina’s 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands. Once again, the Spanish name for the islands, las Malvinas, is feminine, and la patria capitalized on the assault to deflect attention from the atrocities at home and to foster a renewed sense of nationalism. Yet the domain of the feminine, and more specifically, of the maternal, emerged during the “dirty war” as a unique cultural space; it turned back in a radical dynamic of resistance upon the regime that sought to contain it. The longstanding demonstra- tions of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, the Argentine White House, revealed the transforma- tive, politicized potential of maternity. Somberly clad and wear- ing scarves to suggest the traditional working-class iconography of motherhood, the women carried placards with photographs of their children who had disappeared during the brutal military regime. Motherhood as an institution had been torn asunder. Mothers were separated from their offspring by the very regime that venerated the traditional values of motherhood. During the twilight years of the dictatorship and the early period of democracy ushered in by the 1983 elections, Argentine cinema revealed a similar dynamics in its inscription of motherhood; the separation of motherhood from biology, the refutation of the maternal role, and the bereaved mother cum activist emerged as an increasingly popular motif. The 1980s 126 CiNéMAS, vol. 15, no 1 Cinémas 15, 1 24/10/05 13:59 Page 127 Argentine discourse on motherhood rewrites a turn-of-the-cen- tury notion of a “third sex,” comprised of women who remained unmarried due to such factors as emigration or who consciously chose to remain single (Taylor 1997, p. 41). In the case of the post-junta period, the new third sex is one which confronts and reconfigures motherhood in the same way its predecessors of some eighty years earlier reconfigured marriage. Inasmuch as the notion of motherhood is inseparable from the historical thread of national identity in Argentina, motherhood as an institution became a key tool of the cinema for debunking the fascist regime for which it once had stood as a bulwark. Such radical- ization of a traditional role can be evidenced in the films of María Luisa Bemberg, whose 1980 Momentos and 1982 Señora de nadie (Nobody’s Woman) daringly posit alternatives to the con- ventional Argentine paradigm of motherhood by laying bare the often suffocating narrative space of the maternal. Mother of the Regiment A few days following the 1930 coup in Argentina in which the ultra-right regime of General José F. Uriburu toppled the radical government of Hipólito Irigoyen, a group of celebratory mothers demonstrated in front of the presidential palace on Plaza de Mayo for what they termed the “restoration of political order,” claiming that they sought to contribute to the stabiliza- tion of the country through their traditional roles of “patriotic mothers and guardians of Catholic morality” (Carlson 1988, p. 170). This event was anticipatory of the mood of the ensuing dictatorship inasmuch as the mother-child dyad was frequently cited in political, legal, and medical contexts to support tradi- tional family roles. Such discourse on motherhood and the fam- ily had become key to the Argentine conservative agenda. As Asunción Lavrin (1995, p. 124) explains, “Mothers and their children were welded in a tight ideological unit that left mother- hood intact as the paramount role for the female sex. Women remained object and subject of the cult of motherhood.” Referring to the industrialized West at large, E. Ann Kaplan has identified three major economic/political/technical erup- tions that have evidenced changes in discourses on motherhood: Bemberg’s Third Sex: Argentine Mothers et the Dawn of Democracy 127 Cinémas 15, 1 24/10/05 13:59 Page 128 the Industrial Revolution, World War I, and the electronic revo- lution following World War II. While the first inaugurates “the early modern mother in the modern nuclear family” (Kaplan 1992, p. 17), the second challenges the nuclear family by women’s entry into the work-force during World War I and the first waves of female liberation in the 1920s. The third eruption, which refers to the engagement of middle-class women during the 1980s in full-time professional work, altered traditional family roles in significant ways. The involvement of men in the nurturing of children, new reproductive techniques, and moth- er-surrogacy challenged the old centrality of the mother. Kaplan (1992, p. 18) argues, “this final shift may be signaled by the concept of a ‘postmodern’ mother-construct, which usefully sig- nals the political and feminist ambiguities in relation to recent changes.” To draw the discussion back to Argentina, one must substitute Kaplan’s “eruptions” with pivotal moments in Argentine social history that fail to reveal the steady progression of the North American/European context, or in fact, display a process virtually the opposite. Such moments are engendered by and large by the nation’s military history, by its divergent fascist regimes, as well as by the unique face of Peronism. We must note that even turn-of-the-century liberal move- ments were to a certain extent palatable to patriarchy. As Lavrin (1995, p. 97) asserts, “the female professionals graduating from the universities in the first decade of the century won much support because they were dedicated to social problems that did not detract from their femininity and modeled acceptable social behavior.” Gains in education and the undertakings of the early higienista movement, despite a certain parallel with intellectual movements on the continent, remained tied to traditional dis- courses on the family.