Cooking, feeding, and eating : theatre and dictatorship in the Southern Cone

Abstract

This dissertation investigates dramatic responses to the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, focusing specifically on the way in which theatre has drawn on the domestic space of the kitchen and the related acts of cooking, feeding, and eating as framing devices for the events of the political realm. By masking their socially critical stance toward the military regimes with metaphorical representation, the playwrights examined in this project eschewed state-instituted censorship. Furthermore, the dramatic use of the kitchen and its related acts echoes the discursive practice of the military governments in question, which veiled their political projects in metaphors of domesticity, thereby rhetorically conflating the private and public realms.

Spanning a time frame from 1974 to 1993, these works use similar images as they constitute three different responses to the military regimes. The plays written during the early years of the dictatorships, Puesta en claro by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina, 1974) and Lo crudo, lo cocido y lo podrido by Marco Antonio de la Parra (Chile, 1978), portray agency on the part of the oppressed and/or a shift in power relations. La nona by Roberto Cossa (Argentina, 1977) and De a uno by Aida Bortnik (Argentina, 1983) were written further into the dictatorships, and center on the way in which seemingly innocent citizens become complicit in state-sponsored violence. Finally, the works written after the demise of the dictatorships, Carne by Eduardo Rovner (Argentina, 1985) and Cocinando con Elisa by Lucía Laragione (Argentina, 1993), offer a dark, chilling image of violence directed against the female body. While the recent academic revalorization of the domestic realm has focused on the kitchen as an isolated, idyllic site characterized by creativity and agency, I posit that this space must be reconsidered as a site that manifests and even determines the events of the public sphere, given the specific historical context of the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.