The Child/Adolescent as Precarious Subject in Latin American Film

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The child has long occupied a central role in Latin American cinema. Children and adolescents figure especially prominently in films dealing with political and social exclusion, from foundational social-realist depictions of poverty or crime to recent coming-of-age stories set under or in the aftermath of dictatorship, as well as more abstract treatments of the geographically or socially marginal. This panel examines the role of the child/adolescent in all of these categories, examining how films cast young people as precarious subjects, whether in terms of limited agency, physical limitations, social marginalization, or otherness.

Sub Track

• Film Studies

Session Organizer

• Sarah L Thomas, Brown University

Chair

• Erin K Hogan, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Individual Presentations

• Girls and Dolls: The Biopolitics of Gender and Race in Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda (2013)” - Erin K Hogan, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• Infancia clandestina (2012): Between Political Struggle and the Illusion of Normalcy - Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, University of Oregon

• Adolescence, Liminality, and the Uncanny in the Films of Lucrecia Martel - Sarah L Thomas, Brown University

Discussant

• Moira I Fradinger, Yale University