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INTIMATE PUBLICITIES

F I G U R E 5 ‘‘Revolution! The Panties Show.’’ (Primicia, February 1, 2001.)

been in contact with. To begin with, the entire armed forces, which he publicly repre-
sented, now stood exposed in the media as good only for handling a rather fragile oppo-
nent. Even more threatening, however, was the fact that, because of the regime’s
militarism, President Cha ́vez himself, along with the entire regime, risked dissolving in
this corrosive laughter. Indeed, the media event was seen as so damaging for everyone
and everything concerned that one political commentator wondered why the prime min-
ister had been so reckless as to appear before the cameras in such a dubious company
without first having listened to the advice of an expert in image management.^19
As with the surrealist montage of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting
table, the mediatized coupling of epaulets and panties aroused such surprise and hilarity
in part because their public juxtaposition troubled the boundaries between domains that
not only are customarily kept separate but whose very identities depend on such strict
demarcation, as the gendered identity and auratic authority of the public domain of the

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