Thursday, January 3, 2013: 3:50 PM
La Galerie 6 (New Orleans Marriott)
Christine T. Ehrick, University of Louisville
Many Argentine fans and media scholars know Nené Cascallar as a groundbreaking writer of the
telenovela (television melodrama). Less known are Cascallar’s radio and print columns, the hallmark of what has been termed her “psychological approach” to women’s radio in the 1940s. In 1944 Cascallar began to write “microprograms,” five-minute on-air advice columns telling women how to be better wives and mothers. Within a few years, however, the political climate and Cascallar’s writing underwent significant changes. The microprograms became stylized dramas with recurring characters. The political overtones of her writing became more overt as well; while not formally affiliated with the regime, Cascallar’s writing by this point was in alignment with Peronist ideals of duty and self-sacrifice. At the same time, the middle-class woman’s print magazine
Vosotras began running a Cascallar column, “Five Minutes of Love,” bringing together two (seemingly contradictory) Cascallar themes: eroticized fantasy and self-denial.
This paper will situate the history of Cascallar’s microprograms within the larger history of women and radio broadcasting in Argentina and beyond. Radio offered limited, but significant, opportunities for women to speak “en cátedra”: a term which referred to the authoritative speech of a professor or priest. As a whole Cascallar’s radio columns speak to the ways in which women’s radio voices, in the words of film scholar Britta Sjogren, “spoke the feminine and the patriarchal simultaneously.”
Focusing on the years 1948-1949, this paper provides important insight into the cultural aesthetics of women’s media during the Peronist years, and the ways in which romantic media genres were reoriented in tune with Peronist ideals. The ultimate Peronist romance, of course, was that of President Juan Perón and his wife “Evita.” Juxtaposing Cascallar’s fictions with Evita’s speeches and writings sheds new light on the ways gender and class discourses were wielded within the Peronist soundscape.
