Feminist Ironic Montage to Dismantle Gender Essentialism

Abstract

Feminist Ironic Montage to Dismantle Gender Essentialism Isabel Seguí (bio) and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco (bio) Comparing Woman's World (María Luisa Bemberg, AR, 1972) and Miss Universe in Peru (Chaski Group, PE, 1982)1 One day, out of the blue, Marina proposed to Isabel to write something together about two Latin American feminist documentaries, Woman's World (Original title: El mundo de la mujer, 15') and Miss Universe in Peru (Original title: Miss Universo en el Perú, 39'). Marina thought both works share epochal (thematic, political, and formal) similarities. Isabel felt the same to such a degree that, serendipitously, not long before receiving Marina's proposal, she had asked Alejandro Legaspi if he was influenced by Woman's World when he edited Miss Universe in Peru. Isabel thought that Legaspi could have had the chance of watching the short documentary in Montevideo or Buenos Aires before fleeing to Peru due to the dictatorship in Uruguay. The answer was no. Legaspi had never heard of Women's World before. Notwithstanding, we decided that a collaborative comparison of both films was worthwhile. After agreeing with the editors of Framework, we started working on it. As for the similarities, both documentaries question the dualism imposed from a patriarchal gender structure in which women are assigned particular roles and obligations. Woman's World is an early María Luisa Bemberg film. She will go on to become the foremost female filmmaker in Argentina. This work, her opera prima as a director, responds straightforwardly to a feminist agenda. It was shot entirely at the Femimundo '72 trade fair, a commercial event focused on women as a fast-growing market, held in Buenos Aires in 1972. The small crew led by Bemberg captured footage in the exhibition halls. Once in [End Page 62] the editing room, she created a vivid, humorous montage to reflect on the construction of a feminine identity based on traditional values of submission and service, and how capitalism has exacerbated this millenary oppression to take economic advantage of it. Emphasis is placed on the theme of the tyranny of beauty. For women forced to be the object of male desire, the beauty industry offers, in exchange for money, all kinds of devices that will make them more palatable: clothing, cosmetics, hairdressing, gymnastic equipment, and so on. The (self) objectification of women is a gold mine. And two birds are killed with one stone: social control and economic gain. Coincidentally, Miss Universe in Peru is the first film of the Peruvian group Chaski, a film collective that follows the Third Cinema tradition.2 The documentary is constructed around the opposition between two events celebrated in Lima in July 1982: the Miss Universe contest and the VI Congress of the Peruvian Confederation of Peasants. The television business that is the contest for the election of the most beautiful woman in the world imposes a global beauty canon, in addition to being a very lucrative enterprise. But Miss Universe in Peru not only denounces and ridicules the American contest, it puts forward a sour criticism of the matrix of domination and its propaganda tools, but also allows us to witness the political practice of organized women who resist the Western heteropatriarchal and capitalist mandate. In addition, the women represented in Miss Universe in Peru belong to all social classes, with the special participation of indigenous women, who, with a defiant gaze, challenge the manipulation attempted by corporate patriarchy. This is a significant difference vis-à-vis Woman's World, where we mostly see white middle-class women on screen. Following a closer analysis, we realized that many other aspects of the film-making processes and the enunciative voice bear remarkable differences. María Luisa Bemberg, born in 1922, was from a very privileged background.3 She did not access formal education, and, like the women of her class, she was mostly prepared for marriage. However, her knowledge of foreign languages and the possibilities of travelling abroad granted her access to the feminist discussions that were taking place in the 1960s. She was an avid reader of French, Italian, and American feminist theory. Leonor Calvera (in Rodríguez and Ciriza) highlights that Bemberg and Gabriela Christeller...