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La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8898431

1527-1900

Silvana A. Palermo,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

National symbols aspire to be timeless and uncontroversial. For Argentina, whose fertile grasslands transformed the country into the world's breadbasket in the late nineteenth century, the gaucho, a nomadic horseman familiar with rural labors and the pampas' loneliness, emerged as the emblem of nationhood. A booming scholarship has demonstrated that, far from traditional, this stylized image of the gaucho was invented precisely when the rural landscape was moving to commercial agriculture and modern cattle production and when local elites confronted the challenge of making a nation out of a multinational society marked by thousands of European immigrants. In that boisterous era, writers and intellectuals enshrined the gaucho as the main character of renowned novels and popular dramas alike. Thus, by the early twentieth century, this masculine folk hero became the nation's official symbol, both at home and abroad.Cecilia Tossounian invites us to rethink this account by using gender as a concept of historical analysis. Her carefully researched book poses a seemingly straightforward but challenging question: Could this young nation have been represented by a female figure? She demonstrates that the joven moderna, the modern young girl described and depicted throughout the weekly magazines, penny novels, and movies of the nascent local film industry in the 1920s and 1930s, deserves equal standing with the gaucho in Argentina's pantheon of tradition. Tossounian's study commendably makes a convincing case for this original, even daring thesis, building on premises that expand the horizons of Argentina's social and cultural history. For one, the book shifts attention from the literary canon to the much less studied products of a flourishing mass culture. Furthermore, Tossounian rightly recognizes that these symbols' production must be understood vis-à-vis shifting local sociopolitical dynamics, urban anxieties, and larger international transformations in consumer culture. By advocating an approach sensitive to the transnational repertoire of images, ideologies, and commodities, her book adds to new scholarship aimed at overcoming the shortcomings of methodological nationalism.After a concise introduction and a first chapter laying out the main issues that the book will analyze and the rapid socioeconomic process of Argentine nation building, the next four chapters unpack the contested, multiple meanings of several versions of the joven moderna. The flapper, the upper-class girl fond of conspicuous consumption and a cosmopolitan lifestyle, is one version. She generated fascination and apprehension while exhibiting both the novelties of Hollywood and the perceived menace of gender blurring, moral transgression, and increasing Americanization. As Tossounian argues, “In defining the joven moderna as alien to domestic Argentine culture, a nationalist message was conveyed” (p. 51). Yet Tossounian contends that nationalism proved able to reconcile with more acceptable versions of the joven moderna, the topics of chapters 3 and 4, respectively, the working girl and the sportswoman. Examples from weekly magazines and movies show that female workers asserted their respectability and even emerged as models of a new urban cosmopolitanism while at the same time praising femininity. This female type, while drawn from images popularized in US comic strips and advice columns, adopted a distinctive local flavor, including a dark skin tone and a certain irreverence toward the upper-class lifestyle. The sportswoman, by contrast, revealed that moderate physical exercise, not simply labor, could lead to modern femininity. The proliferation of sports clubs and tournaments in the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates the growing enthusiasm for physical activity in Buenos Aires city. The media were key in promoting this fervor, as female athletes appeared on popular magazine covers, positive female examples amid growing concerns with racial improvement, depopulation, and eugenics. Provided that women practiced sports with maternal aims, they were celebrated as models for the nation.And yet, as Tossounian explains in the last chapter, female muscular power should not undermine sex appeal; in representations of modern femininity good health mattered, but beauty mattered most. This chapter explores the local and international beauty contests that proliferated in the late 1920s and 1930s, sponsored by popular magazines, commercial firms, and advertising companies. These events were perfect for defining Argentina's national racial and ethnic identity. The ideal beauty queens combined respectability and modesty with international dictates of physical attractiveness and charm. The debate over the country's national costume for the Miss Universe contests in the early 1930s perfectly exemplifies, in Tossounian's words, “the desire of many Argentines: for their country to be seen by the rest of the world as a civilized, white, cosmopolitan and modern nation” (p. 113).The book's main strengths are insightful interpretation and engagement with major debates in women and gender studies. Tossounian, by dealing with changing gender practices and representations, female work and consumption, feminism, mass culture, and nationalism, speaks to scholars of interwar-period social and cultural history in Argentina and elsewhere. The joven moderna and the gaucho make a very odd couple, but one that conveys the tensions, ambiguities, and dilemmas of national identity making in interwar Argentina. Her epilogue suggests how Peronism reshaped these cultural legacies in the postwar period. In tune with current historiographical concerns, Tossounian raises thought-provoking questions about how state-sponsored cultural policies and images of the nation intertwined with mass-produced representations of the culture industry. La Joven Moderna reminds us that in the interwar years a predominant, rather conservative criollismo had to live alongside widespread celebration of cosmopolitan modernity.