By examining two political protests that took place in the Buenos Aires of the late 1990s, this article explores the theatrical strategies through which the social movements that opposed President Menem’s neoliberal government succeeded in weakening the ruling bloc’s hold on the public sphere. The author argues that much of this struggle was fought around modalities of seeing, displaying, watching, and being seen. While the state utilized spectacle and panopticism in the attempt to reproduce its authority, the protesters turned to these strategies to disseminate their polemic self-performance as Argentina’s people and its critical public. This representational strategy pursued a twofold purpose. On one hand, the protesters strove to confine the state to the double role of spectator of their dissent and object of their critical scrutiny. On the other hand, the protesters provided their audiences with a site of identification and unification that proved effective in mobilizing support to their struggle against the state.
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