Patriarchies in Ruins: Sex, Violence and Autism in Albertina Carri’s La rabia (2008)

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Abstract

Albertina Carri’s recent film La rabia (2008) remains thematically locked in antagonistic interconnections among crude sex, domestic violence and undiagnosed autism. Unlike the urban settings in Los rubios and Gémini, La rabia is set entirely on an estancia in the midst of the Argentine pampa. As the film progresses—tinted with the traces of patriarchal dominance—the immensity of the represented landscape grows increasingly more claustrophobic with each social interaction. In center-staging the autistic child’s defiant expressiveness as a symbolic interrogation of the veneration of this socio-culturally charged landscape, Carri’s film reveals an emotionally taut, unsafe and socially severed space. By focusing on the production of socially severed spaces, this essay examines the intricate role of the child’s cognitive otherness for expounding on complex manifestations of interpersonal (physical, emotional and social) abandonment within a diegetic locale shaped by overlapping patriarchal structures.

Author

• Inela Selimovic, Wellesley College