New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema 2018 PDF

NEW VISIONS
OF AD OLESCENCE
IN CONTEMPORARY
L AT I N A M E R I C A N
CINEMA
Edited by
G E O F F RE Y M AG U I RE
& RAC H EL RA N DA LL
[NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES]

New Directions in Latino American Cultures
Series Editors
Licia Fiol-Matta
Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies
Lehman College
Bronx, NY, USA
José Quiroga
Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA
The series will publish book-length studies, essay collections, and readers
on sexualities and power, queer studies and class, feminisms and race, post-
coloniality and nationalism, music, media, and literature. Traditional, trans-
cultural, theoretically savvy, and politically sharp, this series will set the stage
for new directions in the changing field. We will accept well-conceived,
coherent book proposals, essay collections, and readers.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14745
Geoffrey Maguire · Rachel Randall
Editors
New Visions
of Adolescence
in Contemporary
Latin American
Cinema
Editors
Geoffrey Maguire Rachel Randall
Department of Spanish and School of Modern Languages
Portuguese University of Bristol
University of Cambridge Bristol, UK
Cambridge, UK
New Directions in Latino American Cultures

ISBN 978-3-319-89380-8 ISBN 978-3-319-89381-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89381-5
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Cover credit: © Avante Filmes. Beira-Mar (2015), a film by Filipe Matzembacher and
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Praise for New Visions of Adolescence in
Contemporary Latin American Cinema
“Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall have assembled a striking collection

of essays on adolescence in contemporary Latin American cinema, in what is a
tightly edited volume that covers a range of productions from the continent. The
quality of the essays is excellent throughout and the volume includes a very use-
ful introductory essay, written by the editors, which convincingly makes the case
for the important contribution of this study to both World Cinema and Latin
American cultural studies.”
—Stephanie Dennison, Professor of Brazilian Studies, University of Leeds, UK
“This exciting volume provides original insights into the representation of ado-
lescence in contemporary Latin American cinema, and commences with an
excellent and rigorous introduction by Maguire and Randall. Gender acts as a
key framework for the book, but these high quality essays are also tied together
by their interest in film and the senses, and by the emerging tropes they collec-
tively identify as central to these new depictions of adolescence. New Visions of
Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema is an important contribu-
tion to the field.”
—Deborah Martin, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies,
University College London, UK
“This is a rich collection of essays that offers original and important insights into
contemporary Latin American cinema through the pivotal but critically neglected
figure of the adolescent. Written by leading experts in the field, the book sheds
new light on Latin American film culture. This book is a fascinating read for schol-
ars of youth studies, gender, sexuality and cinema and Latin American cinema.”
—Deborah Shaw, Reader in Film Studies, University of Portsmouth, UK
v
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, the Editors would like to thank the contributors of
New Visions of Adolescence, whose patience, diligence and enthusiasm
throughout the publication process have been very much appreciated.
We would also like to express our gratitude to all those at Palgrave
Macmillan, particularly Shaun Vigil and Glenn Ramirez, for their sup-
port and attentiveness from the initial book proposal to the final printed
volume.
The motivation for this collection began at a conference (The Figure
of the Child in Contemporary Latin American Visual Cultures) at the
University of Cambridge in May 2014, which was generously funded
by the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS) and the Centre of
Latin American Studies, Cambridge. Since then, the Editors, as well as
many of the contributors, have been involved in numerous panels at the
Latin American Studies Association conferences in Puerto Rico, New
York and Lima, and our thanks go to all those involved, who attended
either as panelists or members of the audience. Our thanks also go to
our colleagues in Oxford and in Cambridge—particularly, Joanna Page,
Geoffrey Kantaris, Dunja Fehimović and Paul Merchant—for their sup-
port in the early stages of the process, and for their encouragement and
guidance since.
Finally, we would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust and Murray
Edwards College, Cambridge, for supporting our current research pro-
jects, which are closely related to themes explored in this volume.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary

Latin American Cinema—Gender, Class and Politics 1
Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall
Part I Gender and Sexuality
2 Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the Erotics

of the Queer Male Gaze in Marco Berger’s Ausente 37
Geoffrey Maguire
3 (Re)pairing Adolescent Masculinities:

The Neo-fraternal Social Contract and the Penal State
in Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho and Beira-Mar 59
Ramiro Armas
4 Sensorial Youths: Gender, Eroticism and Agency

in Lucrecia Martel’s Rey muerto 81
Inela Selimović
ix
x Contents
Part II Gender and Class
5 “Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy

and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande 101
Rachel Randall
6 Young, Male and Middle Class: Representations

of Masculinity in Mexican Film 127
Georgia Seminet
7 Beyond Pink or Blue: Portrayals of Adolescence

in Latin American Animated Film 145
Milton Fernando González-Rodríguez
Part III Gender and Politics
8 Growing Pains: Young People and Violence

in Peru’s Fiction Cinema 165
Sarah Barrow
9 Tragic Adolescence in Michel Franco’s Heli

and Amat Escalante’s Después de Lucía 183
Sophie Dufays
10 From Girlhood to Adulthood: Colombian Adolescence

in María, llena eres de gracia and La sirga 203
Carolina Rocha
Index 223
Contributors
Ramiro Armas University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Sarah Barrow Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East
Anglia, Norwich, UK
Sophie Dufays Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
Milton Fernando González-Rodríguez University of Iceland, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Geoffrey Maguire Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University
of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Rachel Randall School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol,
Bristol, UK
Carolina Rocha Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville,
IL, USA
Inela Selimović Spanish Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA,
USA
Georgia Seminet St Edward’s University, Austin, TX, USA
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Cidade de Deus, dir. by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia

Lund (2002) 14
Fig. 1.2 Y tu mamá también, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (2001) 18
Fig. 1.3 XXY, dir. by Lucía Puenzo (2007) 19
Fig. 1.4 La niña santa, dir. by Lucrecia Martel (2004) 22
Fig. 2.1 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011) 40
Fig. 5.1 Jean and Rita in Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe Barbosa (2014) 108
Fig. 5.2 The Cavalcanti Mansion in Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe
Barbosa (2014) 110
Fig. 5.3 Reliance on domestic employees in Casa grande, dir.
by Fellipe Barbosa (2014) 112
Fig. 5.4 Concluding scene of Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe Barbosa
(2014) 120
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Visualising Adolescence

in Contemporary Latin American Cinema—
Gender, Class and Politics
Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall
The term ‘adolescence’, which refers to the stage of life characterised by

puberty and the transition from childhood to adulthood, comes from the
Latin adolescere, meaning to grow or to mature. It is often most closely
linked to the physiological changes that lead to physical sexual maturity
in adults, but, as Ana Maria Frota argues, this association does not sat-
isfactorily account for the multiple connotations that adolescence carries
today (2007: 155). By contrast, in recent years, various studies have prob-
lematised the naturalisation of our modern conception of childhood as a
period of innocence and dependence (Jenkins 1998; Goulart and Soares
2006; Bruhm and Hurley 2004). These critiques have emerged along-
side the recognition of children’s capacity for ‘agency’ (James 2009:
41),1 and a call for analyses that pay greater attention to the effects of
race, class and gender on the experience of childhood (Hecht 2002).
G. Maguire (*) 
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
R. Randall 
School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Maguire and R. Randall (eds.), New Visions of Adolescence in
Contemporary Latin American Cinema, New Directions in Latino
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89381-5_1
2 G. MAGUIRE AND R. RANDALL
As Kristen Drybread has observed, impoverished minors, who are unable

to conform to the standards of ‘normative childhood’, risk being denied
recognition as children, and may be viewed as undeserving of the protec-
tions and privileges that this stage of life is supposed to afford (Drybread
2009: 333–334, 345). Furthermore, as Neil Postman argues, the distinc-
tion between childhood innocence and adult knowledge that was perpet-
uated by print culture has been blurred by ‘a new media environment,
with television at its centre’ (Postman 1985: 286). The Brazilian docu-
mentary short A invenção da infância/The Invention of Childhood (dir.
Liliana Sulzbach 2000) emphasises that children’s television viewing hab-
its often expose them to the same scenes of violence, horror and sexual
content seen by their parents, which supports the documentary’s asser-
tion that ‘um mundo onde adultos e crianças compartilham da mesma
realidade física e virtual é um mundo de iguais’ [a world where adults and
children share the same physical and virtual reality is a world of equals].
Such an assertion may provoke questions surrounding the benefits of
addressing ‘adolescence’ as another, separate category of study. However,
it is also crucial to acknowledge the way in which our modern notions
of adolescence have been socially constructed and have developed over
time, just as Phillipe Ariès (1962) has argued that our understanding
of childhood today only began to emerge after the end of the Middle
Ages. A recognition of the ways in which adolescence has been socially
determined, and is experienced differently by distinct subjects, engen-
ders a healthy suspicion of approaches or representations that universal-
ise, naturalise or capitalise on the experiences of teenagers. New Visions
of Adolescence aims to account for the diversity and complexity of such
experiences, offering readers a critical insight into the particularity and
potentiality of this formative stage of life. Against the social and cultural
backdrop of contemporary Latin America, the essays contained within
this collection justify the formulation of adolescence as a distinct cate-
gory of study, while at the same time demonstrating its inherent capacity
to provide new critical approaches to regional and global debates over
gender, sexuality, class and politics.
The Emergence of Adolescence

Adolescence and its contemporary connotations started to emerge at
the beginning of the twentieth century (Holt 2016), but these only
began to thrive after the end of the Second World War, at a point when
1 INTRODUCTION: VISUALISING ADOLESCENCE IN CONTEMPORARY … 3
an increasing number of families disposed of incomes that enabled their

offspring to remain financially dependent on them for longer (Frota
2007: 149, 156). The inception of modern adolescence is, thus, inter-
twined with increasing socio-economic privilege and the opportunities
that this afforded for young people to ‘improve themselves’ (Driscoll
2002: 111). In other words, this amounts to the possibility of spending
longer undertaking leisure activities, of dedicating more time to profes-
sional training and education ahead of entry into an increasingly com-
petitive and technocratic labour market, and of ‘searching’ for their own
individual identities (Frota 2007: 156–157).
The imbrication of increasing leisure time with a consumer culture
that capitalises on individuals’ desires to establish an authentic, individual
identity (and to belong to a recognisable social group) leads to another
key element at the core of contemporary understandings of adolescence:
the emergence of specific popular cultural phenomena in the 1960s and
1970s, which have had a huge impact on how we conceive of, and relate
to, young people. As Frota argues, the hippy movement in the 1960s,
the student protests of 1968, and the expansion of youth counterculture
throughout the 1970s, contributed to discussion about the nature of
adolescence, instituting middle-class, masculine adolescence as its most
privileged paradigm (2007: 165). In various Latin American countries,
youth counterculture became associated with resistance to the repressive
military regimes that were sweeping across the region. Laura Podalsky
emphasises that in Argentina, for example, rock music and youth became
synonymous with ‘lo sospechoso’ (the suspicious) in the 1970s and that,
during the years following the institution of a hardline military junta
(1976–1983), the rock scene became ‘the dominant discursive site
through which young people could construct and negate their identity as
youth’ (2011: 106).
Nonetheless, by the 1980s, youth movements had fragmented; in
Brazil, for instance, Helena Abramo suggests that the student movement
lost its expressiveness as it simultaneously began to gain greater visibil-
ity (1994: 55). Popular youth figures were reduced to the circulation of
their image and the consumption of specific goods (Abramo 1994: 55).
Similarly, by the mid-late 1980s in Argentina, ‘rock was no longer nec-
essarily an alternative cultural space and, as big producers made inroads,
many bands turned their attention for the first time to the “body, pleas-
ure, and entertainment”’ (Podalsky 2011: 106). At the same time, cable
TV access increased, and mall culture became increasingly prominent
(Podalsky 2011: 106). Ivany Nascimento argues that the images and dis-
courses propagated at this time, principally by the media, did not encour-
age adolescents to reflect on the ways that they could alter or overcome
their circumstances, but rather were designed to promulgate stereotypi-
cal models of behavior that would fulfill the demands of consumer-driven
societies (2002: 71). As Podalsky notes, commentators viewed these
developments as ‘contributing to the depoliticization of young people’,
who were seduced by ‘post-modern culture’ and rendered vulnerable to
‘the unfettered power of the marketplace’ (2011: 107).
In recent years, the diversification and proliferation of teen entertain-
ment across different media, including on the internet, has culminated
in the figure of the adolescent frequently being employed as a cipher for
the social changes and for the alternative forms of cultural production
and consumption that have been instituted by digital platforms (King
2015: 47–71). In his analysis of the Brazilian transmedia comic Turma
da Mônica Jovem, whose narratives revolve around the adventures of a
teen gang in São Paulo, Ed King observes that the comic signals cur-
rent anxieties both surrounding excessive forms of consumption and
hyperconnectivity, which are linked to youth culture (2015: 55–56), and
regarding the ‘immaterial labour’ resulting from young consumers’ pro-
pensity to be active in contributing to the development of the comic’s
characters and plot lines via online fan communities (2015: 53). Within
traditional economic models, this shift towards ‘immaterial labour’, and
‘immaterial’ (digital) consumption may be viewed as threatening because
it enables individuals to consume in ways that are not clearly ‘produc-
tive of capital’ (2015: 53). A detailed consideration of the practices of
distribution, reception and the fan communities that are associated with
youth consumer markets, particularly within the digital sphere, is beyond
the scope of the present study, however it is significant that the unsta-
ble, potentially ‘threatening’ figure of the adolescent has, in several of
the films analysed in this volume, been ‘contained’ within cultural prod-
ucts that shore up traditional modes of production, distribution and con-
sumption. Nonetheless, the haptic and affective dynamics at play within
the films addressed by Geoffrey Maguire, Inela Selimović and Ramiro
Armas also gesture towards the association of teen characters with the
complication of traditional, hierarchical subject–object relationships.
Podalsky argues that it might be possible to trace current critiques of
contemporary Latin American youth back to the anxieties of the ‘revo-
lutionary’ generation, ‘who are now in their sixties and seventies and are
looking back on the failures or limitations of their own youthful projects’

(2011: 122). Although Chilean director Sebastián Lelio does not belong
to this generation, his 2009 film Navidad explores this dynamic as it
depicts three teenagers exploring their own changing subjectivities and
sexualities while implicitly struggling with their relationships to the frus-
trated ‘Utopian dreams’ and ‘socialist projects’ that marked their own
parents’ adolescence, which were thwarted by the 1973 military coup;
these dreams are alluded to through the film’s soundtrack, which incor-
porates revolutionary songs and rock music from the 1960s and 1970s.
The emergence of adolescence in contemporary Latin American cul-
tural narratives has, in this way, been inextricably linked to the region’s
turbulent political history, while, at the same time, often surfacing as
both a marker of a depoliticised, neoliberal present and the symbol of a
media-dominated, globalised future.
Approaches to Childhood and Youth on Film

As has been suggested, a deep concern surrounding the impact of teen-
agers’ exposure to media representations and to television has been
present since not long after the development of adolescence as a mod-
ern category. Consequently, as Timothy Shary states, various studies
have been produced about the positive and negative effects of media on
young people, as they are often considered ‘vulnerable’ to media mes-
sages, ‘both because media industries target them and because their
minds are thought to be particularly impressionable. Yet not nearly as
much time or effort has been expended in examinations of how youth
are represented by the media’ (Shary 2007: 2–3). Shary adds that schol-
arly analyses of the representation of adolescence in US cinema only
began in earnest in the 1980s (2007: 3).
Until recently, there was also a dearth in research into the depiction
of child protagonists in global cinema, which has since been addressed
in studies including those by Karen Lury (2005, 2010), Emma Wilson
(2003, 2005, 2007) and Vicky Lebeau (2001, 2008). Lebeau empha-
sises that the modern notion of ‘the difference of childhood as a time
and space apart’ was strengthened by the ‘quintessentially modern
medium’ of cinema, which since its beginnings, has been used to record
images of children, and has contributed to ‘the visual dimension of the
“myth” of the child’ (2008: 40). Within the context of Hispanic and
Latin American cinema, Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet (2012,
2014), Sarah Wright (2013), Sophie Dufays (2014), Deborah Martin

