State, Filmmaking, and Sexuality During the Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983)

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of the functioning of the cultural repression’s agencies related to the cinematographic industry during the years of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. It aims to show the continuity in the mechanisms of censorship and state control during the twentieth century and to emphasize the reorganization that those had under this political system. It is proposed to offer a historical explanation, through the analysis of scripts and representations of different cinematographic narratives, about the reason why the state funded and the censorship favoured the circulation of numerous films, pierced by a strong erotism, very distant from the official speech about gender and sexuality. It is a hypothesis of this work that the contradiction between what the regime postulated in their public communications and the message produced by these films about gender and sexuality was not owed to a mere “double-speech” but a structural logic of functioning of the state during those years.