Abstract
Latin America is a region of contradictions in terms of gender and sexuality. While the United States failed to elect its first female president in 2016, Latin America has seen more female presidents than any other part of the world, starting with Isabel Perón in 1974 and continuing with a boom in female political leaders between 1990 and 2018. While some, such as the anti-Sandinista Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua in 1990, represented a setback for progressive forces, others symbolized their advance. Some made women’s rights and gender equality a priority. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet worked to legalize abortion against strong opposition. Under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s leadership, in 2012 Argentina passed the most progressive gender-identity law in the world, requiring doctors to provide free hormone treatments and gender-reassignment surgery and allowing people to change their gender on official documents even without surgery. 1 Since then, many laws to protect LGBTQ+ communities, among them equal marriage and adoption, have been approved throughout the region. However, Latin America is also home to 7 of the 10 countries with the highest rates of femicide and one of the most precarious regions in terms of LGBTQ+ discrimination. While abortion still remains illegal in seven Latin American countries, thanks to the powerful “Green Wave” feminist movement that began in Argentina in 2018 and has spread to several other countries women stand poised to win their battle (against the dual logics of Catholicism and patriarchy) for full reproductive rights over their bodies. 2
In spite of persistent inequality and marginalization, women and LGBTQ+ communities have played a crucial, steady role in Latin American activism and resistance movements in the wake of the human rights violations committed during the 1970s and 1980s. Women occupy a wide range of roles in the power structures in contemporary Latin American democracies: as former guerrilla combatants, grassroots organizers, political activists, legislators, high-ranking officials in government agencies, and diplomats. The 1990–2014 increase in the number of female presidents parallels an increase in media representation of issues related to gender and sexuality and female participation in film- and video-making at all levels of production. However, lest we celebrate the recent rise in Latin American female and queer film- and video-makers prematurely, we should keep in mind that, as in the United States, women have been actively working as directors and producers since the era of silent film. According to Columbia University Library’s Women Film Pioneers Project database, “Women’s participation in the first two decades was both deeper and wider than previously thought. In addition to costume designer, as one might expect, the researchers on this project found, as one might not expect, camera operators, as well as exhibitors (theater owner/and or manager).” 3
While Mary Pickford was perhaps the most legendary female film actress/producer to come out of the silent-film era in the U.S. context, Jewish immigrant women such as Sonya Levien and Anzia Yezierska, the Asian-Americans Marion E. Wong and Tsuru Aoki, and the Mexican-American actress Beatriz Michelena are all examples of women who started film companies in California before 1920. The African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston, with her 16-mm ethnographic films Children’s Games (1928), Logging (1928), and Baptism (1929), might be considered the first African-American woman filmmaker (Gibson, 2001: 205). 4
Understanding women’s participation in the early years of the film industry in Latin America is complicated by an uneven availability of information from country to country and an absence of materials. For example, as Joanne Hershfield and Patricia Torres San Martín (2013) suggest: Even in the case of Mexico, researchers have not been able to rely on the films themselves since the majority of silent Mexican motion pictures have disappeared or were destroyed. Dramatically, a devastating fire at the Cineteca Nacional, Mexico’s national film archives, destroyed over 6,000 films and ancillary materials in 1982. Without the films themselves, scholars have had to rely on other archived materials. The Chilean case is as unfortunate. Only a few Chilean silent films out of more than eighty feature-length films produced between 1898 and 1936 survive.
In spite of these challenges, Hershfield and Torres San Martín have managed to compile from the work of feminist scholars an impressive array of women’s histories in early filmmaking across Latin America. Their section of the Columbia University database provides recently unearthed profiles of a number of Latin American women whose labor contributed to the development of the silent-film industry. Examples include Brazilian film pioneer Carmen Santos, the Chileans Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña, Gabriela von Bussenius Vega, and Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna, the Peruvians Ángela Ramos de Rotalde, María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú, Teresita Arce, and Stefanía Socha, and the Mexicans Mimí Derba, Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, Cándida Beltrán Rendón, Cube Bonifant, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela, Adela Sequeyro, and Adelina Barrasa, to name a few (Torres San Martín, 2008). 5 In both the Hollywood and the Latin American context, as the film industry became consolidated around the advent of sound cinema, “the industry became more hierarchical and women’s participation was diminished” (Martin and Shaw, 2017: 9). 6 In general, with the emergence of sound, women tended to participate more in front of the camera than behind it.
