Sex, Desire, and Violence

Abstract

This chapter examines diverse performances of gendered family roles in works that counter bourgeois social imaginaries by conceptualizing the family as an institution of abuse and exploitation. The first section analyzes representations of women who take unconventional actions attempting to free themselves from violent male family members in Armando Discepolo’s Entre el hierro, Jose Gonzalez Castillo’s La serenata, and Florencio Sanchez’s Marta Gruni. The next section addresses how F. Defilippis Novoa’s Los desventurados, Alberto Novion’s Los primeros frios, Armando and Enrique Santos Discepolo’s El organito, and Jose Gonzalez Castillo’s and Alejandro E. Berruti’s El camino del infierno reveal that material hardships and capitalist fantasies generated fractured and monstrous masculinities. The last section returns to Discepolo’s El relojero to suggest that when new alternatives for men and women are explored, their problematic endings underscore the absence of easy solutions for such precarious subjects of Argentina’s peripheral modernity.