(2011, 2017a, b) and Rachel Randall (2017) have analysed various fac-
ets of child characters’ representation, including but not limited to: their
roles in films that operate as national allegories (Dufays 2014) and that
intercede in national ‘memory wars’ (Wright 2013), the cinematic tech-
niques used to evoke their subjectivity and agency (Rocha and Seminet
2014; Randall 2017; Maguire 2017; Martin 2017a, b), and their poten-
tial to enact critiques of class and gender expectations (Martin 2011;
Rocha and Seminet 2014; Randall 2017). In certain cases, their research
has incorporated reflections on the portrayal of teens or young adults,
however it is clear that there are distinct emotional, cultural and filmic
registers at play in cinema’s approach towards adolescence, which differ-
entiates it from filmic depictions of childhood. This volume, therefore,
endeavors to build on and extend these scholars’ insights in order to out-
line and explore these registers and tropes in contemporary portrayals of
adolescents in Latin American cinema. First, however, we will delineate
pertinent contributions that have been made in existing research into the
representation of childhood and of adolescence in both Latin American
and World cinemas.
In her study Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, Claudia Castañeda
observes that the moment at which humans transform from nature to
culture is figured in Freudian psychoanalysis as occurring ‘in and through
the body of the child’, which is represented as a body that wavers on the
cusp between these two domains (2003: 161–162). This association has
arguably acquired even greater significance in Latin American cinema in
which ‘the historical subjugation of “wild” (or “barbaric”) territories and
the imposition of colonial “civilization” finds a pertinent metaphor in the
psychoanalytic model of subjectification with which children are asso-
ciated’ (Randall 2017: xl). Child characters’ relationship to this thresh-
old between ‘civilized’ culture and ‘wild’ borderland territories in Latin
America has converted them into figures who represent both a focal
point of, and a limit to, patriarchal, state or biopolitical power (Randall
2017: xii).
In her recent study, The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon builds on
Foucault’s assertion that ‘the masturbating child’ was one of the key
figures through which modern mechanisms of biopolitical control be
seen to emerge (Foucault 2003: 55–59) and adapts this to the current
global context in which continual environmental catastrophes remind
us that ‘matter is no passive substrate for human design’ (2017: 6).
Similarly to Castañeda, Sheldon observes that ‘the child reminds us of the

autonomous processes and subindividual capacity of which we are com-
posed and so matches the “vital, self-organizing, and yet non-naturalistic
structure of living matter”’ (2017: 6). At the same time, the child ‘binds
the realisation of nonhuman vitality back into the charmed circle of the
human, encircling the future in the promise of generationality’ (2017: 6).
Nonetheless, she concludes that the coexistence of these two elements
‘generates a queer child-figure whose humanity is always suspiciously
intimate with other-than-human forms-of-life’ (2017: 7). Consequently,
Sheldon contends that in various contemporary North American cultural
productions it is through the figure of the child that we address our con-
cerns about the future of the Anthropocene and ‘the emergent energies
of posthumanity’ (2017: 22).
In World Cinema more broadly, the figural child’s association with
both pre-linguistic, embodied experiences and the acquisition of lan-
guage, which enables entry into the patriarchal Symbolic order, is
certainly a trope in child protagonists’ portrayals as liminal, border-
crossing individuals who inhabit both imaginary ‘playspaces’ and the
film’s diegetic (and profilmic) realities. As Phil Powrie has argued, pre-
adolescent protagonists encourage spectatorial identification and nos-
talgia, but they simultaneously represent difference, thereby instituting
a ‘fractured’ mode of viewing, which he terms ‘heterospection’ (2005:
341, 345). Powrie observes that, similarly, the cinema screen operates as
a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’, which exists in reality, but also unites vari-
ous ‘incompatible’, imaginary spaces that are both recognisable because
they may encourage the adult spectator to recall their own childhood
memories, but also unrecognisable because they evoke a child-like
gaze or ‘past’ experience which belongs to another (2005: 350–351).
Film’s potential to evoke children’s and adolescents’ embodied experi-
ences, and hence their physical and emotional vulnerability (which has
been explored by both Emma Wilson [2005] and Deborah Martin
[2017a]), draws a pertinent parallel with cinema itself, as a medium
through which one sees other, but also the (distorted) reflection of one-
self. It is perhaps this that accounts for cinema’s fascination with the
child: both film and the figural child foreground ‘the ways in which
human subjectivities are dependent on the recognition of an Other,
that is to say, they foreground the fundamentally interconnected nature
of the human gaze’, and of human experience (Randall 2017: xlii).
Although the contemporary plethora of child and adolescent films that
elicit affective or emotional responses have been critiqued for their depo-
liticisation of national concerns and conflicts (Bentes 2003), Wilson sug-
gests that these kinds of depictions can remind spectators of a young
person’s ‘lack of control over its circumstances, its environment, even at
times over its own body’ (2005: 330), encouraging viewers to ‘suddenly
feel like children’ (2005: 331). This represents, for Wilson, a political
gesture, given that it signifies an attempt briefly to undermine the power
relations that have traditionally existed between children and adults.
As Lury has argued, child protagonists’ potential to act as a ‘screen’
for adult anxieties and fears, particularly in films about civil violence or
repression, can legitimate an audience’s ‘feelings of anger and pity, and
perceptions of right and wrong, despite the moral complexity inherent
in any representation of conflict’ (2010: 106–107). Their employment in
films that reconstruct the onset of dictatorship or periods of violence are
often suggestive of a cathartic desire to process past collective or national
traumas, with which children have become associated as a result of psy-
choanalytic theory, in which the painful realisation of the child’s sepa-
rateness from their mother is often restaged through ‘transitional games’
that involve forays into new spaces and/or the recuperation of a ‘lost’
object (Freud 1950: 14–15). A wave of Spanish and Latin American
films that depict the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and the periods
of hardline military rule that spread across the Southern Cone during
the 1960s and 1970s employ pre-adolescent protagonists who either
undertake transitional games or institute imaginary ‘playspaces’ within
the films’ realities, precisely in order to process their difficult, violent cir-
cumstances as well as (frequently) to cope with the death or disappear-
ance of a parent. These productions include (but are not limited to):
Kamchatka (dir. Marcelo Piñeyro 2002), Machuca (dir. Andrés Wood
2005), El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (dir. Guillermo del Toro
2006), O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias/The Year My Parents
Went on Vacation (dir. Cao Hamburger 2006) and Infancia clandesti-
na/Clandestine Childhood (dir. Benjamín Ávila 2011). The association of
child protagonists not only with trauma but also with ‘the loss of histor-
ical memory and its recuperation’ has been explored by Sarah Wright in
Spanish cinema (2013), while Geoffrey Maguire (2017) has analysed the
way that child characters have been used to delve critically into the polit-
icisation of individual and collective adult recollections of Argentina’s
military dictatorship.
Interestingly, as Rocha and Seminet (2012) have pointed out,

pre-adolescent children, rather than teens, are much more frequently
cast in filmic narratives that explore historical memory and trauma.
Furthermore, Rocha (2012) and Rita de Grandis (2011) have argued
that several of these films (namely Machuca, O ano em que meus pais
saíram de férias and Kamchatka) primarily adopt an ‘innocent’ child’s
perspective in order to depoliticise a traumatic past, which is thus made
simpler and more palatable for foreign audiences. These portrayals
thus attest to the narrative and political malleability of cinematic child-
hoods, while, at the same time, raising significant questions regarding
the manipulation of youth on screen and forcing us ‘to reconsider our
understanding of the nature and challenges of childhood itself and its
relationship to the political’ (Maguire 2017: 134).
Gendered Portrayals
The proliferation of such productions also demonstrates a marked pref-
erence for boy protagonists; indeed, all the films mentioned above focus
on male children, except for El laberinto del fauno, which incorporates
a gendered critique of patriarchal society under Franco. While boys are
frequently employed as ‘witnesses of well-documented historical turn-
ing points, which have irrevocably marked their nations’, or as ‘bearers
of their nations’ political futures’, girls often appear to ‘have no such
clear link with a teleological, developmentalist “History”’ (Randall 2017:
104–105). Catherine Driscoll accounts for this by highlighting the fact
that girls have traditionally been figured as a failure of subjectification
within psychoanalytic theory (2002: 7), both because they lack the prin-
cipal motivation to overcome the Oedipal Complex (castration fear) and
because they can only pass through adolescence and become ‘Woman’
via their relations to the masculine subject, i.e. by becoming a wife or
mother (2002: 57). This, in turn, has contributed to the characterisation
of young women as occupying a strange state of permanent transition
and has certainly impacted the cinematic portrayal of female teens. This
psychoanalytic framework has, nonetheless, been productively compli-
cated by Anita Harris, who observes that late capitalist discourse has con-
tributed to the creation of the ‘future girl’ figure, as young women are
imagined as the only subjects who can cope with the flexibility and adap-
tation required in a market-driven society typified by insecurity (2004: 6).
It is clear, then, that our understanding of childhood and ado-

lescence, as well as their purposes, is strongly influenced by socio-
economic and cultural developments and requirements. These, in turn,
affect teenagers’ experiences of adolescence, which are also shaped by
gender expectations and class allegiances, a fact that many contem-
porary Latin American films acknowledge in their screening of socio-
political issues and tensions surrounding gender, class and national
identities (which represents a stark contrast to many of the mainstream
‘teen movies’ produced in Hollywood [Shary 2007]). Nonetheless,
the palpable gendering of male and female children and adolescents
in various films produced in the region requires recognition and prob-
lematisation, and it is for this reason that some essays in this volume
draw on Driscoll’s and Harris’ frameworks of critical analysis, among
others. Driscoll, for instance, qualifies suggestions that female adoles-
cence is predominantly ‘a private subject related to a girl’s maturing
body’, unlike ‘male adolescence, which has a dominant connection
to the public sphere’ (2002: 126). She points out that, ‘while boys
learn class/labour roles, girls learn not only these certainties (which
they must share in order not to disrupt) but also privatised and priva-
tising ideologies centered on the family’ (2002: 111). Her observa-
tion that class ‘demonstrably affects both puberty and adolescence as
an experience of social placement and transformation’ (2002: 111) is
equally pertinent to male teens whose passage to manhood involves
the assumption of specific class, gender and sexual roles. As Raewyn
Connell has emphasised, both the class system and a system of patriar-
chy function concurrently in the transformation of the male child into a
male c itizen (1990: 514). Male adolescence is the period in which ‘the
young male becomes most vulnerable to peer expectations, pressures
and judgment’ (Messner 1987: 199) because it is the moment when
boys are often pressured publically to perform the ‘active’ masculine
role that distinguishes them from ‘passive’ femininity, as Richard Parker
has observed in his analysis of masculinities in Brazil (Parker 2003:
310–311). Through their essays in the present volume, Randall,
Seminet and Milton Fernando Rodríguez-González all seek to nuance
such gendered representations of youth, paying close attention to the
historical and political contexts of their films’ presents and exposing the
complex layers of gender, politics, ethnicity and social class that compli-
cate any such critical approaches.
Youth, Globalisation and Urban Space in Latin America

In sum, while child protagonists often feature in films that portray the
nation-state’s (under)development, urbanisation and violent past, as
a result of their allegorical potential (Dufays 2014), teens, by contrast,
are employed as ‘the ideal vehicles through which a scathing critique
is leveled on adults and adult society’ (Rocha and Seminet 2012: 5).
Rocha and Seminet state that this is precisely because they are figured
moving through puberty and toward adult citizenship, which is associ-
ated with the assumption of specific, constraining social roles that have
been informed by traditional patriarchal values (2014: 5). In opposition
to child protagonists, teens are often characterised by rebelliousness, a
loss of innocence, experimentation, sexual-awakening and highly self-
conscious behaviors. They are employed to express and explore anxie-
ties relating both to the present and to the impact of socio-economic
and cultural changes in the near future. Gonzalo Aguilar has argued that
representations of disorientated youth often function as a reaction to
the consequences of globalisation (2008: 196–198), which have altered
‘traditional ways of life’ and conceptions of national identity (Rocha and
Seminet 2012: 14). Indeed, while globalisation may give adolescents
greater access to commodities, it also ‘renders their insertion as produc-
tive citizens into the global market as a problematic scenario at a time
when countries are either unable or reluctant to support their aspirations
(whether in education of meaningful careers) due to uneven develop-
ment and shrinking national economies’ (Rocha and Seminet 2012: 14).
These kinds of concerns represent a contrast to those associated with
child protagonists, who are commonly employed as symbols of a more
distant future, as a result of their strong link to a heteronormative
‘reproductive futurism’ in which a (frequently ‘sentimentalized’) figural
child comes to embody ‘the telos of the social order’ and the one ‘for
whom that order is held in perpetual trust’ (Edelman 2004: 11).
Although it is productive to outline broad trends that unite the por-
trayals of children and adolescents in contemporary World Cinema,
there are certainly different emotional registers and social concerns
at play in relation to the representation of young people on screen in
Latin America, particularly when these are contrasted with films set or
produced in other regions. While generic themes associated with ado-
lescence, including drug use, urban violence and corruption often mark
teens’ depictions, these are frequently fused with the exploration of spe-
cifically Latin American realities. In her essay in this volume, for exam-
ple, Randall explores colonial vestiges in contemporary representations
of domestic labour in Brazil, while Dufays, for her part, demonstrates
how the interweaving of drug violence, political and structural instability,
and recent neoliberal economic crises have infused Mexican portrayals of
adolescence in distinct and decisive ways.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various Latin
American governments (and media outlets) focused on and demonised
the ‘problem’ of ‘street children’ (or youths) and their most noticeable
forms of urban labour.2 The repression and criminalisation of poor ado-
lescents worsened under the military regimes that seized power during
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a situation reflected in Héctor Babenco’s
Pixote (1981), which is based on a novel inspired by real events, and
which attests to the fact that it became the norm to detain destitute,
vagrant and delinquent children and adolescents in the same institu-
tions indefinitely in Brazil at this time (Drybread 2009: 338). In the late
1980s and early 1990s, various countries moved to adopt rights-based
approaches to children and adolescents in the form of ‘children’s stat-
utes’ (particularly after regional governments began to ratify the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [1989]); these were
aimed both at enshrining children’s human rights and acknowledging
their need for extra protections, thereby theoretically clamping down on
young people’s exploitation or detainment. Nevertheless, the situation of
impoverished youths in various Latin American countries did not mark-
edly improve in the 1980s and 1990s, with the spread of neoliberal pol-
icies and the transference of responsibilities related to child protection
and education to private bodies, as in Chile, for example (Vergara 2015:
291). In Colombia, high cocaine prices led to a boom in drug-trafficking
as a rapidly increasing number of adolescents became the protagonists
of the sicariato: ‘la funesta empresa de muerte del narcotráfico’ (drug-
trafficking’s tragic business of death) (Vergara 2007: 587). Across Latin
America, those who survived childhood diseases and came from poor
backgrounds were forced to confront insurmountable socio-economic
barriers, which—combined with ‘a culture of marginality and high lev-
els of rural to urban migration’—contributed to ‘an increasingly visible
(Latin American) urban drama consisting of “street children”’ (Pilotti
and Rizzini 1994: 49).
The situation has, in turn, been explored in a variety of well-known

