New Maricón Cinema: Circulations of Affect and Empathy in Recent Latin American Film

• In Event: Reconsidering the circulation metaphor: Latin American cultural critiques of global exchange

Abstract

The recent critical success of films by Lucía Puenzo, Javier Fuentes-León, and Marco Berger amongst others has led to a boom in films made and produced in Latin America that deal with sexual and gender pluralities. Films on same-sex relations, intersexuality, and non-normative gender roles have circulated to commercial and critical success both in international film festivals and in domestic markets, marking an acute shift from the previous praxis of representing such differences in the Latin American screen. The present work attempts a contextualization of said shift through a tracing of aesthetic and ethical genealogies, with the aim of defining a new praxis of the moving image that relies on specific circulations between the image, the film, the viewer, and the broader community vis-à-vis sex-gender difference. Working with theories of affect and empathy, my analysis traces how recent films such as XXY, Contracorriente, and Plan B move along poly-valenced axes of affect and emotion to orient the viewer away from the traditional semantics of the maricón and, instead, to a global identitarian movement. I then move into films that engender what Ignacio Sánchez Prado calls a neoliberal structure of feeling, to identify how the neoliberal episteme shapes our viewing of gender difference.

Author

• Vinodh Venkatesh, Virginia Tech