The Radical Forefathers of New Latin American Cinema and Lucrecia Martel’s Strategies of Resistance
In the 1960s, films emerged in several Latin American countries as a vital cultural front in struggles against underdevelopment, economic and cultural dependency, and injustice, but women’s voices and perspectives were largely absent from these productions (Rich in Martin and Shaw, 2017: 6–7). From the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil to the Santa Fe School in Argentina, the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry in Havana, and the nationalized Chile Films under Salvador Allende, the 1950s–1970s saw not only the spread of cinema as a powerful rhetorical tool of self-expression, identity, and ideology but also broad resistance to the Hollywood imperialist mode of filmmaking and distribution. Latin American filmmakers influenced world cinema not only as creators but as theorists, asserting the need for a Third Cinema (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino), Revolutionary Cinema (Jorge Sanjinés), and Imperfect Cinema (Julio García Espinosa). They also sought to create new modes of production and distribution and to develop ties among filmmakers across the continent. While many leading filmmakers went into exile or were disappeared during the dictatorships, the politicized climate of filmmaking they created spread throughout the hemisphere and survived into the current era. While these radical film movements were initially largely male-dominated, 7 the decades following the most recent dictatorships in Latin American countries have seen a proliferation of female directors who have chosen to focus on that period in documentaries—many examining memory and dictatorship through autobiography—and in feature films that emphasize hitherto underexplored realms of female and queer experience.
In spite of challenging circumstances, films like Camila (1984) by the twice-Oscar-nominated Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg, Suzana Amaral’s A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star, 1986), Lucia Puenzo’s XXY (2007), and the films of Albertina Carri, Paz Encina, Natalia Almada, Carmen Castillo, Marilú Mallet, and Lucrecia Martel are just a few examples of ways in which the envelope of New Latin American Cinema has been pushed in the past few decades to respond to a wider range of gendered and transgender experience. Judging from these liminal positions, the time is right to explore the contemporary role of Latin American women and queer film- and video-makers and the cultural impact of gender and sexuality norms in film and other media. As B. Ruby Rich (quoted in Martin and Shaw, 2017: xv) suggests, “the history-making women of Latin American cinema remain outsiders to the Latin American and even the Anglophone canon, underrecognized and still urgently in need of champions.”
And yet remaining a willful outsider to canonicity, be it Latin American or Anglophone, can be seen as a strategy of resistance for prominent filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, for whom the confluence of gendered violence, gender inequality, and filmmaking came into stark relief during the 2019 Venice Film Festival. Martel (president of the festival’s jury that year) was asked to weigh in on the inclusion of the controversial director and convicted rapist Roman Polanski’s latest film, An Officer and a Spy. For Martel, whose films often center around the quiet ways in which women from all sectors of society endure everyday suffering, this was a complex task. How does one honor the craft of filmmaking and stay true to one’s political, personal, and ethical convictions? Martel did not object to the inclusion of Polanski’s film in the festival as some activist groups did, but she refused to attend a gala in honor of the film. She had the following to say (quoted in Vivarelli, 2019): A man who commits a crime of this size who is then condemned, and the victim considers herself satisfied with the compensation, is difficult for me to judge. . . . It is difficult to define what is the right approach we have to take with people who have committed certain acts and were judged for them. I think these questions are part of the debate in our times.