films that draw on an enduring association between youths, pov-
erty and urban space instituted by Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950),
which focuses on a group of impoverished minors in Mexico City’s
slums. During the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, films including Pixote,
Rodrigo D: No futuro/Rodrigo D: No Future (dir. Víctor Gaviria 1990),
La vendedora de rosas/The Rose Seller (dir. Víctor Gaviria 1998), and
Cidade de Deus/City of God (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
2002), contributed to ‘street kids’ in Latin American cinema beginning
to qualify as a ‘transnational genre’ (Vieira 2010: 227). They attest to
the involvement of destitute youths in violent, criminal enterprises,
as well as to their lives in institutions or on the street, the only escape
from which is presented by drugs, either taking them, selling them, or
both. Geoffrey Kantaris observes, in his analysis of Pixote, that the film
hints at the links ‘between crime-violence-poverty in one place and
global flows of wealth in another’ (Kantaris 2003: 182). The centrality
of punk music and culture within Rodrigo D: No Futuro, which portrays
the endangered lives of deprived adolescents in Medellín, Colombia, at
a particularly violent moment in the city’s history, serves as a critique of
a globalised market-driven society and its impulse to create consumable
and disposable ‘products’, including its protagonists (Kantaris 2014).
Indeed, it is a terrible irony that the increased awareness and pace of
globalisation in the region has, at once, both contributed to these young
people’s misery and also secured ‘the transnational success of the Latin
American films that feature them’ (Vieira 2010: 241). Kantaris echoes
these concerns in his analysis of Rodrigo D: No Futuro, when he asks: ‘how
can a film whose very apparatus is immersed in regimes of visibility and
invisibility trace the trajectory which propels those invisible bodies into a
nullspace, a no future?’ (Kantaris 2014). The youths who featured in all of
the films listed above were non-professional, ‘natural’ actors, employed in
order to evoke the harsh realities of their daily lives. However, the dangers
of exposing these vulnerable individuals’ experiences later became awfully
evident: several of Rodrigo D’s protagonists were killed or murdered while
the film was being produced (Kantaris 2014), while Fernando Ramos da
Silva, who played the eponymous Pixote, was hounded by the authorities
following the film’s success and eventually shot dead by the police in 1987
when he was nineteen years old, demonstrating his transformation into a
collective figure of fear and suspicion.
Possibly the best known of the wave of fiction films that endeavored to
document the violent realities and economic challenges of urban life for
impoverished adolescents in Latin America is Fernando Meirelles and Kátia
Lund’s Cidade de Deus. Their box-office success was a key player in trans-
forming a global periphery into ‘the centre of a transnational favela cul-
ture, instantly absorbed by the mainstream industries of fashion and music’
(Vieira 2010: 241). João Luis Vieira argues that the key innovation of these
kinds of films lies in their focus on ‘native excluded youth as authentic sub-
jects of, and shareholders in, [a] transnational rap culture’ (2010: 241).
However, various critics have argued that Cidade de Deus and other films,
such as Amores perros, which also dramatises marginality, criminality and the
experiences of deprived youths in Mexico City, participate in the speculari-
sation of violence (Fig. 1.1). Ivana Bentes states that there is a clear shift in
Cidade de Deus from an ‘aesthetics of hunger’ to a ‘cosmetics of hunger’: to
‘the steadicam that surfs through reality, a sign of a discourse that valorises
“beauty” and the “quality” of the image’, whose formula combines a ‘local
theme’ with ‘an “international” aesthetics’ (Bentes 2005: 84). The repeti-
tion of this successful formula, and the pervasive commodification of ado-
lescent experiences, has contributed to a perception of these kinds of films
as clichéd, as they arguably capitalise on the capacity of young protagonists
to make distant, complicated realities more easily understandable or con-
sumable by global audiences and thereby aid their transnational circulation.
Fig. 1.1 Cidade de Deus, dir. by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund (2002)
Given the financial challenges of film-making and securing international

distribution for directors in Latin America, it is inevitable that the films dis-
cussed in this volume are also (albeit to varying degrees) implicated in the
‘tactical’ deployment of adolescence on screen.
Nonetheless, Laura Podalsky’s analyses of ‘the politics of affect and
emotion’ (2007, 2011) in depictions of disaffected youth in contempo-
rary Latin American cinema have productively complicated Bentes’ con-
clusions. Podalsky has suggested that critiques of these films often betray
an ‘urge to resuscitate older models of the political’ that were popular in
the 1960s and 1970s, and that they do not sufficiently appreciate ‘the
sociocultural work carried out by the new “sensorially laden” cultural
practices favored by young adults’ (2007: 107). In her analyses of four
contemporary films about youth from Argentina and Cuba, she argues
that rather than ‘documenting a “waning of affect” or the “emotional
paralysis” of young adults, these films register sensibilities associated with
the renegotiation of modes of sociopolitical engagement’ (2011: 112).
They ‘inscribe contemporary affective disjunction in terms of depth per-
ception’ (2011: 103) and consequently force viewers to adopt ‘a new
type of sensibility’ that ‘cannot ignore the affective charge of history
marginalised in the rationalised realm of neoliberal politics’, but at the
same time they do not ‘subsume cognition to purgative outburst’ (2011:
113). Her analyses of the importance of depth perception, framing, and
the production of affect in these films of youth dovetail with Rocha and
Seminet’s observation that there has been an increasing desire on the
part of Latin American film directors to evoke children’s and adolescents’
subjectivities and agency on screen (2014: xi). Many of the chapters in
this book draw on Podalsky’s observations to explore how adolescents
in Latin American film are employed as emotional catalysts—often in
their relationships to adults—as well as bearers of ‘transgressive’ social
and sexual desires, which represent more troubling critiques of highly
unequal and corrupt societies than those associated with child characters,
perhaps as a result of teens’ greater physical and mental maturity.
Adolescent Sensuality, Transgressive Desires

and Swimming Pools
One reason that child and adolescent characters are associated with
burgeoning ‘non-normative’ sexual desires is that, from an ‘adult’ per-
spective, children are ‘queer’ because they have not yet reached the
destination of fixed sexuality (Bond Stockton 2004: 238). This notion

has been interrogated by Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley in their
edited volume Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), while
Deborah Martin (2017a, b), Emma Wilson (2007) and Rachel Randall
(2017) have explored the experimental cinematic techniques employed
to evoke young people’s desires on film. These techniques often privi-
lege the stimulation or evocation of senses other than vision, as a ‘less
exploitative or objectifying way’ of portraying a potentially childish form
of sensuality (Randall 2017: 120). However, it is important to acknowl-
edge that a less than ‘innocent’ desire for youth or childhood may be sig-
naled by a fixation on children’s or adolescents’ bodies on film (Nichols
1991: 31). As Emma Wilson has argued, ‘what is necessary is the open,
distressed acknowledgement that representations of children may be con-
ceived by certain viewers in sexual terms, and equally that they may not
be’ (2007: 174).
It is perhaps for this reason that various film-makers employ ‘haptic’
cinematic techniques in order to allude to the fact that young people
are themselves desiring subjects. In The Skin of the Film (2000), Laura
Marks explains that haptic compositions appeal to alternative sensorial
modes of relating to the cinematic medium, for example through sound
or invocations of touch. While a traditional ‘optical’ visuality invites
and presupposes the existence of a distant, controlling view, which per-
mits the spectator ‘to organize him/herself as an all-perceiving subject’
(Marks 2000: 162), a haptic composition appeals ‘to tactile connec-
tions’ as it passes over ‘the surface of its object’ (2000: 162). These
kinds of sequences can either provoke disorientation, as the spectator
is uncertain about the nature of the object they are beholding, or they
can evoke a sense of seeing something for the first time, making them
the ideal aesthetic mode to explore childish discoveries (Randall 2017:
108). In either scenario, haptic cinema has the potential to make the
spectator ‘vulnerable’ to the image, which is suggestive of its sensuous
quality; its sensuality is, nonetheless, transferred from the location of the
object depicted to the surface of the image (Marks 2000: 184–185). In
other words, it is a mode that acknowledges that it cannot (and should
not) attempt to expose a child character’s desires, without precluding
the recognition of their existence altogether. Martin has also observed
that ‘the new wave of Argentine women filmmakers making films
about children and marginal sexualities’, and in particular the cinema
of Lucrecia Martel, produces ‘not so much a child’s gaze but rather a
child’s sensorium’ (2017b: 242, 248). She argues that their ‘experiments
with touch and sound […] are a means of constantly gesturing to what
is beyond straight, white, adult, bourgeois subjectivity’ (Martin 2017b:
248). Martin has previously suggested that child characters have become
a popular channel for this kind of experimentation as a result of their
‘vulnerability and lack of visual mastery’ (2017a: 194).
It is unsurprising that films about youth also draw on haptic tech-
niques and focus on the evocation of bodily sensations in their explora-
tions of adolescent sexuality and sensuality. Indeed, these productions are
often much more explicit when addressing teenagers’ burgeoning sexual
desires than are films of childhood, given teenagers’ greater maturity and
the strong association between adolescence, puberty and experimenta-
tion. In this collection, both Maguire and Selimović extend this line of
research by analysing films that draw powerfully on haptic or affective
cinematic techniques in order to evoke adolescent protagonists’ ‘trans-
gressive’ desires, and the way that these lead adult characters to question
elements of their own identities or circumstances. Furthermore, in these
productions, the distinction between the spectator’s body and the film
is occasionally undermined, thereby encouraging the (adult) audience to
submit to the film almost as if it were an embodied experience, which,
nonetheless, may provoke ethical discomfort on the part of the viewer
(or ‘voyeur’). In particular, as Shary observes, various films ‘celebrate,
and often exploit, the youthful discovery of sex’, in which ‘we see young
people not only losing their virginity but also questioning their sexual
orientation, dealing with pregnancy, and occasionally finding pleasure’
(2007: 4).
Adolescence is perceived as more apt for this kind of experimentation
because it complicates the perceived dichotomy between the ‘innocence’
of childhood and the ‘rigidity’ of adulthood. Indeed, teens’ identities
and sexualities are often viewed as mutable and fluid as they retain an
association with the polymorphous perversion of childhood, but have
reached an age at which social and sexual experimentation begins to be
considered appropriate. Nonetheless, this also contributes to the fig-
uration of their desires as unknowable and, at times, threatening. The
perceived liminality, malleability and (potentially hostile) unpredictabil-
ity of adolescent desires accounts for the recurrence of the tropes of the
swimming pool, coast line and swamp in several of the films analysed in
this book, including Ausente/Absent (dir. Marco Berger 2011), La sir-
ga/The Towrope (dir. William Vega 2012), Casa grande (dir. Fellipe
Barbosa 2014), Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho/The Way He Looks (dir.

Daniel Ribeiro 2014) and Beira-Mar/Seashore (dir. Filipe Matzembacher
and Marcio Reolon 2016). However, perhaps the most iconic Latin
American film to link the space of the swimming pool to adolescent sex-
ual experimentation is Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001),
where the portrayal of a pool soiled by vegetation (Fig. 1.2) is associated
both with a decadent and corrupt elite class and with the unknowability
of the protagonists’ desires for one another (Brown and Hirsch 2014:
13–14); interestingly, these associations also gain expression through
the dirty pool spaces depicted in the Argentine La ciénaga (dir. Lucrecia
Martel 2001) and Brazilian À deriva (dir. Heitor Dhalia 2009), both of
which also allude to incestuous urges on the part of young protagonists.
The prevalence and significance of liquid and watery spaces in contem-
porary Argentine films by women directors, many of which focus on chil-
dren or adolescents, has been fruitfully explored by Martin, who confirms
that water is connected to desire both as a result of ‘its sensual qualities
on the skin’ (2017b: 255), and because it is a substance that can be ‘con-
tained and controlled but which also transgresses the boundaries which
attempt to contain it’ (2017b: 253–254). It is, therefore, a trope that
is frequently employed in the depiction of marginal or non-normative
desires that may lie ‘beyond representation’ (Martin 2017b: 255).
Fig. 1.2 Y tu mamá también, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (2001)

Indeed, water is ubiquitous in Argentine films that focus on the

subjectivities and experiences of young transgender characters such as
XXY (dir. Lucía Puenzo 2007) and El último verano de la Boyita (dir.
Julia Solomonoff 2009) (Fig. 1.3). Randall has also analysed the tactile
and haptic aesthetics at play in contemporary Brazilian and Chilean films
of girlhood, which allude both to the young protagonists’ burgeoning
desires and to the seemingly ‘queer’, transitional and unknowable nature
of these (2017: 103–136), which may result from the fact that girls’
subject development cannot always be aligned with popular psychoana-
lytic models (Driscoll 2002: 7, 57). While much of the existing analy-
sis has focused on the relationship between these watery tropes and the
portrayal of girls’ desires (Martin 2011; Randall 2017), Maguire’s and
Armas’ chapters in this volume build on this research by exploring their
intersection with male adolescents’ enactment of, and experimentation
with, homoerotic desires and non-hegemonic forms of masculinity on
film.
Fig. 1.3 XXY, dir. by Lucía Puenzo (2007)

There has, nonetheless, been a clear turn toward the representation

of girl protagonists in recent Latin American cinema, which Rocha and
Seminet link to an increase in the number of women directors active
in the region (2014: xiii). Within the context of Brazilian women’s
film-making, Leslie Marsh argues that ‘the most critical explorations of
gendered relations, sexuality and the unevenness of democracy are found
in contemporary cinematic representations of female youth’, particularly
in works directed by women, such as Sandra Werneck’s Meninas/Teen
Mothers (2005) and Sonhos Roubados/Stolen Dreams (2010) (2012: 11).
Marsh suggests that these films—which explore the experiences of teen
mothers and of young female prostitutes, respectively—act as ‘a femi-
nist counterpoint’ to films and TV series such as Cidade de Deus, Cidade
dos Homens/City of Men (dir. Paulo Morelli 2008) and Última Parada:
174/Last Stop 174 (dir. Bruno Barreto 2008), whose narratives are told
almost entirely from the perspective of young male characters (2012:
175). According to Marsh, Werneck’s films illustrate how female (as well
as male) youth ‘inherit social exclusion, poverty and abandonment, and
how they are subjected to gender-based abuses of power and corruption’
(2012: 173). As Lury has stressed, it is ‘predominantly girls who demon-
strate the real terror of an open, vulnerable position’ (2010: 290), an
observation that is strongly illustrated in this volume by Rocha’s anal-
ysis of contemporary Colombian films La sirga and María llena eres de
gracia/María Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston 2004), which depict
impoverished girls coming of age in a society riven by a prolonged civil
conflict and ‘war on drugs’. Rocha argues that the way in which these
films dwell on their protagonists’ determined battles to survive and
improve their situations emphasises these characters’ increasing agency.
Indeed, these films, as well as those directed by Werneck, and those of
Peruvian director Claudia Llosa—including Madeinusa (2006) and La
teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009), which similarly focus on female
adolescents steadfastly struggling to better their circumstances in an
unequal, patriarchal (and often violent) society—represent a break with
tendencies established in earlier Latin American films about children
and youths, which either privileged the portrayal of boy protagonists, or
confined girls to roles as victims, mostly of domestic violence or sexual
exploitation (Ranghelli 1998: 6).
Driscoll observes that late modernity has added both sexuality and
heterosexual identity to the female virgin (2002: 147). She suggests that
‘images of adolescent girls, whether explicitly referencing virginity or
not, mark feminine adolescence as embodying an object of contempla-

tion, disciplined observation, and desiring interpretation’ (2002: 145).
However, while it is clear that various Latin American films may feature
girl protagonists that invite a ‘male gaze’, many of these have also begun
to refuse the objectification that this implies, either through the mobili-
sation of the haptic cinematic techniques mentioned above (which imply
the frustration of a traditional, controlling, ‘optical’ visuality), or via the
depiction of overtly queer or uncanny female adolescent characters. Films
including À deriva, Madeinusa, La niña santa and Joven y alocada (dir.
Marialy Rivas 2012) take this a step further as they trace girls’ attempts
to turn this gaze back on others, including on adult male characters,
in sequences that dwell on their transgressive gestures in ways that are
clearly designed to unsettle adult spectators. As Martin argues of La niña
santa, ‘what is perhaps most threatening to the social order’ is girl pro-
tagonist Amalia’s ‘refusal to accept her status as object in the economy of
gaze and touch [instituted by an adult male] and her dogged insistence
on actively looking/desiring’ (2011: 65) (Fig. 1.4). Nevertheless, this
kind of sexual experimentation often appears to be reserved for m iddle-
or upper-middle-class girl characters who enjoy at least a basic level of
parental protection and material comfort, thereby enabling them to
take the potential emotional and social risks that may be associated with
exploring different relationships and facets of their identities and sexual-
ities. Of the films listed above, this is the case of all the girl protagonists,
with the exception of Madeinusa, whose narrative is pervaded by surreal-
ist elements.
Despite this, little of the existing research into child and adoles-
cent protagonists in Latin American film reflects on the issue of socio-
economic privilege and how this impacts the experience of coming-of-age,
yet an increasing number of recent productions have begun to address
such an issue. As Tobias Hecht has emphasised, limited analysis has been
conducted relating to the lives of middle-class and rich children in Latin
America at all, even though some of the most disturbing notions about
race, class and gender are taught to privileged children (2002: 244). In
this volume, Randall, Seminet and Sarah Barrow address this gap and
examine Latin American films that pay particular attention to the effects
of class on the experiences of adolescents growing up in Brazil, Mexico
and Peru. These productions represent a diversification of the cinematic
treatment of adolescents in the region’s cinema, which had previously
tended to restrict its focus to impoverished (even homeless) youths, who
Fig. 1.4 La niña santa, dir. by Lucrecia Martel (2004)
embodied the misery and alienation provoked by the emergence and con-
solidation of global capitalism. By contrast, in recent years, several Latin
American films have cast a critical eye on the privileges enjoyed by ado-
lescents from ‘elite’ families, including their close ties to live-in maids
and nannies who often serve as surrogate mother figures for young peo-
ple whose relationships to their own biological parents may be strained.
This is a trend that has been observed by Deborah Shaw (2017) and is
explored by Randall in this volume, who notes that adolescents’ con-
ventional association with deceptive and manipulative behaviors have,
furthermore, led privileged youths to be used as a cipher for critiques of
corrupt or exploitative elite practices in highly unequal Latin American
societies, in films such as Casa grande, Que horas ela volta?/The Second
Mother (dir. Anna Muylaert 2015), and the aforementioned Y tu mamá
también and La ciénaga.
New Visions of Adolescence addresses the complexities and contra-
dictions of the filmic portrayals of adolescence discussed above, which
have surfaced at a time when both theoretical and cultural perspectives
on youth in Latin America have reached a historical peak. Through
the demarcation of adolescence as a distinct period of social, political
and sexual formation, the essays contained within this collection both
acknowledge the continuities between adolescence and child- and
adulthoods, while, at the same time, recognising the distinct registers
that drive and structure the teenage experience and its depiction. If, as
Podalsky contends, a critical gap has emerged in Latin American film
studies that requires a sustained analysis of how these adolescent-focused
films ‘support or contest [the] larger discursive positioning of youth as
a sign of the times (and of what is to come)’ (2011: 102), then New
Visions of Adolescence acts as the preliminary step in addressing such a
gap, interrogating how this recent ‘adolescent turn’ both informs and
reflects the distinct socio-political realities of the region’s present histori-
cal moment.
Structure and Scope of New Visions of Adolescence

