Violence and the Precarious Body in Latin American Film

• In Event: Theorizing Violence in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

This paper analyzes the representation of disabled bodies as a cultural device for social critique in two recent films: El violín (Francisco Vargas, 2005) and La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009). A liberal tradition in Latin American cultural production uses radically different bodies as metaphors for social problems. The above films combat this biopolitical symbolic practice through protagonists whose racial, social, aged, and/or gendered alterity intersect with disabled bodies. The characters make visible the processes by which authoritarian and capitalist regimes actively produce and cast aside sick, precarious bodies. The films respond critically to these processes by proposing a new ethics grounded in the body. These films engage with key facets of two intricately connected periods of violence: State violence in the 1960s through 1990s and globalized societies after neoliberal structural adjustments from the 1980s to the present. In these two contexts—connected because war in one prepared the body for commodification in the next—disability places the characters beyond the epistemological reach of dominant ideologies, underscoring their failures to account for a global subaltern majority. Drawing upon theorizations of precarious bodies, torture, biopolitics, the politics of memory, and mourning and trauma, I argue that these representations of disability map out a new ethics grounded in a shared human condition of precariousness. By underscoring this precariousness, these films potentially create powerful affective ties that sensitize the viewer to a democratic sociability, one that would respect the fragility of the other rather than responding with violence to protect one’s own fragility.

Author

• Victoria L Garrett, West Virigina University