Abstract
The first two Peronist governments (1946–1955) introduced extensive social reforms that notably improved working conditions and systematised vocational training. Thereby the foundations of the Argentine welfare state were laid and the working masses were socially included to an unprecedented degree: thus, they also constituted the majority of Perón’s supporters. These reforms were accompanied and buttressed by a purportedly equally innovative set of symbols, in the form of mostly graphic propaganda on leaflets or advertising posters, intended to disseminate political ideas and educate the Argentine population. Apart from economic implications like fostering industrial progress, the centring of the regime around the figure of the worker, which for the first time appeared within the self-representation of the state, also brought about a redefinition of the notion of citizenship. In conceiving of the Peronist visual propaganda as a means of state-driven education of the Argentine population and thereby taking it up in the realm of educationalist research, this article first focuses on the appropriations and reformulations of local discursive and iconographic traditions within the Peronist propaganda, despite the self-proclaimed novelty of the regime and its visual representations. Second, by comparing it to the propagandistic production of other corporatist welfare regimes of the interwar period, it elaborates the national specificity, as well as transnational entanglements in the staging of welfare policies and the visualisation of the redefined relationship between state and citizens.
Published Version
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