(Death, aviation and femininity in Argentina. The case of Myriam Stefford)

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the different meanings that the heterogeneous press produced, transmitted, and put into circulation when narrating the death, burial, and posthumous biography of the popular actress and aviator Myriam Stefford (1905–1931). Based on studies on the social and cultural history of sport and death, the funeral is analyzed as a polyphonic ritual in which different social actors, among whom the press played a central role, contributed to the construction of an ideal type of modern femininity. The hermeneutic analysis articulated the press as “text” in relation to the historical and contextual conditions of its production. Among the article’s conclusions, an ambiguous and contradictory rupture with the traditional gendered body order is highlighted, since Stefford’s death and funeral projected and imagined, through the press, new ways of being, inhabiting, and experiencing femininity in the modern social and sporting world (leaving behind domestic comfort, challenging masculine homosocial spaces, demonstrating independence, audacity, and determination, etc.), while at the same time reproducing certain gender scripts with rather traditional meanings (reinforcing romantic love, reproducing a cis-heteronormative aesthetic, and accepting the monopoly of male scientific expertise within the universe of aeronautics, etc.). Over the years and decades, Stefford’s figure and posthumous biography became consolidated both within and beyond the field of aviation; however, narratives surrounding her death and biography changed in meaning and significance, producing diametrically different representations of her death and legacy.