This book reconstructs different images of modern femininities and their evolution during the 1920s and 1930s, showing that women were at the center of a public debate about modernity and its consequences on the emergence of an Argentine national identity.
With a focus on competing media representations of womanhood, mainly proposed by male contemporaries, but also with attention to young women’s descriptions of their experiences, the book explores different images of modern femininities and what they reveal about how Argentines imagined themselves and their country during decades of cultural and social renewal. Based on an analysis of a wide range of consumer culture sources—including women’s and general interest magazines and daily newspapers, pulp fiction, advertising, popular music, and films—this book shows that the multifaceted figure of the modern girl embodied the hopes, tensions and anxieties associated with sociocultural transformations, while becoming the bearer of diverse assessments about the Argentine nation. While the young modern woman was sometimes invoked to symbolize fears of the country’s moral decadence and cultural loss, at other times she stood for an “advanced” nation in the media, and her image was a demonstration of national progress and civilization. By reconstructing the emergence and evolution of new female images and their connection to the conformation of different versions of Argentina’s national identity, this book not only unveils the dynamics of sociocultural change but also explores its gendered and nationalistic dimension.
How and Why is a Theory of Ideology of Importance for Media Representations of National Identity: Albanian Identity during the Communist Regime