The structure of the collection reflects the emerging themes explored
above, with consecutive chapters demonstrating a shared preoccupation
with the recurrent issue of gender and gendered representations. The
first section, entitled ‘Gender and Sexuality’, focuses on the cinematic
treatment of developing libidinal desires, both heterosexual and homo-
sexual, and on the specific haptic and sensory forms of cinematography
that serve to problematise the ‘transgressive’ nature of these emergent
sexual subjectivities. The second section shifts the focus to ‘Gender and
Class’ and examines how the increasing instances of ‘privileged’ youths
in contemporary Latin American cinema have served to critique and
expose the region’s enduring racial, ethnic and political inequalities.
The final section of the collection, ‘Gender and Politics’, extends these
debates to the national and international stages, exploring the figural
adolescent’s capacity to act as a lens through which to view the past and
the future, and examining, as a parallel, how the effects of globalisation
have complicated any such attempts at representation in purely national
terms. The overarching emphasis on gender throughout all three sec-
tions reflects the importance, described in a preliminary fashion above, of
emerging theoretical notions of girlhood and boyhood, extending their
critical importance beyond the category of childhood and, at the same
time, recognising their limitations when applied to adolescent demon-
strations of sexuality, social class and politics.
In the first essay of the collection, ‘Visual Displeasure: Adolescence
and the Erotics of the Queer Male Gaze’, Geoffrey Maguire examines
the formal and aesthetic implications of cinematically constructing ado-

lescence as a site for the interrogation of emergent sexual subjectivities.
In his critical analysis of Marco Berger’s Ausente (2011), Maguire argues
that the filmic figure of the adolescent performs a key role in contem-
porary queer Argentine and Latin American film, serving not only to
emphasise the inherent fluidity of sexuality and sexual orientation, but
also to facilitate a more dynamic identification between spectator and
cinematic image. As Maguire contends, the erotic nature of Ausente’s
narrative, which recounts a teenager’s attempts to seduce his mid-
dle-aged teacher, is reflected in the film’s cinematography itself, with the
camera formally dwelling on naked or exposed male adolescent bodies
as they enter and exit the aquatic and affective spaces of the swimming
pool, its showers and locker rooms. Maguire draws on recent phenome-
nological scholarship on filmic embodiment and touch in order to draw
attention to the ‘visual erotics’ (Marks 2000: 183) of Berger’s produc-
tion, which, as he concludes, demands a more active and intersubjective
form of spectatorship through its eroticised, haptic screening of the ado-
lescent body.
The ethical dimension of representing adolescence on screen, and
the critical focus on the adolescent questioning (or queering) of heter-
onormative and societally policed sexualities, also inform the theoreti-
cal framework adopted by Ramiro Armas in his chapter, entitled ‘(Re)
Pairing Adolescent Masculinities: the Neo-Fraternal Social Contract
and the Penal State’. Through the lens of contemporary Brazilian cin-
ema, namely Daniel Ribeiro’s Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho (2010) and
Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Beira-Mar (2016), Armas
argues that recent Latin American queer cinema has seen a marked trend
towards adolescent characters of relative privilege, along with a corre-
sponding narrative emphasis on their inherent socio-political potential
to enact change. In his chapter, Armas draws on Walescka Pino-Ojeda’s
conceptualisation of the ‘fraternal social contract’ (2014), whose role
in the patriarchal bourgeois state is to maintain the continuity of gen-
der and power dynamics; for Armas, however, the characters of Hoje eu
quero voltar sozinho and Beira-Mar are exposed to a new fraternal social
contract, which both demands and polices hegemonic expressions of
masculinity within the ‘carceral’ social structures of the neoliberal state.
As Armas concludes, while the performance of masculinity enables
these protagonists to negotiate conventional adolescent rites of pas-
sage, it is only through the fictional, sensorial exploration of their queer
desire—within spaces marked by fluidity and fantasy—that they are able

to ‘re-pair’ a sense of narrative and social agency that would, otherwise,
contravene present-day Brazil’s tacit heteronormative ‘code of conduct’.
Developing Maguire’s discussion of the aesthetic and narrative signif-
icance of the sensory in recent adolescent-focused film, and expanding
on the emphasis discussed by Armas on the capacity of teen protagonists
to enact change within patriarchal structures of socio-political power,
Inela Selimović closes the collection’s initial section on gender and sex-
uality with a critical analysis of Lucrecia Martel’s short film, Rey muerto
(1995). The chapter, entitled, ‘Sensorial Youths: Gender, Eroticism,
and Agency’, discusses how the privileging of adolescent experience in
Martel’s film, which Selimović argues lays the formal and aesthetic foun-
dations for her later Salta trilogy, triggers in the viewer a synesthetic
understanding of corporeal subjectivity, pushing the ocular to the periph-
ery and integrating a multisensory formation of erotic desire. By turning
to Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet’s conception of the adolescent
as a ‘focalizer’ (2012: 5), Selimović explores how Martel mobilises cin-
ematic forms of embodiment and perception in transgressive ways
through the teenage protagonist of Rey muerto, advancing a socio-polit-
ical critique of the inherently patriarchal structures of power that remain
hegemonic in the contemporary Argentine context. In this way, the
chapter raises significant questions surrounding the narrative agency of
teen protagonists, bringing into focus the complex layers of representa-
tion that the adolescent ‘focalizes’ and gesturing towards the inextrica-
ble nature of these films’ representations of gender, sexuality, class and
politics.
In ‘Part II: Gender and Class’, Rachel Randall opens the section by
discussing contemporary filmic representations of the lingering colonial
relationships between domestic workers and their employers’ teenage
children in Brazil. In her chapter, entitled ‘“Eu não sou o meu pai!”:
Deception, Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande’, Randall
focuses on how the adolescent protagonists of Fellipe Barbosa’s Casa
grande (2014), particularly the upper-class central character of Jean, at
once expose, problematise and consolidate the enduring colonial power
dynamics that persist within the domestic space. Randall prioritises a crit-
ical examination of Casa grande’s production of cinematic affect, con-
tending that such an approach is fundamental when interrogating how
the bonds that lead domestic workers to be considered ‘one of the fam-
ily’ simultaneously permit their emotional and labour exploitation. In
doing so, Randall also calls into question the narrative and socio-political
agency of the figure of the adolescent and its inherent capacity to act as
a catalyst and lens for affectively charged experience. Ultimately, through
a contextualisation of the film’s presentation of domestic work, which
considers recent changes to labour laws in Brazil, Randall thus draws
our attention to the broader socio-economic panorama of contemporary
political cultures in Brazil, effectively drawing a critical link between con-
temporary cultural and political debates surrounding economic privilege,
social class and the ‘affective alliances’ (Podalsky 2011: 8) that can lead
to political and social change.
The economic and political crises of the middle-class domestic sphere,
and the effects that such a breakdown has on its adolescent inhabitants,
form the focus of Georgia Seminet’s chapter, ‘Young, Male and Middle
Class: Representations of Masculinity in Mexican Film’. Seminet examines
Fernando Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos (2004) and Alonso Ruizpalacio’s
Güeros (2014), scrutinising how absent fathers, parental divorces, domes-
tic responsibilities and struggles over sexuality affect the films’ adolescent
protagonists, and noting how they integrate their own subjective expe-
riences ‘through micropolitical practices that empower them’ and allow
them to repair their own sense of masculinity. In a similar fashion to
Randall, Seminet comments on the importance of examining the produc-
tion of cinematic affect, drawing on the work of Podalsky to argue that
‘these films are less interested in the struggles of their protagonists with
their natural or social environments than in using the screen as a mobile
canvas to trace the unfolding of subjectivities in time-space’ (2011: 163).
The formation of these subjectivities through affect is, as Seminet argues,
enabled in these films through the presence of their female characters,
who act as therapeutic counterparts to the male characters and ‘provide a
balance to their rational masculinity’. Ultimately, Seminet concludes that
the young protagonists display a reconditioned form of masculinity at the
end of each film, highlighting both the performative nature of adolescent
sexuality and the fundamental role that female subjectivities play in the
emergence of middle-class, teenage masculinities.
In the final contribution to this section, Milton Fernando González-
Rodríguez explores the links between class and gender in a num-
ber of recent animated films from Latin America, demonstrating how
the debates over masculinity and social class discussed by Randall and
Seminet are present in cultural products both about adolescents and
those aimed at adolescents. In his chapter, entitled ‘Beyond Pink or
Blue: Portrayals of Adolescence in Latin American Animated Film’,

González-Rodríguez explores how the cinematic spaces of animation are
profoundly constrained by social conventions, particularly in terms of
class and ethnicity, and how such spaces inadvertently maintain long-es-
tablished tropes surrounding these categories. Through a close analy-
sis of recent animated films, such as Ricardo Arnaiz’s La leyenda de la
Nahuala (2007) and Alberto Rodriguez’s La leyenda del Chupacabras
(2016), González-Rodríguez also demonstrates how the industry has
experienced certain paradigmatic shifts in the representation of adoles-
cence, necessitating a critical interrogation of the pedagogical effects of
reconfigured notions of girlhood and boyhood in a domain, as he argues,
in which specificity and historicity are not central priorities. Indeed,
while female adolescents in these films are presented either as key pro-
tagonists or passive secondary figures, and male adolescents are almost
always depicted as physically strong, daring and independent characters,
González-Rodríguez demonstrates how these stereotypes are constrained
by more than a facile dichotomy of ‘pink and blue’; they are, as the chap-
ter concludes, inextricably linked to issues of social class, which consoli-
date and, at times, undermine long-established social hierarchies in Latin
American informed by the colonial ‘colouring’ of race and ethnicity.
The final section of New Visions of Adolescence shifts the critical
focus towards an exploration of the capacity of the adolescent protag-
onist to shed light on, and challenge, varyingly politicised concepts of
nation, nationhood and national identity. In ‘Growing Pains: Young
People and Violence in Peru’s Fiction Cinema’, Sarah Barrow explores
how the teenage characters of Fabrizio Aguilar’s Paloma de papel (2003)
and Rosario García-Montero’s Las malas intenciones (2011) are able to
revisit Peru’s violent, troubled past from the vantage point of the pres-
ent. Drawing on the work of, among others, Karen Lury, Carolina Rocha
and Georgia Seminet, Barrow explores how the young characters’ per-
sonal struggles serve as ‘metonym for wider suffering’ (Lury 2010: 106)
and how the violence of the past itself is ‘focalized’ (Rocha and Seminet
2012: 5) in their developing subjectivities, serving as a means of ‘calling
attention to [personal and political] anxieties about the future’ (Rocha
and Seminet 2012: 5); more than this, however, Barrow’s approach
reflects on the broader appeal of these narratives beyond this national
context, questioning how the film’s signifying and affective strategies
inform distinct audiences and resonate on an international level. The
films’ own portrayals of national ‘transitions in crisis’ are thus reflected in
these adolescents’ coming-of-age narratives, invoking the safety and sta-

bility of childhood and, also, the uncertainty and volatility—in personal,
political and national terms—of adulthood. In doing so, as Barrow ulti-
mately concludes, the adolescents of both Paloma de papel and Las malas
intenciones constitute, then, ‘acts of cultural memory that refuse to rele-
gate specific conflicts and their aftermaths to oblivion’.
While the national focus the subsequent chapter shifts to Mexico,
many of the ideas explored by Barrow surrounding violence and its
narrative and aesthetic representations continue to be of significance
in Sophie Dufays’ essay, ‘Tragic Adolescence in Michel Franco’s Heli
(2013) and Amat Escalante’s Después de Lucía (2012)’. In both of these
Mexican productions, the conventional rites of passage that are associ-
ated with adolescence are represented as a privilege that their protago-
nists are not allowed to experience; both young women are, as Dufays
argues, ‘innocent victims of a cruel, arbitrary and irreparable destiny’.
Despite the films’ distinct socio-economic backgrounds, Dufays argues
that there is a tragic dimension that transcends their individual con-
texts, which is rendered manifest and intensified by the frank cinematic
portrayals of physical and psychological acts of torture and repeated
instances of sexual violence and rape. Drawing on the work of Ignacio
Sánchez Prado (2012) and Podalsky (2008), Dufays situates these depic-
tions of adolescence within broader frameworks of teenage protagonism
in contemporary Mexican cinema, before contending that the role of
modern technology (particularly mobile phones) in these films, which
both enables certain key acts of violence to take place and then foments
the sense of shame felt afterwards, surfaces as an adolescent object of
mourning for a lack of inter-generational communication between child
and parent.
In the final essay of the collection, entitled ‘From Girlhood to
Adulthood: Colombian Adolescence in María, llena eres de gracia (2004)
and La sirga (2012)’, Carolina Rocha interrogates the aesthetic and ide-
ological potentiality of the cinematic adolescent to serve as a metaphor
for a national future. In these two coming-of-age narratives, directed
by Joshua Marston and William Vega respectively, the adolescent is
projected as the nation’s hope for an optimistic future, though, as this
chapter notes, it is ‘one that may not be contained within the country’s
borders’. Drawing on the work of Anita Harris and Catherine Driscoll,
Rocha explores how ‘adolescence also functions as an explanation of the
indispensable difficulty of becoming a subject, agent, or independent or
self-aware person’ (Driscoll 2002: 6), and links the struggles that the
young female protagonists of each film endures to Colombia’s present
historical moment. More than this, though, Rocha argues that the resil-
ience, stamina and strength that these protagonists display in the face
of socio-economic and political hardship not only allow them in this
way to act as ‘icons of Colombia’s future’, but, in contrast to much of
Hollywood’s cinema, that this passage from adolescence to adulthood is
achieved precisely through the preservation of their femininity.
It is the Editors’ hope that the content and structure of New Visions
of Adolescence allow readers to appreciate the diversity and richness of
contemporary Latin American film, and that the scope of its contribu-
tions provides a valuable intellectual and pedagogical intervention into
the field. As the image from Beira-Mar on the front cover of this book
suggests, the liminality, fluidity and dynamism of the adolescent experi-
ence have led to the visualisation of teenagers in recent Latin American
film as agents of creative transition, affective potential and threatening
unknowability. As a result, New Visions of Adolescence aims to address
critically the aesthetic and ideological possibilities of the cinematic figure
of the adolescent, and to locate its narrative potential firmly against the
backdrop of Latin America’s own socio-political and cultural presents.
Notes
1. This refers to children’s capacity to be active in the construction of their
own lives (James 2009: 41). Allison James expands on this by defining the
child agent as ‘someone who does something with other people, and, in
so doing, makes things happen, thereby contributing to wider processes of
social and cultural reproduction’ (2009: 41).
2. Interestingly, domestic and agricultural work among young women has
attracted much less attention. This is just one of various instances where
boys have remained the focus of state apparatus, while girls (and women’s)
experiences have been marginalized (Lodoño and Lodoño 2013; Rojas
2007: 477, 490; Pilotti and Rizzini 1994: 59).
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PART I
Gender and Sexuality

