Chapter 3 - The challenges of a (non-)star system in a postdictatorship period

Summary

In his seminal work on Stardom in Latin America, John King states that ‘there is critical consensus that we can speak of stars in the 1930s and 1940s. The case is not clearly made for actors or actresses after, say, the mid-1950s’ (2003: 148). In this vein, he further questions ‘whether the term “star” is the right one to use for the many prominent actors working in national cinemas throughout the region in the past fifty years’ (2003: 148). While there is no longer a managed or vertical system as used to be the case in Argentina during the Golden Age – hence the challenges of talking about a ‘star system’ in the region today – undoubtedly there are still a number of figures who possess a set of extraordinary qualities that single them out for stardom and distinguish them from other film performers (Shingler 2012: 90–91). In general, those qualities have been defined as sitting within the realm of ‘glamour, charisma, and desire’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 1; Shingler 2012: 90–91). Yet, as recent studies on Cult Film Stardom (Egan and Thomas 2013), Ageing Stars (Swinnen and Stotesbury 2012) and the expansion and transformation of Star Studies (Qiong Yu and Austin 2017) demonstrate, there exist different types of stardom that do not necessarily involve those characteristics.

With the aim of offering an expanded contemporary notion of stardom, Susan Hayward (2006) suggests that the star ‘is representative of both normality and “acceptable” excess’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 3). The actors and actresses who will be in focus in what follows negotiate the tension between these poles and, to paraphrase Qiong Yu, they ‘[highlight] the performativity of Stardom’ (2017: 19). Informed by the ‘polycentric vision’ proposed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994/2014) in their groundbreaking monograph Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, this chapter moves away from a Hollywood-centric approach that would locate Latin American and, more specifically, Argentine Stardom, in the periphery – or as ‘non-stardom’. As they state, ‘the world has many dynamic cultural locations, many possible vantage points’ and ‘no single community or part of the world, whatever its economic or political power, should be epistemologically privileged’ (2014: 48).