Martel’s films tend to address what she considers important social currents from her own peripheral positionality as a Latinx filmmaker from a remote region in Argentina, one that lies closer to Bolivia than to Buenos Aires. For example, her latest film, Zama, deemed by Vanity Fair, Film Comment, and others as one of the top films of 2018, is no exception. Zama traces the decadent and pointless wanderings of a Spanish crown functionary named Don Diego de Zama who is assigned to a remote colonial outpost, lives among and in conflict with indigenous communities, and tries his best to get a new assignment that will bring him closer to his family or at least to “civilization” as he understands it. What Zama considers “civilization” versus the lack thereof (read “indigeneity,” “mestizaje”) is a major theme, and Martel collapses the time and space between the past and the present in clever ways, including an anachronistically modern soundtrack, the randomly painted fingernails of some of the male and female characters, and her own metatextual references to radical filmmakers (such as Glauber Rocha) and feminist film theorists (such as Laura Mulvey) who came before her. 8
In interviews about the controversial film, Martel suggests that one of its main themes is Latin America’s continued desire for Europe. During the early stages of production, she suggested that the narrative logic of Zama “is Argentina” and referred to a perpetual state of longing for a white European identity on the part of many who seem to “think of themselves as Europeans enduring some protracted exile” (quoted in Taubin, 2009). In cinematic terms, this longing can be represented iconographically by the bleached-blonde signature hairstyle of Eva Perón, Hitchcock’s bleached-blonde Hollywood starlets, and Martel’s own character Verónica, played masterfully by María Onetto in La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman). For Martel this desire and false consciousness of those living as if in a protracted state of exile from “civilization” represents the legacy of colonialism, and Zama presents a decolonial cinematic gaze at Latin American history: “We have a middle- and upper-middle class that’s mostly white and a lower social class that is predominantly indigenous. It’s this that perpetuates the racism and prejudice that we haven’t been able to abandon. This attitude is not just deep but foundational: the upper classes’ inability to identify with the lower class, which forms the majority of the country.”
Twenty-first-century Latin American neoliberal policies that have prompted austerity measures, an increased gap between the rich and poor, and environmental degradation are referenced in Zama in the Spanish crown’s extensive but ineffective hierarchy, characterized by a decadent web of functionaries apparently devoted entirely to reporting about extractivist exploits, abusing slaves and indigenous persons, and vying for power within the organization. As Glauber Rocha suggested in “The Aesthetics of Hunger” (quoted in MacKenzie, 2014: 218), “the problem facing Latin America in international terms is still that of merely exchanging colonisers. Thus, our possible liberation is always a function of a new dependency.”
For Martel, a decolonial gaze must represent all historical players during the period in which the narrative is set, from African slaves to Portuguese bandits to Spanish crown functionaries to indigenous groups. But Martel’s cinematic gaze is also a feminist gaze, and so the quieter lives of women take on more importance than they might in more standard historical narratives. Zama opens with a clear reference to what most feminist film theorists will recognize as Laura Mulvey’s iconic theoretical critique of Alfred Hitchcock’s (effectively, the mainstream Hollywood industry’s) mastery in her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The film’s antihero, Zama, is revealed to be hiding in the bushes with a small telescope as he listens to a small group of women bathing in a nearby river. The women, naked and covered in mud, spot him and yell, “Voyeur! Voyeur!” Mulvey argues that the Hollywood camera lens and its pleasure principle function according to violent and voyeuristic fantasy in their pleasure at the objectification and fragmentation of women’s bodies that she terms “the male gaze.” She suggests that mainstream cinema operates in the imaginary as an “advanced representation system” within the visual language of patriarchy and, as the film scholar Richard Dyer (1997) pointed out, masks a whiteness strategy according to which white racial imagery represents the whole of humankind.
In Zama, when the group of largely indigenous women calls Zama out as a spying voyeur, it directly challenges the male gaze and indicates to viewers that this film will present a different type of gaze. As the essays in this collection illustrate, feminist filmmakers are often faced with the following conundrum: how can one fight patriarchy while still confined to the language of patriarchy (in this case the visual language of mainstream narrative cinema)? Is it possible to transcend through film, even temporarily, the patriarchal order in which we are all (men and women) trapped? Analogous questions of film as a medium were asked in the 1960s by radical Latin American filmmakers looking to develop their own local political and activist film language—approaches aimed less at entertainment than at a decolonizing didacticism in support of a revolutionary upsurge. 9
In this Issue
The essays in this issue engage with the above and other, larger questions as we explore what it means to gaze (cinematically) at Latin American history. Yet we also situate these analyses within the current, ever-evolving political landscape, with its inherent regional complexities. In many Latin American countries these complexities are brought on by neoliberalism and its resulting growth in the informal and precarious employment sectors, which contribute to deepening inequality. In cases in which governments have made successful inroads into neoliberalism, attempts to achieve greater social and economic justice have engendered intense racial, class, and ethnic conflicts. This issue considers an array of contradictions pertaining to gender, sexuality, access, community, and production in Latin America from a film and media perspective. We recognize the impact of the broader social and political context on women and LGBTQ+ communities and on media production. We have grouped the essays into two broad thematic subsections: (1) testimonio, indigeneity, activism, and gender and (2) queer narratives.