CHAPTER 2
Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the

Erotics of the Queer Male Gaze in Marco
Berger’s Ausente
Geoffrey Maguire
On the levels of both narrative and form, Marco Berger’s Ausente (2011)
is a film fundamentally concerned with the power of the cinematic gaze.
From a storyline triggered by a fabricated eye injury to its sustained for-
mal interrogation of the erotic potential of filmic spectatorship, Ausente
acknowledges the potency of diegetic and spectatorial vision while, at
the same time, accentuating the role of the other senses in the embodied
relationship it encourages between viewer and image. In a similar fashion
to Berger’s other cinematic explorations of concealed homosexual desire,
namely Plan B (2009), Hawaii (2013) and, most recently, Taekwondo
(2016), the tense and unsettling relationship between Martín, a 16-year-
old student, and his swimming teacher, Sebastián, eschews any clichéd
representation of latent queer attraction, preferring instead to ‘place
homoeroticism and homoerotic desiring bodies at critical axes over a
broad, dynamic plateau of human interaction’ (Venkatesh 2016: 153).
The routine spaces that provide the setting for the majority of the film’s
G. Maguire (*) 
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK

38 G. MAGUIRE
development—the swimming pool, the locker room and Sebastián’s

apartment—are presented by Berger as sites of queer potentiality; that is,
just as the images of adolescent bodies become sexually charged through
Martín’s eroticised stares in the swimming pool and its locker room, so
too are the furtive glances exchanged between student and teacher in
the otherwise mundane space of the apartment imbued with an erotic
hue. As the film progresses, Martín’s elaborate plan to seduce his teacher
by feigning an eye injury and spending the night in his apartment after
returning late from the doctor’s clinic, is met with an increasingly vis-
ible sense of uneasiness on the part of the latter. Moreover, this sense
of discomfort also extends to the spectator, for whom the adolescent’s
manipulative actions are only gradually exposed through a slow narra-
tive structure and a highly suggestive extra-diegetic musical score. In one
pivotal scene, which explicitly visualises the film’s unrelenting air of dis-
comfort, the two protagonists are filmed in the space of a cinema, seated
separately and with their respective female partners. The tension of the
scene, which takes place shortly after the student’s secret plot is revealed,
is acutely apparent: while their gazes do not meet, their sudden discom-
posure and furtive glances in each other’s direction render it manifestly
clear that each one is aware of, and moreover disturbed by, the other’s
unexpected presence. When their film begins and they stare directly at
the screen, and thus at the camera, the spectator of Ausente is in this
way drawn into the claustrophobic atmosphere of the cinema, reflexively
interpellated through an embodied sense of discomfort that exposes the
film’s complex layers of spectatorship.
Though Ausente, in the most obvious sense, revolves around the
power of vision, stressing the provocative and, at times, predatory nature
of gazes and glances, the film does, however, also question any exclu-
sionary spectatorial emphasis on sight, encouraging an embodied rela-
tionship between the spectator and the on-screen image. The frequent
filmic inspection of semi-clothed, athletic male swimmers, and the sensu-
ous and fragmented examination of Martín’s adolescent body in particu-
lar, are presented in Ausente as more than simply erotic or scopophilic
spectacles; the director’s recourse to a haptic form of cinematography
instead invokes a tactile engagement with the on-screen body, encour-
aging the eyes, in Laura Marks’ terms, ‘to function like organs of touch’
(2000: 162). As this chapter will argue, it is both Ausente’s sense of
visual displeasure and its haptic discomfort in the display of adolescent
bodies that foment a more dynamic relationship between viewer and
2 VISUAL DISPLEASURE: ADOLESCENCE AND THE EROTICS OF THE QUEER … 39
image. If, as Vinodh Venkatesh writes in relation to contemporary queer

film from Latin America, ‘[w]e no longer see difference, we are invited
to actively touch, caress, and participate in the sensuality of libidinal
urges, body identifications, and often-multidirectional orientations that
engender new structures of feeling vis-à-vis bodies and desires’ (2016: 8,
original emphasis), then it is precisely these ‘prelinguistic sensations
and somatic relations’ (2016: 8) that endow Ausente with its potential
to provoke new forms of spectatorship among and beyond queer view-
ing subjects. While the first part of this chapter will discuss the direc-
tor’s mobilisation of affective and haptic aesthetics within the space of
the swimming pool, the second and third sections will reflect upon the
‘visual erotics’ (Marks 2000) at play during the sequences that take place
in the film’s locker room and apartment. If the film’s sense of visual dis-
pleasure is realised in both diegetic and—through its haptic cinematog-
raphy—spectatorial terms, then this chapter will ultimately argue that
Ausente not only enables a dynamic intersubjectivity between spectator
and image but that, consequently, it also generates the potential for an
embodied spectatorial acknowledgement of queer (adolescent) sexuality.
Visual Hapticity: The Swimming Pool

In the opening scene of Ausente, the spectator is confronted with a
series of discretely shot parts of Martín’s body, during a routine medi-
cal examination in which the doctor confirms the teenager’s fitness to
swim. The consecutive images of Martín’s athletic, adolescent body—his
arms, upper legs, shoulders, stomach, lower back and groin—are sugges-
tively screened before any establishing shot places the viewer within the
appropriate setting of a doctor’s surgery. The extra-diegetic music that
accompanies the scene, with its threatening discordancy and unsettling
atonality, combines with the initial lack of any explanatory dialogue to
instil the sequence with an uncanniness that both disorients and intrigues
the spectator. Indeed, as clinical context and eroticised filmography col-
lide before any recognition that the target of such intimate camerawork
is an adolescent body, Martín is thus presented as the sexualised object of
the film: a position that is emphasised not only by the successive images
of his toned body parts but also by the camera’s lingering shots on his
swimming trunks and crotch (Fig. 2.1). The deeply haptic nature of this
introductory sequence, which, in Marks’ terms, not only calls upon the
viewer ‘to engage in its imaginative construction’ but also ‘to be aware of
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Fig. 2.1 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)
her or his self-involvement in the process’ (1998: 342), marks the begin-
ning of a narrative that blurs the ethical and aesthetic boundaries of erot-
icising adolescence, approximating the spectator haptically to the film’s
exploration of Martín’s transgressive and concealed desire. For Marks,
who elaborates on the concept of haptic visuality in her book The Skin
of the Film, this embodied approach to film-making ‘is more inclined to
move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze’ (2000: 162).
She continues:
Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things

from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in
other words, how we usually conceive of vision. Optical visuality depends
on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic look-
ing tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into
illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture.
(2000: 162)
Indeed, as the hairs, creases and sweat on Martín’s body become visi-
ble on screen, punctuated by the doctor’s requests to inspect the spaces
between his fingers and toes, as well as his upper thigh, the proximity
of the spectator to this inspection—and filmic dissection—of the adoles-
cent’s body provokes a somatic response through the textural quality of
the on-screen image. Though the initial sequence, as some critics have
suggested, does indeed formally reflect the adolescent’s exploration of
his own fledgling sexuality over the course of the film, in a style that is
typical of recent queer cinema from Argentina,1 the slow, eroticised sur-
vey of his limbs and bodily features also lays claim, in Marks’ terms, to
‘the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film
with one’s eyes’ (2000: xi).
The haptic nature of much of Ausente’s cinematography is, for a large
part of the film, heightened by the recurring setting of the swimming
pool. As the ripples on the surface of the water deflect light and obscure
bodies, and as voices are echoed and rendered indiscernible against the
sound of splashing water, the film’s appeal to senses other than sight is
unambiguous. Indeed, if the pool’s depth is presented as difficult to dis-
cern due to the refraction of light, so too do the identities of those in
the water become indistinguishable; mirrored in the cinematography of
the film, it is the biceps and bulges of these male adolescent bodies that
instead become the focus of spectator’s gaze, with a recurring camera
angle, labeled elsewhere as ‘el plano Berger’ (the Berger shot) (Peidro
2013: 50), that draws our attention to the genital area while at the same
time denying an image of the body as a whole. Thus, as fragmented
bodies enter and exit the swimming pool, with a sustained emphasis on
their glistening skin and on items of swimwear ‘that reveal more than
they hide’ (Pagnoni Berns 2014: 230), the film at once eroticises vision
and denies its sufficiency, emphasising the textural quality of bodies
and water through this affective and somatic cinematography. As Marks
writes: ‘Haptic images are often used in an explicit critique of visual mas-
tery […]. They work by bringing vision close to the body and into con-
tact with other sense perceptions; by making vision multisensory’ (2000:
151, 159). If, as Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns remarks, ‘It is consid-
ered “natural” [in a swimming pool] for male spectators to watch male
bodies sheathed in tiny swimsuits [with] heterosexual and homosexual
gazes uniting in a recognition of the beauty of the masculine’ (2014:
230), then Berger intentionally queers any ‘natural’ aspect to Ausente’s
spectatorship through the formal and aesthetic qualities of such haptic
imagery: that is to say, not only are the half-naked bodies under scrutiny
those of high-school students, but the film’s eroticised and embodied
42 G. MAGUIRE
spectatorship further denies any passively detached consumption of the

images on screen. In this way, the filmic space of the swimming pool
of Ausente becomes ‘more than merely a setting, instead providing a
dynamic space in which a film’s central themes are played out’ (Brown
and Hirsch 2014: 1). As gazes between protagonists, onlookers and
spectators overlap on the adolescent body, the affective space of the
swimming pool thus triggers a layer of spectatorship in Ausente that is
both haptically active and ethically problematic.
In two key scenes of the film, linked both by the formal setting of
the pool and by a similar series of camera shots, the repeated glances
exchanged between student and teacher attest to the development, and
indeed the queering, of their relationship. In the first instance, which
takes place after the aforementioned medical examination, Martín begins
to tread water in the middle of the pool, removing his goggles and
staring directly into the camera (Fig. 2.2), with our gaze as spectators

aligned with that of Sebastián. The unexpected directness of Martín’s

gaze, similar to his unsettling stare in the space of the cinema, destabi-
lises the spectator, not only emphasising our position as viewers but also
inciting the uncomfortable ethical dimension of our voyeuristic presence
in the high-school swimming pool. With the spectator already harbour-
ing a suspicion of the adolescent’s possible same-sex desires due to an
earlier sequence in the men’s locker room, the directness of this gaze
towards the teacher (and, momentarily, the spectator) is thus infused
with a queer potentiality, stressed by the suspenseful and dissonant music
that appears both before and after this scene. Significantly, this is also the
moment in which the teenager’s carefully devised plan, which comes to
dominate the film’s narrative, is set into motion: as he leaves the water,
with the camera once again dwelling on his toned physique and those of
his classmates, his complaint about an eye problem resonates on a more
abstract level, intimating the transgressive nature of his gaze over and
above any potential medical issue that he may be experiencing. In the
second of these two linked sequences, which takes place after Martín’s
plot to seduce his teacher has been exposed, it is now Sebastián who
actively—though cautiously—gazes at the teenager from the poolside,
glancing at him intermittently as he exits the water and walks towards
the locker rooms. Though Martín avoids visual contact with the teacher
in this scene, contrasting starkly with his previous behavior, his sud-
den and direct glance at the latter (and at the spectator) before enter-
ing the locker room again provides an unsettling sense of discomfort in
the viewer. For Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch, the cinematic space
of the swimming pool, whether public or private, is an inherently transi-
tional one, historically imbued with the potential for an intimate ques-
tioning of sexual identity. They write:
As environments blurring conventional distinctions between land and

water, nature and artifice, purity and impurity, swimming pools are tran-
sitional, liminal spaces. […] Pools [are] places in which sexual identity
becomes fluid, like the water in which the protagonists swim; it is a space
of bodily and sexual metamorphosis. (2014: 17–18)
It is precisely the duality of Ausente’s swimming pool, acting not only as

the voyeuristic site for the intensification of the film’s visual hapticity
but also as a dynamic metaphor for the potential fluidity of the protago-
nists’ sexualities, that allows it to function as an affective marker of their
44 G. MAGUIRE
developing queerness. In this way, the filmic space of the pool subtly comes
to suggest a sexual charge hidden beneath the surface of their relationship
that is, at once, both threateningly undefined and erotically potent.
As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener observe in their book Film
Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, haptic cinematic techniques
such as those described above mean that ‘the spectator is no longer a
passive recipient of images at the pointed end of the optical pyramid, but
rather a bodily being, enmeshed acoustically, senso-motorically, somat-
ically and affectively in the film’s visual texture and soundscape’ (2010:
131–132). Following Marks, they argue that any sole emphasis on ‘spec-
ular and visual perception […] systematically ignores the significance of
the spectator’s body as a continuous perceptive surface and as an organ-
izing principle for spatial and temporal orientation even in the cinema’
(2010: 100). It is important to note that this embodied, phenomenolog-
ical approach to the film has an important impact for any consideration
of its cinematic spectatorship; that is to say, despite the film’s unmistak-
able invocation of the viewer’s gaze through its intimate and sensuous
portrayal of the male form, the haptic formal structure, as this chapter
will argue, ultimately denies any solely voyeuristic spectatorial response.
For Diego Moreiras, the film’s formal aspects, and in particular the iden-
tifications that are suggested through the spectator’s frequent alignment
with both protagonists at distinct points of the narrative, raises an impor-
tant question about the nature of its scopophilic potential. He writes:
‘[C]abe preguntarnos si, aún a pesar de sostener las pausas narrativas para
la mirada escopofílica sobre un cuerpo-objeto (masculino en este caso),
el cine de Berger no realice una ruptura desde dentro del propio dispos-
itivo, al proponerle al espectador una identificación no esperada’ (We
should ask ourselves if, despite providing narrative pauses for a scopo-
philic gaze that comes to rest on a [masculine, in this case] body-object,
Berger’s cinema does not also enact a rupture from within the frame,
suggesting an unexpected identification for the spectator) (2016: 102).
Though Moreiras’ semiotic analysis of the film fails to account for the
formal mechanics of such a rupture, or to reflect on the nature of any
potential spectatorial identification, he does however effectively draw
attention to the film’s refusal to offer any straightforward, enduring,
or indeed comfortable, connection with either of the protagonists. It is
precisely this paradoxical sense of rupture and identification, achieved
through the film’s formal and aesthetic hapticity, that enables Berger
to invite the spectator to inhabit alternative forms of sexuality, at once
denying any hierarchical approach to sexual difference while, at the same

time, drawing the spectator closer to this filmic representation of trans-
gressive queer desire.
Visual Displeasure: The Locker Room

