Girls and Dolls: The Biopolitics of Gender and Race in Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda (2013)”

• In Event: The Child/Adolescent as Precarious Subject in Latin American Film

Abstract

In her novel and film Wakolda (2013), Argentine writer-director Lucía Puenzo explores the precariousness and exclusion of certain social groups subjected to the discipline, racial hygiene, and biopower of nation-building projects. Puenzo’s tale, set in Patagonia in 1960, alludes to the indigenous targets of Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert and the children and mother marks of Germany’s National Socialism. These populations coincide in the narration of the Germanophile Argentine family’s travel through the desert to Bariloche, where Nazi war criminals are in hiding, to reopen their boarding house. By virtue of the fugitive Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele’s treatment of the underdeveloped child protagonist, Lilith (Florencia Bado), and her doll Wakolda, Puenzo primarily draws parallels of aggression towards two populations: non-Aryan children and the non-European Mapuche. Mengele’s funding of the mass production of dolls fitting the Aryan ideal, based on a design by the protagonist’s father, and growth experiments on Lilith symbolize the incorporation and politicization of children’s bodies by the biopolitical state. This paper will dialogue with Michel Foucault’s theorization of biopower, which names Nazism as its clearest example, to examine the biopolitics of the child, gender, and race in Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda.

Author

• Erin K Hogan, University of Maryland, Baltimore County