“Being Gorgeous is a Duty!”: Hegemony, Agency, and Visual Culture in Modern Argentina

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, in Argentina –as in much of the western hemisphere–, the female body was an arena to be disciplined. Ideal beauty standards demanded that women be slender, white, young, athletic, affirmatively feminine, modestly sexy, and show no signs of labor or the passage of time. Visual culture played a central role in cementing this canon and rendering non-conforming bodies invisible. This article examines how a hegemonic image of the female body was shaped and spread though popular culture in Argentina in the first half of the century. At the same time, it focusses on the ways in which these ideas were appropriated by those women not represented by this canonical gaze. Looking into the consumption and construction of working women’s appearance allows us to consider fashion and beauty practices as spaces of feminine subjectivity and agency. The case of Argentina constitutes a way to decenter the geography of fashion and beauty industry, to analyze not only the diffusion of models, with their patriarchal parameters and racial standards, but how this hegemony expressed its nuances in the different contexts.