After the previously discussed medical check-up, the film’s title screen
appears in emboldened blue letters and ominous and dissonant string
music begins to play once again, serving as a foreboding segue into
the subsequent scene.2 The camera then cuts to an image of broken
frosted glass in a windowpane, alluding to the uninhibited voyeurism
to come, before panning towards Martín sitting in a locker room, sur-
rounded by his classmates in various states of undress. Martín’s furtive
glances at the semi-naked bodies of those around him, dwelling, just
as the camera does, on the visible bulge in one of the teenager’s boxer
shorts, are complemented aurally by a high-pitched synth and threaten-
ing percussion that accentuate the predatory nature of his gaze. Here,
the space of the locker room, in which the homosocial has historically
played a conventional role as naked bodies of the same sex undress and
shower in plain sight, thus becomes queered, with Martín’s unsolicited
stares subtly invoking the filmic potential of the locker room to act as
an ‘iconic site of sexual transgression’ (Brown and Hirsch 2014: 4).3 If
the minor chords and shrill pitch serve to emphasise the transgressive
nature of Martín’s gaze, then they also intimate an apprehension towards
the potential discovery and denunciation of a look that contravenes the
heterosexual conventions of this homosocial space. Furthermore, the
textural quality of the music, with its deep percussion and intermittent
scratch tones, serves as a parallel to Martín’s—and, through our aligned
perspective, the viewer’s—intimately haptic inspection of these unsus-
pecting bodies. In a subsequent sequence, after Martín excuses himself
from swimming practice and returns to the locker room, he spies on an
older man showering through the window of a door, then subsequently
watches from behind a row of lockers as the man dresses himself. While,
in the first instance, Martín’s presence in the scene is nothing more than
a shadow in the foreground of the frame, the second sequence sees the
use of a reverse shot, reminiscent of classic horror films, in which Martín
appears in the man’s view then disappears seconds later.4 The tension
of these scenes reflects, to some degree, the spectator’s own voyeuristic
position through the repeated formal alignment of our gaze with that of
46 G. MAGUIRE
Martín; moreover, the subsequent image of the adolescent smiling into a

mirror, quite unaffected by any injury to his eye whatsoever, also subtly
accentuates the manipulation inherent in the narrative and, on a broader
level, alludes to the meticulously controlled and deceptive nature of this
cinematic gaze. In Bodies at Risk, Robert Burns Neveldine discusses the
necessarily clandestine nature of the queer male gaze, writing,
One of the components of the queer gaze is assumed to be the furtive: it

attempts to look, perhaps even engaging attention, duplicating itself – pos-
sibly even possessing, in some senses, the object of its operation. Yet, at the
same time, it is thought to be concealing that very operation in a furtive-
ness disguising a sexual interest. (1998: 176, original emphasis)
In Ausente, however, Martín’s gaze, though furtive at first, becomes

increasingly overt and at times even aggressive in its visual assault on
Sebastián. Indeed, while Neveldine writes that the power of the inter-
action between queer male and heterosexual subject lies convention-
ally with the latter, who ‘positions himself as the one who chooses the
desired object, not as the one who is himself chosen as an object of
desire’ (1998: 176), Martín’s gaze thus recalibrates any such power
structure, with Sebastián becoming progressively more aware of the
adolescent’s advances and increasingly less able to deflect the eroticised
nature of his unsolicited gaze.
The persistence and, at times, provocative nature of Martin’s advances
towards Sebastián causes the teacher to become visibly more uncom-
fortable as the film progresses, as the adolescent’s glances are repeatedly
‘caught’ in flagrante delicto, either by Sebastián himself or, more often,
by the spectator. The mounting sense of paranoia on the part of the
teacher, punctuated by his awkward, fumbling interactions with neigh-
bours and colleagues, as well as by his repeated assertions of the potential
trouble that the situation could cause him, is indeed accentuated by the
mise-en-scène of the claustrophobic spaces of the film’s diegesis. During
numerous scenes in a car, for example, though the glances directed from
student to teacher are never directly acknowledged, there is an embodied
awareness of their existence, with Sebastián shifting uneasily in his seat
and exhibiting a palpable sense of discomposure. As Neveldine contends,
‘A crisis occurs when the straight male object, under menace of attention
from the queer male gaze, perceives that his return look can no longer
work to expose what it fears, what it hopes is hidden and will remain
so, but that, in fact, the desire motivating the gaze openly and unabash-
edly continues to cathect with its object’ (1998: 177). It is precisely this
crisis, both diegetic and, by formal extension, spectatorial, that foments
the film’s sense of visual displeasure, triggered not only by the erotic
persistence of the queer male gaze but also by the teacher’s impotence
in restraining or, for the majority of the film, even clearly identifying
it. If, as Laura Mulvey notes in her seminal article, ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’, the ‘male figure [in mainstream film] cannot bear the
burden of sexual objectification’ (1975: 838), then Ausente mounts a
challenge to these limitations through its sustained objectification of the
adult male by the transgressive queer adolescent gaze. Though Mulvey’s
work gives no consideration for such a gaze, ‘writing’, as certain queer
and feminist critics have argued, ‘homosexuality out of existence’
(Hanson 1999: 13), her discussion of ‘the way film reflects, reveals and
even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual
difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle’
(1975: 838) is important for any critical analysis of spectatorship within
Ausente. The undeniable sense of visual displeasure that stems from the
refusal to privilege any ‘satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (1975: 838) on
the part of the heterosexual male combines with the more haptic specta-
torial response described above to trigger an active form of spectatorship,
leading to the situation in which, as Santiago Peidro notes, ‘de ningún
modo hay la posibilidad de no tomar una posición subjetiva o acallar la
fantasmática que en cada uno se despliega frente a estas presentaciones
de amor, sexo y deseo’ (there exists no possibility whatsoever of not tak-
ing a subjective position or of silencing the phantasm provoked in all of
us when faced with such images of love, sex and desire) (2013: 53).
The crisis caused by Martín’s insistence on targeting the heterosex-
ual male body as scopophilic spectacle, mirrored on a formal level by
the camera’s own haptic portrayal of the adolescent male form, does not
come without its diegetic consequences. When Martín confesses his plan
to Sebastián after placing a note of apology on the teacher’s car wind-
screen, the admission of sexual intent—‘Pensé que si me metía en su casa
podía pasar algo’ (I thought something might happen if I was in your
house)—is met with an act of violence; moreover, the ensuing threat
from Martín not only places the societally transgressive nature of their
relationship into stark relief but also marks the beginning of the teacher’s
deterioration in mental state. If this narrative apogee triggers, at first, an
explosive declaration of Sebastián’s heterosexuality through his assault of
48 G. MAGUIRE
Martín, then it also, subsequently, prompts a more introspective, emo-

tional exploration of his feelings towards the student. In Spectacular
Passions, Brett Farmer discusses the challenge posed to conventional
assumptions surrounding heterosexuality by gay male protagonists in a
wide range of Hollywood film, observing that ‘gay subjectivities/specta-
torship perform a fantasmatic “ruination” of phallic masculinity, a simul-
taneous assumption and de(con)struction of its forms and significances’
(2000: 200). Though Farmer rightly contends that the traditional filmic
refusal, as outlined by Mulvey, to objectify the heterosexual male pro-
tagonist ‘bolsters the myth of the male phallic sufficiency by shielding
masculinity from scrutiny and dissociating the male body from the dis-
empowering possibilities or erotic objectification and passivization’
(2000: 210), it is precisely Sebastián’s objectification by Martín that leads
him to scrutinise, in the final stages of the film, his own feelings, whether
romantic or otherwise, towards the teenager. However, while Farmer
focuses exclusively on gay male spectatorship, Ausente’s more embodied
relationship between viewer and image encourages, as this chapter will
continue to argue, additional identifications beyond any sole focus on a
queer audience, invoking in the spectator not an awareness of their own
queerness but, crucially, an acknowledgment of the confusing nature of
sexuality and the possibility of alternative libidinal subject positions. In
the final scene of the film, after Martín’s unexpected death, Sebastián
returns to the swimming pool late at night, intoxicated, injured and vis-
ibly upset. In an extended fantasy sequence, the disorientation felt by
Sebastián towards his own desires for Martín is spatialised in the laby-
rinthine maze of the changing room, and emphasised by the teacher’s
attempts to follow his student, with some difficulty, between the darkly
lit rows of lockers. While this sequence contains the only instance of sex-
ual contact between the two protagonists during a final, uncharacteristi-
cally bright and aurally harmonious scene, the film’s ultimate refusal to
define the teacher’s sexuality, and thus encourage any specific form of
identification on the part of the viewer, is a crucial aspect of Ausente’s
conclusion: it is, in Sebastián’s case, his emotional disorientation and
sexual confusion that are of primary importance, denying the spectator
any definitive or fixed understanding of his—potentially shifting—sexual
orientation.
Visual Erotics: The Apartment

If the swimming pool and its locker room trigger a queering of the
filmic gaze in Ausente and emphasise a more embodied spectatorial
engagement with the images on screen, then the increasingly claustro-
phobic space of the teacher’s apartment, which dominates the second
half of the film, intensifies these haptic and affective cinematographic
strategies. In much the same way as the athletic context of the swim-
ming pool justifies the presence of semi-naked male bodies, the scenes
in the apartment, which take place largely during the night, also vali-
date repeated images of both Sebastián and Martín sleeping in little
more than their underwear (Fig. 2.3); however, the private space of the
apartment, whose scenes rely even more heavily on the film’s unsettling
and discordant musical score, set the socially transgressive nature of
the pair’s situation into even starker relief, denying any pretext for the
latently eroticised gaze between student and teacher that the space of
the swimming pool may otherwise have served to provide. The initial
scene in the apartment accentuates this distinct change in dynamic: the
image of Martín undressing to his underwear before taking a shower,
which would otherwise have been an everyday, unremarkable sight for
Sebastián, now causes him visible discomfort, creating a sense of agi-
tation and hesitation within the space of his own home. Moreover,

50 G. MAGUIRE
the sporadic appearance of neighbours, along with Sebastián’s clumsy

attempts to explain Martín’s presence in the apartment, effectively stress
both the imminently problematic nature of the situation and, more sig-
nificantly, the teacher’s growing sense of paranoia towards the latter’s
inscrutability. The sense of foreboding and vulnerability that Sebastián
experiences is reflected in the cinematography itself, which, in a more
emphatic way than in the locker room, allows Martín’s actions to be
concealed by the darkness of the apartment, with its shadows and
thresholds enabling the teenager to push the predatory nature of his
gaze to its limits. In a decisive scene in the middle of the night, Martín
is seen uncovering Sebastián’s body as he sleeps, slowly moving his
hand up the teacher’s shorts and inner thigh, and towards his crotch.
When the teacher wakens, a reverse shot, similar to that used previously
in the locker room showers, sees the adolescent vanish into the shad-
ows, leaving the teacher unaware of the reason for his abrupt awakening;
moments later, when the teacher enters the kitchen, Martín’s attempt to
cover his torso in a moment of feigned modesty heightens the manip-
ulative and threatening nature of his actions. Moreover, the difficulty
the spectator has in discerning these images amidst the darkness adds to
the haptic nature of the scene, forcing the more active narrative engage-
ment described above as the textural quality of the music accentuates
the mediated ‘touch’ of the teenager’s hand slowly brushing against the
hairs on the teacher’s exposed thigh.
When Martín is unable to locate his grandmother after returning late
from the eye clinic, or recall the whereabouts of his best friend’s house,
Sebastián is forced to drive the teenager to his apartment, noting the
potential trouble that this may cause: ‘Vos sos menor y de verdad me
puedo meter en problemas llevando a un alumno a dormir a mi casa’
(You’re a minor and I really could get into trouble for taking a student
home to sleep in my house). After Martín arrives at the apartment and
asks if he can use the teacher’s bathroom to wash the chlorine off his
body, the ensuing shower sequence sets the intimate, intrusive tone of
the scenes in the apartment, not only in terms of Martín’s unsolicited
sexual advances towards Sebastián but also with respect to the specta-
tor’s voyeuristic ‘presence’ in the space of the apartment. As the camera
tilts to gradually reveal the entirety of Martín’s naked torso (Fig. 2.4),
the image is once again imbued with a haptic quality, tending, in Marks’
terms, ‘to move over the surface of [the] object rather than to plunge
into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern

texture’ (2000: 162). Indeed, if this scene now brazenly parades the ado-
lescent’s body in the private space of the bathroom, no longer under the
guise of a medical examination or swimming lesson, then it also empha-
sises in a more explicit manner an additional layer of erotics intermit-
tently at play throughout Ausente. For Marks, the embodied relationship
that haptic images provoke between the spectator and the on-screen
image creates a situation in which ‘it is not proper to speak of the object
of a haptic look as to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and
image’ (2000: 164, original emphasis). While she contends that hap-
tic images can be, and often are, sexualised, her use of the term ‘erotic’
here describes a distinct formal layer of spectatorship, in which the view-
er’s formal proximity to the image serves to activate a distinct form of
engagement. She writes:
52 G. MAGUIRE
Regardless of their content, haptic images are erotic in that they construct
an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image. The viewer is
called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the
image leaves. By interacting close up with an image, close enough that the
figure and ground commingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of
separateness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her
desire for it. (2000: 183)
As the spectator of Ausente is both sensually and sensorially brought pro-

gressively closer to the image, the formal emphasis placed on an erotic,
intersubjective relationship in this way demands both an aesthetic and an
ethical engagement with the events on screen. ‘What is erotic about hap-
tic visuality, then,’ writes Marks, ‘may be described as a respect of differ-
ence, and concomitant loss of self, in the presence of the other’ (2000:
192–193).
It is, then, precisely through the visual erotics of Ausente that Berger
is able to break with previous cinematic conventions concerning the
scopophilic spectacle, queering any act of voyeurism through a critique
of visual mastery that is, as Marks writes, ‘bodied forth’ (2000: 193)
through the haptic quality of the image. More specifically, rather than
‘taking people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious
gaze’ (1975: 835), as Mulvey contended of much of Hollywood cinema,
the dynamic subjectivity between the spectator and image in Ausente
‘acknowledges the presence of the body in the act of seeing’ (Marks
2000: 151) and interpellates the viewer through a more active, less hier-
archical acknowledgment of sexual difference. This is particularly evident
in the numerous mirror scenes that punctuate the narrative, whose pres-
ence in the film transcends any formal reflexivity or, as may convention-
ally be expected, merely a psychological introspection on the part of the
protagonists. For example, as Martín explores his body in the mirror of
the teacher’s apartment, manipulating his facial features and stretching
the skin of his chest, these actions not only stress the textural quality of
the film’s cinematography and allude to the adolescent experience of
negotiating a maturing body, but they also crucially emphasise the teen-
ager’s agency over the unfolding circumstances with Sebastián. Indeed,
rather than surfacing as simply a metaphor for the film’s broader fixation
with the cinematic gaze, the mirror scenes in Ausente allow the spectator
to glimpse Martín’s capacity for manipulation and deceit: after excusing
himself from swimming practice due to an eye injury, for example, he
appears quite unaffected by any affliction whatsoever in the mirror of the

locker room; on a separate occasion, his enigmatic smirks and notable
confidence in the mirror of Sebastián’s bathroom suggests that there is
indeed a concealed ulterior motive to his actions. This narrative aspect of
the film reflects the way in which, for Marks, the visual erotics of haptic
cinema are able to engage the spectator formally in a more dynamic, less
colonising form of viewership. She writes:
Voyeurism relies on maintaining the distance between viewer and viewed.

Eroticism closes that distance and implicates the viewer in the viewed. […]
Visual erotics allows the thing seen to maintain its unknowability, delight-
ing in the playing at the boundary of that knowability. Visual erotics allows
the object of vision to remain inscrutable. But it is not voyeurism, for in
visual erotics the looker is also implicated. (2000: 183)
This inscrutability is also evident in one of the final scenes of the film,
shortly after the teenager’s death, in which Sebastián finds a t-shirt previ-
ously worn by Martín and sits in front of his bedroom mirror to inspect
it. As the teacher caresses the garment, bringing it close to his face and
smelling it, the spectator is not only encouraged to engage in a multi-
sensory manner with the teacher’s distress, evoking earlier images of
Martín applying aftershave in front of his bathroom mirror, but they are
also denied any definitive conclusion surrounding the teacher’s feelings
towards his student. While it is clear that he harbors an unresolved emo-
tional connection, whether sexual or otherwise, the spectator is instead
forced to acknowledge both the potentiality of alternative sexualities and
the unfixed—and often unpredictable—nature of sexual orientation and
erotic desire.
For Peidro, who also notes the film’s ‘clara interpelación a la fan-
tasmática del espectador, dirigiéndolo hacia, por lo menos, un territorio
de incomodidad’ (clear interpellation to the spectator, causing them, at
the very least, a feeling of discomfort) (2013: 46), Ausente’s refusal to
engage in stereotypical representations of queer desire or to privilege
hegemonic notions of masculinity ‘abre posibilidades distintas de enlaces
homoeróticos y evidencia el error de referirse a la homosexualidad en
singular’ (facilitates distinct possibilities of homoerotic connections and
exposes the error of referring to homosexuality in the singular) (2013:
52). Similarly, David William Foster suggests that Berger’s protagonists,
when faced with the possibility of homoerotic desire, ‘llegan a descubrir
54 G. MAGUIRE
un campo más amplio de potencial erótico para sus cuerpos de lo que

