Che and Tania's socks: Reflections of an incorporated wife - Caroline Moser (2023)

ABSTRACT

In 1967 my husband, Brian Moser directed a film about the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia for UK Granada TV’s series World in Action (1963–1998), with me working alongside him, as an unpaid, non-unionized, member of the film crew. This Viewpoint article recollects my contribution to documenting this history-changing event, how I came to be there, and how my positionality as a wife meant that I was made invisible, or ‘invisibilised’. The meant that, despite my participation, I never allowed myself to recognise that this exciting experience, or the subsequent prize-winning film, was mine to ‘own’. I use Callan and Ardner’s early 1980s feminist concept of the ‘incorporated wife’ to explore my contradictory positionality, as well as my subsequent long-term admiration for women guerrilla combatants. This started with Brian’s photo of Che Guevara, taken before rigor mortis had set in, wearing socks that I thought belonged to Tania, the East German courier, who, caught behind the lines, nursed the asthmatic Guevara, and was soon killed in battle. As I later came to know Colombian women ex-combatants, Tania’s socks became symbolic to me of the role so frequently ascribed to them, if not exactly ‘incorporated wives’, nevertheless still ‘invisibilised’, and dismissed in guerrilla conflicts, amid the celebration of the heroism of men combatants such as Ernesto Guevarra, nicknamed ‘Che’.

The full article can be found here: ‘Che’ and Tania’s socks: Bolivian recollections of an ‘incorporated wife’