Jean Graham-Jones's study of Argentine female and feminist iconicity, or ‘femicons’, spans the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Graham-Jones employs discursive, visual and performance analysis to argue for the collective making and remaking of Argentine femicons across a wide range of theatrical performances, films, novels, poems, (auto)biographies, visual art and popular culture. Eva Perón, popularly known as Evita, is ‘inevitably’ the central figure whose representational matrix maps broader patterns of female iconicity documented in the text. Born into poverty, Perón worked as an actress before rising to fame in the 1940s as the second wife and political accomplice of populist president Juan Domingo Perón. Evita was and continues to be a controversial figure, constructed nationally and internationally as, alternately, a saint, a political militant (particularly regarding women's rights), an opportunist and a whore. Graham-Jones aims to avoid what she considers the ‘polarizing, personalized impasse’ of scholarship on Evita specifically, and Argentine femicons generally (p. 3). Performance as analytical frame, she argues, offers an alternative to scholarship which attempts to pin down who these women ‘were’, and instead identifies the (trans)national politics of their repeated imagination across stages, pages and screens.
The first chapter takes up Camila O'Gorman, an elite femicon executed in 1848 by dictator Juan Manuel Rosas for her affair with Jesuit priest Ladislao Gutiérrez. The second chapter works through the arguably best-known pieces of the Evita myth-making repertoire, including Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1978 rock opera Evita; Nacha Guevara's 1986 rock opera Eva, el gran musical argentino; and a number of highly circulated biographical narratives, films and plays. The next chapter analyses a series of theatrical works that engage Perón's political legacy through stagings of Evita's multiple bodies. The final chapter examines the performative imagination of femicons in devotional culture, including the Virgin of Luján (the national Catholic patron saint), popular saint María Antonia Deolinda ‘Difunta’ Correa, and pop singer Gilda. The conclusion reflects on current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's strategic deployment of Evita's image, a negotiation of Evita's ‘inevitable’ haunting of Argentine female political leaders. Latin Americanist readers will no doubt appreciate this analysis, and Graham-Jones's closing consideration opens the door for future investigations.
Evita, Inevitably represents a significant contribution to the literature on female iconicity and performance. It is notable in its deft tracing of the interlocking trajectories of multiple femicons as opposed to the more common focus on one or two figures. Additionally, the book's historical breadth widens the scope of English-language scholarship on Argentine theatre and performance, a bibliography that otherwise largely emphasizes the period of the 1976–83 military dictatorship. Graham-Jones's study presents compelling arguments around the transnational cultural force of female and feminist iconicity while maintaining a methodologically innovative approach. The sheer diversity of cultural works considered will interest scholars across theatre, performance and cultural studies.
