Sunday, June 26, 2011

70's geishas

[from Suzanne Jill Levine's Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000]

. . . the nightmare atmosphere of the mid-seventies, when military officials exploited their power as rapists and torturers of their victims but also used female captives, usually "Montoneras" (left-wing Peronist guerrillas), as cultivated geishas. Instead of dining at home with their wives, who were the uneducated daughters of other officers, the officers would take these highly literate ex-citizens out to dinner, to "discuss books, movies, politics."