Monstruos, galanes, sumisos

La disputa en torno a la representación visual del trabajador nacional

Authors

  • Marcos Del Cogliano New York University

Keywords:

national worker, peronism and culture, representation of work, empty signifier, America Latina Welfare State

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, the figure of the worker was the object of a series of visual representations: monuments, plastic works, graphic media, performances, etc. In Argentina, these prescriptive imaginings consolidate an exemplary, idealized proletarian as a way of projecting a model of future citizenship. However, resistance was also part of that process. In this article I affirm that the very figure of the worker functioned as the surface on which many of the political and cultural tensions of this period were printed. In fact, the visual representation of the proletariat was articulated as a dispute. On the one hand, these experiments represent the proletariat as an anxiety of synthesis, an embodiment of the social heterogeneity of the new urban crowds. On the other, the proletariat exhibits an instability of meaning, a figure that cannot be concretized.

Author Biography

Marcos Del Cogliano, New York University

Marcos Del Cogliano has a PhD from New York University and obtained a BA in Literary Theory at the University of Buenos Aires. He is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University. His research interests include literature and the visual arts in Latin America and his intersections with work studies, key issues in his book project ““Sujetos (in)dóciles: imaginarios modernos del trabajo en el Cono Sur “. He also developed a career as a journalist and editor. Since 2013, he has collaborated with reviews on literature and visual arts in Rolling Stone Argentina, Vice Mexico and Panama Magazine (among others), and in 2018 he served as editor of the magazine emisférica.net

Published

2019-05-17

How to Cite

Del Cogliano, M. (2019). Monstruos, galanes, sumisos: La disputa en torno a la representación visual del trabajador nacional. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 16(3), 99–120. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/1907

Issue

Section

Dossier: El cuerpo del Trabajo: Precariedad