Unmasking the Ideology of the Dictatorial Discourse: Motherhood and the Family as Fundamental Institutions of the Nation

Abstract

The recent Argentine theatrical scene uncovers the ideology of the Dictatorship exhibiting the inconsistencies present in the discourse of the “Process of National Reorganization” and of the Argentine Catholic Church regarding motherhood. The two theatre pieces that this article will examine expose the existence of two opposing sex-affective systems, disguised by the explicit dictatorial discourse of the defense of values and the protection of family as an institution. The Dictatorship’s discourse acted as a concealing device for the violence it used. The recent Argentine theatre scene, through linguistic and visual metaphors, reveals that inconsistency and its role as a device for dominance and violence; this gave rise to a socio-political organization that is closely related to the ideal family model under the construction of a totalitarian, discriminatory and violent subjectivity. Susana Torres Molina’s La Fundación theatrically discovers the incoherence between the Dictatorship’s necropolitical practice and the references to the sacredness of motherhood and family explicited in its discourse, while Cocinando con Elisa, by Lucía Larragione, exhibits the power that motherhood invests and how it causes fear in those sectors that defend the status quo, which react by seeking to dissolve the threatening element: the mother and the maternal and family bond.