María Elena García (CHID)

José Antonio Lucero (JSIS)

Cynthia Steele (Comp Lit)

Adam Warren (History)

Latin America has long been a complex cultural and political battlefield between the forces of what Domingo Faustino Sarmiento famously called “civilization and barbarism.” It was Latin America, tragically and symptomatically, that gave the world the paradoxical notions of “dirty wars” and “perfect dictatorships,” linguistic byproducts of efforts to legitimize illegitimate forms of violence in the name of order. Despite the decline of dictatorships, Latin Americans and scholars of the region still confront the consequences of the discursive and material struggle between order and disorder. The very persistence of these struggles suggests a deep and enduring unease regarding the proper state of things in Latin American societies. The efforts to create and defend a sense of order, as Mary Douglas noted are guarded by “danger-beliefs” which “are as much threats one man uses to coerce another as dangers which he himself fears.” The goal of this research cluster is to create a collaborative exploration of how these threats and fears have shaped political subjectivities and struggles in and across Latin American societies.

In line with this concern with the power to categorize safe and disorderly forces, we propose to explore a variety of “dangerous subjects” understood as identifiable populations and processes that define and reinforce the boundaries of “normal” states. Indigenous people, Afro-Latin Americans, and the poor have often been considered by elites as precisely these kinds of actors, subjects “out of place” in the dominant imaginaries of modernity and progress. Similarly, concerns with disease, aesthetics, criminality, and madness have also generated a complex set of technologies of control to separate animals from humans, country from city, and the normal from the deviant. These categories and the processes that produce them are far from static and have been challenged, not least by those who are captured in their webs of signification. Though the potential set of topics that these issues raise is vast, we propose to focus our exploration on three areas which will provide the thematic centers for the fall, winter and spring quarters of 2009-2010. The three areas are as follows:

Emerging Subjectivities (Fall Quarter).

Unlike Douglas’ classificatory example of dirt as “matter out of place,” when people are labeled as being out of place, they “categorize back.” UW faculty, graduate students and invited scholars will explore the cultural politics involved in establishing and contesting the bounds of imagined communities. These explorations will involve the study of social movement campaigns, artistic production, and other forms of “cultural agency” that constitute counter-hegemonic performances that recast the terms of belonging in Latin America.

Stigma and Surveillance (Winter Quarter).

In the service of security, civilization, and health, a variety of disciplinary technologies have been developed to classify and control “dangerous” elements of society. The work of Michel Foucault has helped make mental asylums and prisons the emblematic institutions of the political economy of stigmatization and surveillance, though we will additionally explore how colonialism, development, racial formation, and education are also part of the political economy of subject-making.

 “Dangerous” Flows (Spring Quarter).

Latin America is also a region of motion across which people, animals, ideas and commodities flow. These flows themselves have been categorized as illicit or legal and often seen as transgressive of certain rules and values. Immigration, refugees, and drug trafficking are perhaps the most familiar kinds of flows that we will explore, but we will also examine the changing processes by which non-human animals are caught in moments of economic and political change. The (in)ability of national states to control these flows reveals much about the impact that the processes of globalization, transnationalism, and trade agreements have on lives and livelihoods in the region.

 

Abjection and Violence in Contemporary Mexican Cinema

Sergio de la Mora
(Chicana & Chicano Studies,
University of California, Davis)
Thursday Nov. 19, 2009 - 1:30 pm
Savery 138

Sergio de la Mora will examine how the canonical Mexican directors Arturo Ripstein and Alejandro González Iñárritu, working at the cutting edge of the Mexican film industry in the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively, have approached the issues of aesthetic form, genre, and social critique. His analysis will give particular attention to gender, sexual identity, and violence, as exemplified in Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites (The Place Without Limits, 1977) and Iñárritu’s Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, 2000).

De la Mora’s Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (2006) was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award in the category of Art and Culture. His current book project, on Lucha Reyes, the pioneer ranchera song performer from the 1930s-40s, examines the transnational flow of culture between Mexico City and Los Angeles and the contributions of queer artists to classic Mexican popular music. A star study of actress Isela Vega’s participation in sexploitation and art films is included in the anthology Latsploitation, Latin America, and Exploitation Cinema (2009). De la Mora’s articles have appeared in Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, El ojo que piensa, Senses of Cinema, and numerous other journals and essay collections. He is also a freelance film programmer and journalist who writes for the internet film sites Twitch and The Evening Class and curates film programs and contributes articles for the San Francisco International Film Festival, San Diego Latino Film Festival, Cine Acción's Festival ¡Cine Latino!, the Mexican Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.