Natalia Milanesio sets the stage for her wonderful book about sexuality and repression during and after the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–83 with a poem written by a Spanish sociologist extolling the liberating virtues of sexual freedom after the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in 1975. As Milanesio puts it, the poem is “an effective tool to talk about sex in the return to democracy in Argentina” (p. 5). Throughout the rest of Milanesio's book Spain is noted explicitly and implicitly, as well as the fact that other postdictatorial destapes in Latin America have not been studied in depth. Milanesio defines destape “as a sweeping change of discourses, representations, manners, and morals that both grew from and reinforced the newborn democracy” (p. 7). This new set of freedoms, as she succinctly points out, was incomplete and ended up resexualizing the female body, promoting motherhood and heterosexuality, and silencing discussions of...
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