Presenters
Abstract
Eva Perón, Argentina’s most famous and controversial first lady, may lend her name to the title of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel, Santa Evita, but she is not the central character. Rather, it is her body that is overwhelming focus of both the novel and Argentinian politics and culture. It was only in death that Eva the person disappeared and was replaced with the Corpse, a space for fetishization and appropriation by the masses, demonstrating the privileging of the female body over the female individual. Not content to merely mourn or vilify Eva as the First Lady, Argentineans politicized her body, usually transforming it into a sacred relic and imbuing it with a fraught and tangible presence in Argentinean history and politics that is felt to this day. It is the purpose of this paper and presentation, therefore, to explore the fetishization of Eva’s body in Santa Evita, committed by both the author and the characters within the narrative. Furthermore, this paper aims to prove that this politicizing of the female body can happen on a mass scale in contemporary history by drawing parallels between Eva and the more recent case of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. By investigating the active afterlife of the bodies of both women, and by drawing from Simone de Beauvoir’s theories regarding the deconstruction and assumption of the female image, otherwise known as the Eternal Feminine, this paper will contextualize the fetishization of the body of Eva Perón within a historical and literary framework.