Diana Taylor Theatre Of Operations Summary

Diana Taylor’s “The Theatre of Operations: Performing Nation-ness in the Public Sphere” examines the ways in which nation-ness is formed through spectacle. She is interested in the role of performance in controlling and shaping the social and the political, particularly in the Argentinean case. In the context of the Dirty War—which she calls a theatre of operations—Taylor argues that surviving meant being seen as Argentinean. Therefore, the author begins by underlining the inherent performativity of citizenship, a status she relates to gender, based on Judith Butler’s theory. For Taylor, gender and citizenship are “oppositional and exclusionary” (92), as they are both constructed in opposition—one is female when one is not male, one is Argentinean
Whereas women were forced into the domestic space and confined to “more traditional roles” (94), the outside space was occupied by males. By calling the Dirty War a “theatre of operations” Taylor emphasizes the “theatricality, medicalization, and the violence of the operation exercised simultaneously on social space and human bodies” (96). The military performance determined the physical reality of the citizens: whereas military man carried out violent endeavors on the exterior space, the female body—which occupied the interior space—became increasingly depoliticized and subdued. Through continued repetition, such performance became the norm that would soon be displayed in women’s magazines, conduct manuals, and commercials. This performance, which Taylor calls a “spectacle of control” creates an authentic body—a male body—that comes to represent nation-ness. This “authentic body” is also represented through sports. Taylor suggests that winning the Soccer World Cup in 1978, as the Dirty War was merely getting started, is “a social equivalent to the military spectacle” (114). A spectacle that comes to define citizenship, nation-ness, and