UCLA

Taking “gobernar es poblar” as a key mandate to Argentine women, this doctoral thesis will trace the centrality of motherhood to women’s citizenship and to the Argentine national imaginary writ large. Specifically, this project is based on an array of cultural productions, including novels, poetry, artwork, and film, along with archival documents, cultural artifacts, and theories from several fields, pertinent to the main topic of this thesis: the way post-mortem maternal/female bodies are notably depicted and reproduced around the model of sacrificial motherhood as a central site of reference for national identity building in Argentina. Among the analytic objectives that guided the direction of this dissertation are the following assumptions and hypotheses: 1. Women’s citizenship and participation in the public sphere was dictated by maternity, as defined through Republican Motherhood; 2. Through foundational narratives’ depictions of mothers, this exemplar was disseminated and reproduced as a model to be followed, or in a similar vein, narratives of “bad” mothers were circulated as cautionary tales, as in the case of La Cautiva; 3. As motherhood determined citizenship, rewriting these maternal archetypes can serve as a means of exploring the gendered, racialized, and class-based constraints this citizenship entailed; 4. Depictions of la Difunta Correa and Eva Per�n can be considered examples of these reinterpretations due to their reliance on maternal tropes and the subjects’ relevance to women’s civic engagement, and therefore prove useful as vehicles for examining the limiting of women’s political status; 5. The situating of la Difunta’s and Evita’s narratives beyond their original historical moments allows the author to recontextualize the original constraints on women’s citizenship and thereby highlight the continued exclusionary practices of defining a citizenry via identitarian categories, including gender and sexuality. I argue that by reading these modern and contemporary cultural productions depicting la Difunta and Evita through the framework of motherhood and queer theory, the artists are reconfiguring the parameters of citizenship and reimagining the nation.