This issue focuses on women and queer folks as media-makers and considers questions related to gender and sexuality in film, video, and other media. As Martin and Shaw (2017: 1–4) suggest, women’s cinema often flips the notion of politics from one of overt public action to a notion of the private and personal: “political women’s filmmaking is located within the domestic, in women’s engagement with political militancy and in transgressive sexual and gender representations.” As Rich (quoted in Martin and Shaw, 2017: 19) suggests, an emphasis on interiority (or the personal realm of embodied poetics) as political does not constitute a “retreat from society” by female, queer, and/or feminist filmmakers but “an altered form of engagement.” In queer theoretical circles this altered form of engagement can take on a notion of resistance to the confines of heteronormative social structures or an embrace/reframing of the notion of failure. As Martel suggests (quoted in Taubin, 2009). “The world of women knows failure much more than that of men. And so it was like I was sharing this with Zama. I think that an important part of the film is a man wanting to hold onto this masculine culture and later accepting something that is more from feminine understanding, which is failure and the liberty that failure brings.” The queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2011) expands on this notion of failure as liberty by suggesting that a queer embrace of “failure” has the potential to radically disrupt the logic of advanced capitalism and its heteronormative mandates of compliance to consumer culture.
Testimonio, Indigeneity, Activism, and Gender
In her essay for this issue, “Testimonio at 50,” Guadalupe Escobar focuses on the testimonio genre and its debates 50 years after its canonization. Testimonio, she suggests, coming to prominence amidst the so-called extractive boom and the new waves of state terror and economic precarity in Central America, “has long been regarded as a genre that subverts the silences of the otherwise absent.” While in the 1990s the Rigoberta Menchú controversy marked a pivotal moment in which to explore the gendered dimensions of testimonio, 10 the moment is ripe “to reflect upon indigenous-women-centered environmentalisms in testimonial documentaries,” a “cinema of memory composed of first-person accounts and rooted in a continuum of grassroots activism.” Accordingly, Jaimie Baron’s “archive effect,” whereby films that combine footage from different sources expose multiple layers of meaning, serves as a theoretical framework for reflection upon a shift in debates within the genre of testimonio. We see an initial emphasis on the reality of representation give way to a newer focus on the framing of memory and environmental activism. Escobar highlights two women’s films from different Central American countries as case studies—500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017), by Pamela Yates, and Berta vive (Berta Lives, 2016), by Katia Lara. These films invite an ecofeminist reading, shining light on women’s political agency and on the solidarity between indigenous and black communities. Moreover, they invite “reformulations of testimonio in the early twenty-first century that complicate simple narratives of transition from dictatorship to democracy” and “propel human rights struggles forward in contemporary Central America and elsewhere.”
In “The Sexual Politics of Beauty: Reflections on Contemporary Argentine Cinema,” Julia Kratje explores how female beauty is constructed and consumed in Argentine cinema. Looking particularly at Manuel Abramovich’s La reina (The Queen, 2013) and Mariano Llinás’s La más bella niña (The Most Beautiful Girl, 2004), she touches upon controversial topics such as heteronormative male-focused aesthetic conventions and the conditions that underpin the visibility of the bodies. These topics are often focal points of feminist activism and art criticism. She argues that a series of independent productions has appeared with the aim of deconstructing the sexual politics of beauty.
