Social Science Research Council

"The Making of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics and Sexuality, 1958-1976"

How did “youth” become a crucial cultural and political actor and discursive category in 1960s and 1970s Argentina? The central aim of my dissertation is to answer this overarching question and, in doing so, shed new light on 1960s and 1970s Argentine cultural, political and sexual history. The making of youth remained unexplored by historians of 1960s and 1970s Argentina. My project contends that only through a detailed analysis of the making of youth will it be possible to grasp the enduring cultural and political transformations that took place in those decades.

By drawing on methods and concepts from cultural history, political history, intellectual history, discourse analysis and ethnography, I will inquire into two levels of the making-of-youth process. First, I will analyze the representation of youth that proliferated since the late 1950s. In constructing the youth question, government educational and social welfare officials, as well as sociologists and psychologists, engaged in a dialogue about the threats and hopes of modernization and the transformations in gender relationships and sexuality. Second, I will focus on the formation of youth cultures and political mobilization. I will examine the interaction of national and localized processes, chiefly by studying the experiences of students at the School of Philosophy and Literature, University of Buenos Aires, and of working class youths in Lanús, a neighborhood in the Greater Buenos Aires area. To analyze the formation of youth cultures, I will investigate the offering and consumption of “youthful” cultural goods, the creation of spaces of sociability and the changing conceptions and practices of sexuality. To investigate the process of politicization, I will examine the creation of a political culture of contestation. I will show how a general “anti-system” perspective developed amidst working- and middle-class youths and how a new set of political rituals and symbols emerged.