Tango and women’s bodies in the dictatorial city in: “Exilio” de Eugenia Brito y “Perestroika” de Heddy Navarro

Abstract

In the following article, the implications of the musical style of tango on female poetics from the late eighties in Chile will be analyzed. The selected corpus corresponds to the poems “Exilio” in Vía Pública by Eugenia Brito and “Perestroika” in Mónologo de una hembra tardía (1994) by Heddy Navarro. It is proposed that both explicitly allude to tango to represent womanhood in the dictatorial context, that is, as a strategy to avoid censorship and refer to topics such as patriarchal violence, exile and the violence of this period. So the poems resignify the tango’s own imaginary and dislocate themes such as the city and the body to situate and exhibit the figure of women within the dictatorial panorama.