A gendered perspective on the history of regional beauty contests shows the ways in which, in the first decades of the twentieth century, contests were connected to the masculine labor imaginary. By contrast, in today’s media-inundated social landscape, scopic regimes are diversified and beauty becomes a challenging field of conflicting powers. “A beautiful body is always defined in the intersection of class, ethnic, gender, and age differences that in a patriarchal, capitalist, racist world are translated into social hierarchies.” Bearing this in mind, Kratje explores the potential of cinema to affirm or subvert social standardization and suggests that “cinema has developed innumerable scenarios that manage to displace this normative frame,” facilitating a move away from a culture in which femininity permeates various consumer goods and thus liberating the stereotypes that surround women’s bodies.
Sarah Sarzynski’s “Before the ‘Ecologically Noble Savage’: Gendered Representations of Amazonia in the Global Media in the 1970s,” brings extractivism (the removal and conversion into commodities of the earth’s natural resources) and indigeneity into stark relief by delving into various stereotypical representations of the Amazon and its indigenous population during the military dictatorship’s developmentalist project. Focusing on the impact of Jair Bolsonaro’s environmental policies, which aim to deepen the country’s economic dependence on the extraction of large volumes of natural resources, she searches for the roots of his political rhetoric in the last dictatorship. She analyzes popular films and media reports that circulated globally in the 1970s and “obfuscated the actual deforestation and human rights abuses occurring in the region” as a product of, mainly, the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway. International media reports often promoted stereotypes of women and indigenous people “as inferior Others.” According to Sarzynski, “Women and nature are portrayed as objects of desire to be conquered.” Among the stereotypes discussed is the image of the “savage Amazon” whereby indigenous populations are represented as violent cannibals and/or primitives in order to justify their subjugation by whites. Examples discussed include the Yanomami culture’s appearance in the media and popular films of the time, such as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). The ongoing impact of the myth of El Dorado and the dynamics of gender, nature, and power are key aspects developed in this essay. Such narratives, by the 1990s, sparked “global environmental movements” that depicted Amazonian indigenous people as “ecologically noble savages,”’ a depiction that was challenged by scholars and activists as “a product of white culture that has often been employed to criticize modernity and civilization.”
Argelia González Hurtado’s “Resistance and Revival: Indigenous Women Media-Makers in Contemporary Mexico” analyzes the documentaries Voladora (Flying Woman, 2008), by Chloé Campero, La vida de la mujer en resistencia (We Are Equal, 2004), produced by Chiapas Media Project–Promedios, and La rebelión de las oaxaqueñas (The Oaxaqueña Rebellion, 2008), produced by Mal de Ojo TV. González Hurtado considers these films case studies of female indigenous resistance through media in Mexico, situating them amidst the upsurge of media projects around the world emphasizing indigenous societies in various stages of self-determination against the effects of (neo)colonialism that have historically denied or excluded their histories and cultural paradigms. As she explains, “The contributions of women in these areas are therefore linked to the transformation of the ‘nation,’ either the indigenous or the Mexican,” and “female media-makers are guardians of their cultures, promoting the renewal of indigenous cultural heritage.”
Isabel Seguí’s “Beatriz Palacios: Ukamau’s Cornerstone (1974–2003)” focuses on the history of one of the instrumental figures of the legendary Bolivian filmmaking group Ukamau, which advocated for the liberation of Andean people. This group has been widely cited in film studies as an integral collective of the so-called New Latin American Cinema wave of the 1960s and 1970s—the iconic movement of militant and political cinema that has proved definitive for film productions from the region ever since: “Ukamau stands out in the history of Bolivian and Latin American cinema for a kind of practice that the group itself defined as ‘cinema with the people’” (Benamou et al., 1997). Jorge Sanjinés, Palacios’s husband, has always been the face of the group in scholarly works written on the topic. As Seguí explains, this is by no means the treatment she received from her peers but rather the perspective chosen to this day to narrate the history of Ukamau because “auteurist, formalist, or exclusively textual approaches have resulted in vertical and male-centered analyses that overshadow the contribution of women.” Based on a series of interviews that Seguí herself conducted in La Paz with Sanjinés and in the archives of the Ukamau Foundation, this article provides the necessary tools for rereading and rewriting the history of the group from a feminist perspective. A group that has been praised for its “innovative cinematographic language and the empowering representation of working-class and indigenous” populations in Bolivia needs to be reviewed, as Seguí explains, by “depatriarchalizing the history of cinema,” which in this case entails “relativizing Sanjinés’s prominence in the narrative.” The article explores as well Palacios’s role as film ethnographer, gathering information on the films’ reception using a unique testimonial style, and documents unfinished projects such as La tierra sin mal (The Land without Evil) that the director set aside in order to prioritize her husband’s productions.
