Natalia Milanesio's most recent book is a distinctive intervention into recent Argentine and Latin American historiography. The book inspires a refreshing intimate history of the conflictive anxieties, desires and frustrations of the generation that came to adulthood with the collapse of Argentina's bloodiest military government. This monograph proposes a research agenda to explore the uncontrollable desires for new freedoms previously banned by the State and the cultural conservatism of previous generations – helping us to expand our historical understanding of democracy and citizenship.
The context for this bold piece of writing is the fortieth anniversary of the renaissance of Argentine democracy and the attendant public discourse about its social, political and cultural challenges. While debates on democratisation in the Southern Cone have usually been monopolised by sociology, memory studies and political sciences, this monograph joins forces with other recent publications, such as Jennifer Adair's In Search of the Lost Decade (2019), to showcase the ability of historical approaches to push our understanding beyond institutionalist perspectives. Milanesio's book is the first compelling study of sexuality in the democratisation of Argentina – and one of the most prominent historical studies about this topic in the region. This book promises to take studies on the 1980s in a new direction, expanding on the still meagre studies of the democratisation process and contributing to counterbalance the strong historiography of the 1960s and 1970s.
Milanesio's main argument is that the destape (‘taking the lid off, undressing, uncovering’) was one of the most explosive sociocultural phenomena at the fall of the military dictatorship – a flexion point that revitalised the visual and discursive regimes of public conversation (and practice) about sexuality and the body. Rather than a cultural history of sexual representations, the book combines media studies and social history to interpret the destape as a lived experience that transformed how Argentines talked about, understood and experienced sexuality. The book explores a contrasting range of topics between the decades of the 1960s/1970s and the 1980s to showcase the disruptive power of this process, such as the emergence of sex therapies and sexologies, the struggles for introducing sex education in schools, the expansion of family planning services, the emergence of sexual healthcare organisations and the advent of feminist, gay and lesbian movements in public life.
¡Destape! can be read as a consistently longer intervention in Argentine historiography. As in her previous monograph, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture (2013), Milanesio successfully displaces the dominant focus of Argentine historiography on the State, bringing civil and private actors to the historical dynamic. While social and historiographical debates usually restrict their evaluation of the democratic experience to access to social, economic and political rights, Milanesio invites us to consider the expansive development of alternative and contested practices and expectations tied to the democratic impulse. Alongside public institutions – with their powers of censorship and legislation – ¡Destape! views the media, social movements and civil society initiatives as vital elements in the transformation of local sexual culture and politics. Milanesio's book raises the question of the right to pleasure in democratic societies and explores, through representation, consumption, fantasies and practices, the historical disruption of the status quo.
This monograph successfully proves the relevance of sexual cultures and practices to understanding broader social and political processes such as democratisation. While previous historiographies considered sexuality a marginal dimension of broader cultural and political projects, Milanesio shows us how public disputes concerning intimacy were central in shifting notions of selfness, citizenship and freedom. Rather than reducing her scope of sexuality to those practices considered abnormal or censured by cultural conservatism, ¡Destape! is an open call to explore the shifting histories of heterosexual desire in its broadest practice and the contested cultures of those excluded from the mainstream discourse, such as gay men and lesbians, and provides an innovative understanding of the productive and opposing power that from below and above define intimacy in post-dictatorial Argentina.
In contrast with those studies that understand democracy as an abstract teleological endpoint never achievable for Latin American societies, this monograph is an example of how to ground the concept to the ways in which historical subjects understood and experienced it. Following Argentine political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell's classic observation – ‘the problem of consolidation and expansion of democracy in Argentina is linked as much to society as it is to state and macropolitics’ (p. 27) – Milanesio invites us to analyse core notions of freedom through the transformation of sexuality. Her historical narrative shines light on the actions of sex educators and of gay, feminist and lesbian activists, along with those of journalists, psychologists and sexologists in this changing context. In this book, the readers will find compelling stories of how historians can recentre their subjects’ desires, expectations, frustrations and practices in the fabrication of Latin American democracies.
This book has become extremely relevant in light of the recent events in Argentine history. While the destape was a distinct event that shifted the cultural life of Argentina in the 1980s, the trend of increasing politicisation of intimacy and sexuality has become central to the current debates about the nature of Argentine democracy. In the twenty-first century, feminist and LGBTQI+ movements foster debates about how sexual freedom and material equality are substantial components of the everyday experience of democracy. During this short century, these movements have pushed major legal and cultural transformations – from legalisation on the termination of pregnancy to that expanding trans rights such as ‘self-identify’ gender recognition. As many of the stories that Natalia Milanesio showcases in her book, these changes don't necessarily move in any single direction; there are usually conflictive experiences – in which Argentines are defining their lived experience with democracy in their public spaces, homes and beds.