habían, hasta este punto, imaginado’ (come to discover a broader erotic
potentiality than they had previously imagined for their own bodies)
(2014: 2). However, while both critics stress the interpellative nature of
Ausente’s cinematography, and the consequential spectatorial recognition
of alternative sexual subjectivities, they each fail to consider the formal
aspects of such forms of spectatorship, preferring instead to take this
interpellation for granted, as is the case with Peidro, or to reduce it to
a correlative effect of the director’s sustained avoidance of narrative cli-
chés, which Foster suggests is alone responsible for arousing ‘la atención
de todo espectador’ (the attention of every spectator) (2014: 9). This
chapter, in contrast, has argued that it is precisely through the haptic
visual erotics of Ausente, ‘bodied forth’ (Marks 2000: 193) by an often
potent formal and narrative sense of diegetic and spectatorial displeasure,
that Berger succeeds in both the cinematic presentation of alternative
forms of sexuality and, more significantly, the formation of the poten-
tial for these distinct identifications to be embodied by the film’s specta-
tors. If Ausente’s cinematography flaunts the erotic potential of cinematic
vision, confronting the spectator with its repeatedly intimate and sensu-
ous images of the male form, then the overwhelmingly haptic quality of
the film denies the spectator any comfortable position in the voyeuris-
tic realm of sight. In Ausente, it is the erotics of the image, triggered
through a somatic response to the bodies on screen, which both invite a
spectatorial approximation to queer desire and, at the same time, deny its
scopophilic appropriation.
Conclusion
In his essay ‘Water and Queer Intimacy’, Pagnoni Berns discusses the
queer narrative potential of aquatic spaces in recent Brazilian film, noting
how ‘water sites are some of the few spaces in which there exists, to some
extent, flexibility in the regulation of the borders that control desire
and the politics of (homo)eroticism’ (2017: 188). In Ausente, however,
the affective spaces of the swimming pool and showers serve not only
to reflect the fluidity of adolescent sexuality and, in a similar fashion to
other queer adolescent films from Argentina and Brazil,5 to provide a site
for the exploration of a transgressive queer gaze. From the outset of the
film, these spaces are also the setting for a haptic engagement with the
adolescent body, provoking an engaged form of spectatorship through
the viewer’s often unexpected confrontation with fragmented images of

bare limbs and the textural filmic ‘grazing’ (Marks 2000: 162) of wet
skin on exposed bodies. On the immersive tactility of such images, Marks
writes: ‘The eroticism of haptic videos does not rest in their ability to
make more tasteful, arty images, though certainly many do. Instead it
is to multiply the forms of erotic contact and […] to replace the visual
with the tactile, and identification with embodiment’ (1998: 342). As
this chapter has argued, the paradoxical centrality of vision in Ausente,
both consolidated by the narrative emphasis on the protagonists’ furtive
glances and penetrating stares yet repeatedly displaced by a haptic stress
on touch and the textural quality of sound, provokes such an embod-
ied relationship to the filmic image on the part of the spectator. As the
semi-naked, athletic bodies of Martín and his classmates trigger an ethi-
cal dimension to spectatorship through their presence in a high school or
changing room, the haptic, disjointed emergence of these images denies
any immediate spectatorial identification, effectively displacing a sense
of ‘visual plenitude’ (Marks 2000: 177). In this way, the focalisation of
such a process through the adolescent body, which is itself both liminal
and transitional, allows Ausente to preclude any hierarchical or detached
response to queer desire, and, ultimately, to immerse the spectator in the
very construction of the queer images of adolescence that unfold before
them.
Notes
1. Similar representations of adolescent corporeality can be found in
Lucía Puenzo’s XXY (2007), Lucía Puenzo’s El niño pez (2009), Julia
Solomonoff’s El último verano de la Boyita (2009), and Papu Curotto’s
Esteros (2016).
2. As Neil Lerner notes, ‘Horror films’ repetitious drones, clashing disso-
nances, and stingers (those assaultative blasts that coincide with shock or
revelation) affect us at a primal level, perhaps instinctually taking us back
to a much earlier time when the ability to perceive a variety of sounds
alerted us (as a species) to approaching predators or other threats’ (2010:
ix).
3. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch discuss the filmic portrayal of swim-
ming pools and their environs in their introduction to The Cinema of
the Swimming Pool, noting the long tradition in queer film of the chang-
ing room’s potential to act as the locus of ‘homosexual sex and cruising’
(2014: 4).
56 G. MAGUIRE
4. On numerous occasions, Berger has discussed how Ausente is strongly

influenced by Japanese horror film, particularly the musical score: ‘From
the start, I was talking with the musician about making a Japanese horror
film. So I’d say: “Peter, you have to work with the idea of terror”’ (cit.
Nikolaidis 2012).
5. In addition to those Argentine films already mentioned, see the follow-
ing Brazilian productions for examples of socially transgressive gazes that
are linked to swimming pools and bodies of water: Aluizio Abranches’
Do Começo ao Fim (2009), Heitor Dhalia’s À Deriva (2009), Filipe
Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Beira-Mar (2015), and Daniel
Ribeiro’s Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho (2014).
Filmography
Ausente. 2011. Dir. by Marco Berger. Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes
Audiovisuales (INCAA) and Oh My Gomez! Films. Argentina.
Hawaii. 2013. Dir. by Marco Berger. La Novia Cine and Universidad del Cine.
Argentina.
Plan B. 2009. Dir. by Marco Berger. Rendez-Vous Pictures, Oh My Gomez!
Films and Brainjaus Producciones. Argentina.
Taekwondo. 2016. Dir. by Marco Berger. Oh My Gomez! Films. Argentina.
Bibliography
Brown, Christopher, and Pam Hirsch. 2014. Introduction: The Cinema of
the Swimming Pool. In The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, ed. Christopher
Brown and Pam Hirsch, 1–20. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction
Through the Senses. New York and London: Routledge.
Farmer, Brett. 2000. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male
Spectatorships. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Foster, David William. 2014. Marco Berger: filmar las masculinidades queer en
Argentina. Imagofagia 9: 1–17.
Hanson, Ellis (ed.). 1999. Introduction: Out Takes. In Out Takes: Essays on
Queer Theory and Film, 1–19. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Lerner, Neil (ed.). 2010. Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. New York:
Routledge.
Marks, Laura. 1998. Video Haptics and Erotics. Screen 39 (4): 331–348.
———. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moreiras, Diego. 2016. Educación sexual integral, Marco Berger y Ausente.

Miradas en conflicto desde una didáctica de la comunicación. Anagramas 14
(28): 97–114.
Mulvey, Laura. 1999 [1975]. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ In Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen, 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press.
Neveldine, Robert Burns. 1998. Bodies at Risk: Unsafe Limits in Romanticism
and Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Nikolaidis, Leo. 2012. There Is Sexuality in Everything: An Interview with
Marco Berger. Sounds and Colours. Available at https://soundsandcolours.
com/articles/argentina/absent-inter view-with-marco-berger-12684/.
Accessed 19 Sept 2017.
Pagnoni Berns, Fernando Gabriel. 2014. Cartographies of Desire: Swimming
Pools and the Queer Gaze. In Cinema of the Swimming Pool, ed. Christopher
Brown and Pam Hirsch, 229–237. Oxford: Peter Lang.
———. 2017. Water and Queer Intimacy. In Space and Subjectivity in
Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, ed. Antônio Márcio da Silva and Mariana
Cunha. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Peidro, Santiago. 2013. Un deseo que interpela: subvirtiendo las normas morales
de la erogenia masculina. Ética y Cine Journal 3 (3): 43–53.
Venkatesh, Vinodh. 2016. New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
CHAPTER 3
(Re)pairing Adolescent Masculinities:

The Neo-fraternal Social Contract
and the Penal State in Hoje eu quero voltar
sozinho and Beira-Mar
Ramiro Armas
The panorama of Latin American cinematic production and consump-

tion has veered towards a child/adolescent-centered type of film, par-
ticularly at the turn of the new millennium, and Brazilian cinema is right
on board with this shift. It has been a long and steady move in Brazil,
which has gone from the neo-realistic representations of the young liv-
ing in the slums and the rural poor characteristic of late 1950s Cinema
Novo, like Cinco veces favela/Five Times a Slum (1962), all the way to
State-funded award-winning films in the 1980s like Pixote (1981), and
other so-called ‘Retomada’ films like Central do Brasil/Central Station
(1998).1 Complementing this trend, new films have emerged at the
beginning of the twenty-first century centering on teenage women and
their vicissitudes with motherhood and girlhood in the urban periph-
eries of Brazil, like Meninas/Teen Mothers (2006) and Sonhos roubados/
R. Armas (*) 
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

60 R. ARMAS
Stolen Dreams (2010). In all these films, boys and girls have been gain-
ing the voice that had remained silent in the highly commercial forms
and contents of the Hollywood cinema of import. However, Brazilian
film-makers have not only foregrounded young male and female charac-
ters in socio-economic circumstances of deprivation; some film creators
have also focused on youngsters who struggle with subjectivity formation
in the context of the expanding middle-class in urban neoliberal Brazil. A
series of queer films have come to the screen in which teenage characters
grapple with questions of gender and sexual dynamics within a seemingly
single hegemonic sociopolitical discourse of present-day Brazil. Two of
those queer films in which issues of masculinity and social class collide
are the focus of the present chapter: Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho/The
Way He Looks (2014) and Beira-Mar/Seashore (2015).
The award-winning and critically-acclaimed Hoje eu quero voltar soz-
inho is based on the 2010 successful short film Eu não quero voltar soz-
inho, both directed, written and co-produced by Daniel Ribeiro. The
same actors star in both short and feature films. The storylines are based
on the coming-of-age romantic drama centering on Leonardo, a ‘clos-
eted’ gay, blind high-school student dealing with ‘coming out’ issues
and his rivalry with his friend Giovana for the affection of the hand-
some new boy in school, Gabriel. In Seashore, the second film discussed
in this chapter, Tomaz accompanies Martin to the latter’s family beach
house in order to obtain some documents from his relatives on his
father’s orders.2 When the directors of this film, Filipe Matzembacher
and Marcio Reolon, met in film school as adults, they realised that they
used to spend their summers in a beach called Capão da Canoa during
their adolescence, without knowing about each other’s existence. They
decided then to build the two main characters of their film on their own
coming-of-age experiences as teenage men, and to reconstruct a story
where the two meet. Thus, while Seashore is the actualisation of the
directors’ adolescence embodied by their two young actors, in The Way
He Looks, actors and director literally grow together from the short to
the feature film three years later. Both feature films constitute, then, an
attempt to return to the past of their directors and actors in order to
revisit their narratives. In both films, the frontiers between past and pres-
ent, fiction and reality become porous, and the experiences portrayed on
one side of the border have powerful effects on the other.
Scholars have been paying close attention to instances of Latin
American filmography in which adolescents face the difficulties of
3 (RE)PAIRING ADOLESCENT MASCULINITIES … 61
gaining agency and constructing subjectivity under social and eco-

nomic circumstances of relative privilege. Films like Lucrecia Martel’s
La ciénaga/The Swamp (2001) and Albertina Carri’s Géminis/Gemini
(2005), for instance, have been a focus of research demonstrating how
the constraints of rural upper-middle-class morality fragment the psy-
chosocial spaces of girlhood.3 Others have considered Latin American
films where painful masculinity constructions in young men are the
result of a stifling socio-economic position of power. In his essay ‘“Be a
Man!”: Masculinities and Class Privileges in Postcoup Chilean Cinema’
(2014), Walescka Pino-Ojeda examines Julio comienza en Julio/Julio
Begins in July (1976), directed by Silvio Caiozzi, a film where a young-
ster’s non-conformity with the patriarchal social structure of early
twentieth-century rural Chile reshapes his rebellious agency. Pino-Ojeda
interprets the film as a critique of the fraternal social contract underpin-
ning the gender politics of the sociopolitical patriarchy of the bourgeois
state in Chile.
Drawing on the work of Carole Pateman, Pino-Ojeda asserts that the
main role of the fraternal social contract in the patriarchal bourgeois state
is to maintain the continuity of gender and power dynamics: ‘This is not
a spontaneous occurrence, but rather a process that requires a sustained
campaign of socialisation, carried out by both the formal and informal
bodies at the disposal of the state’ (2014: 89). Within this framework,
processes of masculinisation often result in painful and even traumatic
processes of socialisation, such as social performances of manhood,
like male rites of passage or other gender-marking ‘tests of manliness’.
Furthermore, this intense gender-based dynamics of power is perpetu-
ated through events that emphasise the discontinuities among the dif-
ferent ranks of the social hierarchy: hegemonic, subaltern and peripheral.
For the patriarchal social machinery to work, members of a given social
sphere must ensure the maintenance of each rank in perfectly dissociated
binaries: male vs. female being the paradigmatic gendered distinction.
Although Pino-Ojeda analysed the interdependence of gender and class
dynamics in the 1920s context of the story, and by extension of 1970s
post-coup Chile, the same theoretical approach can be applied to the
case of the two films proposed for the present analysis, albeit in the con-
text of present-day neoliberal Brazil.
According to Pino-Ojeda, children and adolescents inhabit, in princi-
ple, the periphery of the dominant social narratives established by adult
masculine hegemonic subjects. This is certainly the case, and the sphere
62 R. ARMAS
of physical mobility parallels this social mapping. There is a subtle but

observable difference between children and adolescents in the arena of
physical mobility, which shows how the realms of physical and mental
growth are linked to ideals of economic independence and social respon-
sibility.4 In broad terms, whereas infants and children are physically con-
tained or mobilised by their caregivers, adolescents become increasingly
independent and mobile. As a result, teenagers require more than physi-
cal restraint to control their displacement from peripheral to subordinate
spaces, and from here to hegemonic spaces of dominance. Adolescents
are constantly tested for readiness of passage by their adult counterparts
from a mobility point of view. Caregivers, professors, older siblings, and
other hegemonic and subordinate subjects orchestrate a series of rituals
where the ‘femininity’ or ‘virility’ of the young ‘candidate’ is affirmed.
These observations are critical for understanding the physical and mental
processes by which adolescents are socially positioned within the socioec-
onomic categories of the neoliberal state. In both The Way He Looks and
Seashore, the displacement from and to distinct social domains is experi-
enced by the young characters as emotionally strenuous or even painful.
These movements are presented to the adolescent by hegemonic institu-
tions as opportunities to test and later attain a higher status in the social
structure (from peripheral child to subordinate adolescent, from subor-
dinate adolescent to hegemonic adult) when in reality these possibilities
of ‘ascent’ often generate a painful experience of growing for both social
institution agents (parents, teachers, priests, etc.) and adolescents.
In The Way He Looks, Leonardo, the blind protagonist, seems to be
at first overly dependent on his female friend, Giovana, to move around
at school and during other activities outside of the home. His parents
approve of the practicalities of their only son’s friendly heterosexual rela-
tionship, given that in principle it reassures them of his safety. For the
majority of the narrative, Giovana acts as a co-parental figure of sorts,
assisting Leonardo with navigating the physical and social gendered world.
After their last summer day by the pool, Giovana walks Leonardo home,
opens the jail-like iron grid gate for him and kisses him goodbye on the
cheek before making sure he is safely indoors. Once inside, he greets his
mother and gets subtly inspected for sunburns, and interrogated over din-
ner about his day by both his overly anxious parents. In this scene, the
parents frown upon but finally accept Leonardo’s decision to spend one
evening by himself at home while his parents run some errands: ‘What kind
of tragedy could possibly happen?’ Leonardo asks. ‘It’s fine, but you call us
as soon as you get home from school! And keep your phone charged!’ his
mother responds anxiously, while his father smiles in approval.
It is clear that Giovana’s co-parental function is not only to guide the
blind teenager around physical obstacles, but more importantly to par-
ticipate in surveying and invigilating his transition to potential hegem-
onic heterosexual male adulthood. Giovana and Leonardo’s parents
never appear in the same frame during the movie, underscoring their
functional interchangeability. Consequently, it seems as if Giovana func-
tioned as a surrogate teacher/mother figure outside the teacher’s and
mother’s ‘jurisdictions’. Much like the mother and the female teacher,
Giovana inhibits her own sexual desires in order to attain her subordi-
nate function as caregiver and invigilator. She spends long hours with
Leonardo who shows no sensual attraction to her. Another institutional
figure that inhibits libidinal drives in the service of invigilation is the
schoolteacher. In the classroom, the female teacher engages in protecting
Leonardo from aggressive bullying. Outside of school, the blind young-
ster becomes prey to other male bullies. Thus in the film, house and
school ‘parental jurisdictions’ seem modeled around imagery associated
with what Michel Foucault called the ‘carceral model’, defined as ‘the
disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which all the coercive
technologies of behavior previously found in the cloister, prison, school
or regiment are concentrated, and which, being brought together in one
place, served as a guide for the future development of carceral institu-
tions’ (1977: 293). In the first classroom scene, all boys and girls wear
the same penitentiary-like washed-up gray t-shirt uniform. The hostile
atmosphere is complemented by the expulsion of a classmate who calls
Giovana ‘a human walking cane’ and ‘a guide dog’ when she attempts
to defend her blind friend from bullying. The scene after Giovana walks
a disturbed Leonardo home shows the protagonist’s feelings of solitude
and confinement as he spends his evening in the dark and silence of his
small room. The overhead medium close-up shots of his bed draw in the
intrusive adult spectator who feels the impossibility of consoling the suf-
fering boy while prying on his intimacy.
The subtle prison model imagery at play in the first scenes of The Way
He Looks unveils what critics of neoliberalism call the ‘punitive regu-
lation’ of the penal state. In explaining the historic conundrum of the
rise of the prison as a model institution at the forefront of neoliberal
societies, Loïc Wacquant (2009) argues that the glorification of polic-
ing and the punitive politics of marginality respond to social insecurity
64 R. ARMAS
(not criminal insecurity), poverty policy and the restrictive ‘workfare’