Queer Narratives
In “Reflections of Nonnormativity: Photography, Childhood, and Belonging in Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo,” Gabriela Bacsán takes us to Venezuela with the aim of exploring the formation of the self during childhood, when dominant heteronormativity is challenged. In order to do so, she focuses on Pelo malo (2013), one of the films of the so-called boom in contemporary Venezuelan cinema that took place between 2005 and 2014. As she explains, the director of this film is “part of a growing number of Latin American women film- and video- makers whose work challenges dominant structures and representations of gender and sexuality in the region amidst its changing social, political, and economic landscape.” Thus, the analysis delves into the sense of belonging as inherently racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed through the experience of Junior, the protagonist, who is obsessed with his Afro-descendant appearance. The text also examines, as does Kratje’s, the importance of beauty contests in the construction of normativity. As in many Latin American countries, beauty standards in Venezuela center around a “European beauty canon,” demonstrating the racial stratification of society and the myth of an existing racial democracy. Ultimately, Bacsán reminds us, the film attempts to generate “a productive dialogue through which social anxieties pertaining to nonnormativity can be reshaped toward an acceptance of it.”
Karol Valderrama-Burgos’s contribution to our collection, “Transgressive Female Sexuality and Desire in Colombian Cinema,” demonstrates that, while a majority of contemporary Colombian films conform to a well-established heteropatriarchal, colonial, and religious cultural context, a few recent films by female directors have successfully challenged the stereotypical “virgin/whore” roles routinely reserved for representations of women. In particular, Valderrama-Burgos explores La luciérnaga (directed by Ana María Hermida, 2016), the first female-directed Colombian film to give expression to lesbian desires, and Señoritas (directed by Lina Rodríguez, 2013), an award-winning avant-garde film about female pleasure and self-exploration. The two films, according to Valderrama-Burgos, have subverted Colombian patriarchal forms of representation by making visible lesbianism and novel forms of female sexuality and desire.
Marcus Welsh, in “Cross-dressing and Transgressing: The Queer Body in Madame Satã,” explores whether “the queer body transgresses heteronormativity” through one of the last productions of Brazil’s cinema da retomada, Karim Aïnouz’s debut feature film Madame Satã (2002). According to Welsh, “The body is spatially important because it is at the threshold between self and other,” where “the social discourses of gender, race, and class” converge. Based on the historical figure João Francisco dos Santos, the protagonist of his case study is “black, poor, gay, and a criminal in the Brazil of the 1930s,” sparking discussions of racism and homosexuality long overdue in the country and demonstrating how “the transvestite body is used as a space for the temporary performance of gender-bending roles . . . a physical simulacrum of the feminine.” In a similar vein as Seguí’s article, Welsh attempts to unveil the power of patriarchy. Both use the term “queer” in its double function: to unmask the hegemony of heteronormativity and to contest its power in society. Thus queer theory serves to discuss the intricacies of sexual identity in Latin America, which according to Welsh is based more on gender roles than on sexual practices.
In her essay for this collection, “Mourning, Activism, and Queer Desires: Ni Una Menos and Carri’s Las hijas del fuego,” Cecilia Sosa deals with contemporary Argentine cinema, particularly in connection with the influence of the #MeToo and Ni Una Menos movements. 11 As in previous works, she explores from a queer perspective ongoing memory struggles, the effects of dictatorship trauma, and, more specifically here, their connection with the feminist awakening and activism under the neoconservative government of Mauricio Macri. She argues that “the cross-fertilization of these different experiences was part of a dense history in which local and global tensions became intertwined in a moment of failure.” Exploring this idea, the article focuses on the controversial new film by Albertina Carri, Las hijas del fuego (2018), which “offers a depiction of gender and sexuality that is . . . expressive of the wider affective rearrangements of kinship taking place in Argentina.” Carri is well-known in Argentina for her first-person documentary Los rubios (The Blonds, 2003), which explores in an innovative and experimental way the intricacies of memory— following the director’s efforts to come to terms with her own recollections of the past, when her parents disappeared. Sosa says that the documentary “gave life to a nonblood community that endorsed an extended family in mourning,” similarly to other cultural productions of the period. Since “mourning allowed the envisioning of new ideas of community” during the Kirchners’ administrations, she suggests that Carri’s latest film “provides significant insight into this cycle of resistance” in the new political landscape. Ultimately, what she demonstrates in this thought-provoking piece is that “public shaming has experienced a queer/feminist turn,” shedding light on the existence of an enhanced Matria.
Guillermo Olivera’s contribution to this issue, “Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema: The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa Patria (Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti, 2011),” is a rhetorical analysis from the standpoint of film semiotics, queer theory, and discourse theory of sex-gender identities in the light of the equal marriage and gender identity laws passed under the Kirchners’ administrations. Accordingly, one of the main issues under review is how “queerness” has historically been constructed. Olivera suggests that we need to look at the “changes of frame” that portray the transitions “from ‘element’ to ‘moment,’” with the “inherent possibilities of unframing, reframing, or . . . ‘undoing’ the dominant heteronormative conceptions of sexualities and genders.” Moreover, regarding sexual identities, Olivera invites us to consider in films “not so much that which is included and excluded (i.e., the visible and the invisible) but the enactment of the processes themselves through which these exclusions/inclusions and their conditions emerge.”
Female and queer film- and video-makers often call attention to human rights and other issues affecting women and marginalized communities that traditional media outlets fail to adequately cover. For example, the Mexican American filmmaker Lourdes Portillo has brought international attention to the struggles of Argentine women activists searching for their disappeared family members with her award-winning 1985 documentary Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (cowritten and directed with Susana Blaustein Muñoz). Similarly, Portillo was first on the scene to document the grisly femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in her 2001 documentary Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman), helping to propel a then-local issue into a broader discussion of the alarming rise in femicide and gendered violence in the Americas. Before Zama, Martel made her mark on the international film community with fictional dramas about survival, mourning, and witnessing in the postdictatorship years with La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008). In the same vein, in addition to her own work on indigenous issues, the Chilean Mapuche filmmaker Jeanette Paillán is a founding member of the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Cine e Comunicación de los Pueblos Indígenas, which promotes indigenous video and film material and heads the largest indigenous-film festival in South America.
As some of the essays in this issue demonstrate, a queer theoretical perspective transcends the boundaries of sexuality studies and becomes an important political positionality. Queer theorist Aneil Rallin (2019: 42) takes this idea a step farther and suggests that a queer “failure” to anchor oneself in a stable gay/lesbian identity community de-essentializes and unsettles not only sexual and gender identities but also normalizing regimes. And as Jacqui Alexander (quoted in Rallin, 2019: 43) points out, queer theorists and artists have a “duty to denounce a state that is producing ever-increasing global misery” and to interrogate all political and cultural institutions that might be complicit in U.S. imperialism. As the queer theorist Malea Powell (2002) suggests, queer artistic projects often take root in the shadows, the substratum, of what is visible and present. They represent an insistence, a resilience, a demand to be heard. The present issue aims, thus, to cast some light on those shadows and call attention to some of the voices that have been unheard.
Footnotes
Notes
Kristi M. Wilson is director of the writing program at Soka University of America and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives. She is the coeditor (with Laura E. Ruberto) of Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007), coeditor (with Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli) of Film and Genocide (2012), and coeditor (with Antonio Traverso) of Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (2014). Clara Garavelli is director of studies of modern languages and lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Leicester (UK). She is the author of Video experimental argentino contemporáneo (2014) and coeditor (with Alejandra Torres) of Poéticas del movimiento: Acercamientos al cine y video experimental argentino (2015). The collective thanks them for organizing this issue.