that forge the neoliberal state; thus, a ‘zero tolerance’ policing, and
its ensuing mass incarceration of peripheral individuals, are at the core
of a propounded conception of neoliberalism. Other critics go fur-
ther in connecting prison and school policies. Richard Mora and Mary
Christianakis, for instance, contend that ‘the increase in prisons and the
policing of schools is rooted in the convergence of neoliberalism, con-
servatism and “penal populism” (Pratt 2007). It is a convergence that
criminalises minority youth and reinforces the school-to-prison pipe-
line, i.e. policies and practices that systematically push at-risk youth out
of mainstream public schools and into the juvenile criminal systems’
(2013: 1). The school represented in the film is far removed from the
reality of a peripheral North American policed school, yet the criminal
control model, with zero-tolerance and gender segregation policies, is
subtle but evident in its scenes. The guard-like female teacher is loud
and strict. For the end-of-course assignment, students can only work in
same-sex partnerships, suggesting an aversion to possible sexual interac-
tions among the ‘inmate’ school population. The expelled bully in the
scene described above has messy-looking long hair and wears a saggy
sweater, which function as an index of a predatory social inconformity
and rebellion.
With the highest prison population in Latin America, Brazil is not far
behind the prison model of other neoliberal countries.5 In discussing the
negative effects of neoliberalism in Brazil, Edmund Amann and Werner
Baer (2002) point out how at the socioeconomic level one of the most
adverse outcomes of neoliberal economic policies has been social ine-
quality. Aman and Werner also underscore the dire social consequences
of the inequitable distribution of income in Brazil: ‘Another indication
of the distributional and low human development ranking is the rise in
urban violence. One study found a dramatic increase in the rate of hom-
icides in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro
the rate of male homicide per 100,000 inhabitants in the age bracket
of 15–24 rose from 149 in 1981 to 275 in 1995’ (2002: 955). This
exponential tendency in youth criminality is echoed in the prevalence
of male violence and incarceration portrayals in the Brazilian filmogra-
phy of the years leading to 2000. As Ivana Bentes points out: ‘Images of
poverty and violence have never circulated more vastly, including those
of “the excluded,” or “deviant” or “abhorred” behavior’ (2013: 103).
Specifically in relation to the release of Carandiru in 2002, a film that
portrays the 1992 massacre of over a hundred inmates in the biggest

penitentiary of Latin America at the time, Robert Stam posits: ‘Prisons
everywhere are the site where the state meets the citizen in a very direct
and brutal way. A manifest instance of Weber’s concept of “the state’s
monopoly on violence”, a prison is also the place where Althusser’s idea
of “interpellation” becomes terribly literal’ (2013: 139). Both films dis-
cussed in this chapter depict scenes that bear witness to this fierce space
where adolescents seem to be placed for invigilation and control.
In The Way He Looks, the over-anxious surveying atmosphere triggers
the protagonist’s wishes to escape from his present suffocating situation.
Leonardo confesses to Giovana his secret plans about going as far away
as possible to another country where he could construct his own per-
sonality. He answers Giovana’s disapproving questions: ‘This is not new.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Imagine how cool it is going
somewhere where no one knows you. No one knows who you are. You
could even create a new personality!’ ‘Don’t you like your personality?’
Giovana interrupts. ‘I do. But I’m not the problem,’ Leonardo answers,
as their intimacy is suddenly broken by his mother abruptly opening
the door on them. In the next scene, Leonardo arrives home after dark
from a visit to his grandmother and confronts his overly worried parents:
‘Can’t I take a step without you watching over me?’ After asking to let
him go to take a shower, he adds: ‘Or do you want to bathe me too?’
criticising what he perceives as his parent’s hyper-vigilant and controlling
attitude.
If surveying is an intrinsic mechanism of the modern prison state
model, according to Foucault, his notion of the Panopticon, used as
a metaphor for the neoliberal regime of mass control with a pervasive
inclination to normalise through observation, is still applicable in the
contemporary period.6 In assessing the relationship between techno-
logical advances and neoliberalism, Laurence Reynolds and Bronislaw
Szerszynski conclude that ‘despite the proliferation of consumer elec-
tronics, the contemporary new knowledge economy has so far not pro-
duced anything equivalent to the paradigm-shifting technologies of
earlier industrial revolutions’ (2012: 35). The authors indicate that par-
adigmatic technological innovations may emerge soon, particularly in the
energy sector, but in many respects, neoliberal economies are still deter-
mined and will remain determined in the foreseeable future by second
industrial revolution advances and its derivatives, like electrical power and
the internal combustion engine. However, the disparity between these
66 R. ARMAS
production technologies and the massive technological rate of advance

in the communications and surveillance area is abysmal. Since the early
years of the twentieth century, telecommunication and location technol-
ogies have advanced in overwhelming proportions, and these changes
have affected the way subjectivities are constructed and agencies are
negotiated. In relation to the portrayal of invigilation in violence-themed
Brazilian cinema, Bentes asserts that the most visible consequence of a
political discourse of fear in the neoliberal state has been a ‘greater indif-
ference to the origins of poverty and toward structural injustice, more
private security, more repression and demand for the containment of
slum populations so they cannot leave their ghettos without being
observed, more CCTV surveillance in defense of private property’ (2013:
103). Although the films studied in this chapter distance themselves for-
mally and thematically from the violence-centered filmography of recent
Brazilian cinema, the mere portrayal of a controlled blind adolescent in
The Way He Looks and a boy who is entrapped in his father’s mission in
Seashore attests to the asymmetrical relationship between the technolog-
ical invigilation and control of social institutions and the disempowered
teenagers. This power asymmetry is mapped on to Foucault’s notion of
the Panopticon, where the guards observe the inmates through peep-
holes from the central tower while the latter are unable to look back.
In the modern state, young and adult individuals face communi-
cation technology shifts in terms of privacy and surveillance issues.
Technology changes reshape an individual’s ability to construct subjec-
tivity. Telecommunication devices have had repercussions for technology-
mediated interactions. These rapidly changing technological challenges
are particularly distressing for young individuals in their interactions
with peers and their adult counterparts. Mobile phones play an impor-
tant role as prosthetic ‘eyes’ for the familial social institution that needs
to effectively invigilate and control the future hegemonic social agents.
The main character in The Way He Looks struggles with his sense of con-
finement and constant surveillance as a means to invigilate his transition
from subordinated to a potential hegemonic male subject. In an attempt
to deflect the over-controlling gaze of his parents, Leonardo uses varied
ringtones to screen calls. In fact, he is avid in assigning his favorite musi-
cian’s ‘tone’ (Beethoven) to his favorite new friend, Gabriel. The latter,
however, wants to have his favorite modern band’s ‘tone’ assigned for
him in Leonardo’s phone. In this scene of homo-social interaction, the
teenage characters manage to subvert the use of an apparatus of control
into an agency-gaining device. The caller-ID interface mechanism of their

mobiles helps them attain a certain sense of intimacy in the strenuous and
exposed space of technology-mediated interaction.
In the second film, Seashore, the teenage characters also struggle with
the strictures of the penal neoliberal state and its proclivities for corpo-
real control through the constant invasion of privacy. In the initial scene,
Martin’s father appears showing his back, answering the interphone
to someone who just called the front door. As the handheld camera
approaches the father, there is a cut to the two friends happily greeting
in the parking garage. In the dialogue overlap from the previous take,
the father’s ominous voice reminds Martin of the severity of his assign-
ment: ‘Take it seriously’. This scene shows Martin’s anxiety to leave with
his friend Tomaz as soon as possible to complete the serious task. The
father’s voice-over makes his expectations clear and, more importantly,
underscores his omnipresence in the narrative of the film. The diegetic
rock music in the car links to the following scene in which a shot/reverse
shot of the handheld camera closes up on the two adolescents from the
back seat of the car, as if they were being viewed by an intrusive pres-
ence. ‘Once we get there, we do what we gotta do, and that’s it, ok?
[Pause] Relax!’ Tomaz says realising that Martin looks overly stressed.
This omnipresent intrusive camerawork is constant throughout the film.
The movements of the two adolescents are closely followed from behind
and very near the back of their necks as if the camera-eye were spying
on them. The semi-subjective point-of-view shots turn the initial father’s
orders into a sort of Orwellian presence that aligns with the adult per-
spective of the intrusive film viewer.7
In both films, the portrayal of confinement and invigilation fore-
grounds the painful experience of growth for the teenage characters
in terms of a process of individuation within a penal social context.
The morning after their arrival, Martin’s father calls, and Tomaz drives
Martin along a rural road to his relatives in order to obtain the requested
document and complete the pressing assignment. While Tomaz waits
outside in his car, Martin is confronted by a hostile situation inside the
house. He is interrogated and made to feel uncomfortable as he realises
that he is in the middle of a family conflict that he is unable to compre-
hend fully. He does not remember the people from whom he demands
the document. Mrs. Marisa, the older woman, sits with a defiant atti-
tude in the company of a teenage girl and a tall male adult. Martin
finds himself at odds in explaining exactly which document he is meant
68 R. ARMAS
to pick up, and attempts unsuccessfully to reach his father through his
mobile phone. ‘No one is going to speak with your father on the phone.
[Pause] Why didn’t he come himself? [Pause] He sent you, right?’
Mrs. Marisa asserts in a dismissive tone. Before Martin leaves the house
empty-handed, the small bathroom door gets jammed and he tries to
exit in distress through the jail-like window of the house, emphasising
this sense of entrapment.
As the fraternal social contract of the bourgeois state applies for the
neoliberal state as a means to maintain the continuity of gender and
power dynamics, the new fraternal contract sustains the sexual politics of
the neoliberal state by relying on the mechanisms of carceral body con-
trol and its ensuing technological invigilation. It is a neo-fraternal social
contract whereby the sustained campaigns of gendered socialisation, car-
ried out by a physically absent but virtually omnipresent paternal figure,
result in effective persecutory tests of masculinity for future hegemonic
agents in the hands of subordinate social members. These subordinate
subjects act like ‘inmates’ who enact the rites of passage represented in
the two films, namely the social gatherings where the hegemonic-to-be
male candidate has the opportunity to perform his initiation by testing
his ‘manliness’ through drinking, smoking and playing sex-inducing
games. In both films the teenagers play ‘Spin the Bottle’ under the vig-
ilant eye of their male and female peers. In The Way He Looks, Giovana
saves Leonardo before he is tricked into giving his much-anticipated
‘first kiss’ to a puppy, and being humiliated in front of all his school
friends. Instead, an impulsive Gabriel takes the opportunity to kiss him
on the lips outside the house, before running away on his bike. In the
small gathering in Seashore, the ‘Spin the Bottle’ game results in Tomaz
and Martin being dared to spend time inside a dark room where their
straight sexuality would be put to the test. The spectator’s gaze again
preys on the two friends in the confinement of the little space. All the
activities in both films occur under the vigilant eye of other peers as
guarantors of the tacit hetero-normative ‘code of conduct’.
Essentially, in the modality of the neo-fraternal social contract, the
relation among hegemonic, subaltern and peripheral subjects is super-
imposed by the roles of the free, jail-keeper and inmate agents of the
carceral model of society. To move up to the hegemony category would
amount to being free and outside of the vigilant force of jail keepers and
peer inmates. In Masculinities Under Neoliberalism, a series of scholars
grapple with the dramatic changes that neoliberalism has wrought on the
present global social order and on masculinities in particular. As noted

above for the case of Brazil, the social and economic policies of the neo-
liberal state have accentuated the socioeconomic and gender inequalities
of a class society. According to Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale,
the systematic patterns of inequality that neoliberal ideologies sustain
are naturalised mainly by gender inequality: ‘gender naturalizes inequal-
ity better than racism. It is so effective because it is always double-sided:
one side is love, the other is imbued with sexism. […] So love locks us
in, and sexism hurts and angers us. We are simultaneously trapped and
divided’ (2016: 64). Thus, one of the implications of a heightened une-
qual society is its marked gendered individuation. The male teenage
characters of the two films struggle from within the carceral environment
of their class society in order to come afloat to a fully gendered inde-
pendent self. Tomaz and Martin in Seashore, and Leonardo and Gabriel
in The Way He Looks, are closely invigilated by their ‘inmate’ and ‘jail-
keeper’ peers throughout their rituals of passage to full social and eco-
nomic separation and individuation. What these films evidence, however,
is that contrary to the ideals of the separate gendered self of the neolib-
eral class society, adolescence, and queer adolescence in these instances,
refashions a concept of the self based on relational notions of mutuality,
dependence and connectedness. The queer adolescent experience of sub-
jective construction is grounded in a process of affective reparation of the
alienated individual in the two films.
In her critique of prevailing psychological theories that sustain the
atomistic notions of autonomy and individuation of a bounded and sep-
arate self, Judith V. Jordan observes that these ideals of a mature indi-
vidualistic subject derive from sociopolitical assumptions of Western,
democratic societies (1993: 233). Jordan also notes that clinical evidence
shows how Western ideals of a free and emotionally autonomous individ-
ual shape the social expectations of adolescents, causing enormous dis-
tress on the empathic and relational aspects of subjectivity:
A system that defines the self as separate and hierarchically measurable is

usually marked in Western cultures by power-based dominance patterns.
In such a system, one seeks to exercise self-control, minimize affective dis-
play (particularly those feelings suggesting loss of control), and maintain
independence. Abstract logic is seen as superior to what has been called
‘connected knowing’ (Belenky et al. 1983). While somewhat caricatured
here, this represents much of the prescribed socialization for males in
70 R. ARMAS
western society. I have suggested this be called the ‘objectifying/power/

control mode’ (Jordan 1987). Relationships in this system are in impor-
tant ways about power, entitlement, hierarchy (being better than or higher
than); one feels safe and clear in separation rather than in connection.
(1993: 234)
The consequences of a politics of boundedness of the self, as described

by Jordan, are heightened in the carceral system of the penal state. The
fractures in the social fabric of the films in question attest to a painful
experience of subjectivity construction for the teenage protagonists in
their relationship with their peers and adult caregivers. The anxieties
depicted by the characters of both films portray the tensions between a
relational versus an autonomous subject model construction. The ado-
lescents experience this tension with their respective caregivers as a deep
sense of alienation. In The Way He Looks, Leonardo strives for independ-
ence regardless of his visual disability. His parents and peers invigilate
and control such a process of individuation of the only child as a means
to maintain a sense of connectedness within a painful experience of sep-
aration. In Seashore, Martin (an only child too) constantly restrains him-
self from any expression of emotional attachment in order to obtain his
father’s approval. He purports to have a determined and strong mind set
against any emotional surge or empathy for the feelings of others, includ-
ing his best friend and his humble relatives. What seems to be at stake for
the characters of the two films is the possibility of a re-negotiation with
their parents where they could reconcile their empathic mode of self with
an attained sense of agency.
In order to ‘denaturalize’ the gender-based dualism of the neolib-
eral ideology, Lindisfarne and Neale invite us to think of masculine and
feminine constructs as relational among ‘dividual’, not ‘individual’, sub-
jects: ‘This is a way of thinking of human beings as having permeable,
changing boundaries that alter in response to different kinds of social
interactions and in different social settings’ (2016: 76). The ‘dividual’
is a concept borrowed from McKim Marriot (1976) who conceives of
social agents as resulting from gendered partible bits of sensorial experi-
ence, like scents and other substances such as breast milk or semen. This
partible approach to subjective formation coincides in many aspects with
the feminist perspective of a relational self. It is a model of development
initially conceptualised to understand women’s experience of self, such
as mutuality and responsiveness of female inter-subjectivity. As Jordan
points out: ‘The development of mutual empathy, characterised by the

flow of empathic attunement between people, alters the traditional
model of boundedness and separateness’ (1993: 236). The ‘dividual’,
thus, as much as the ‘feminine model’ of self described by Jordan, alters
the discrete model of ‘self’ purported by the neoliberal ideology and its
carceral system of surveillance and punishment. The ‘dividual’ purports a
fluid type of self in constant change:
We are changed when we catch a whiff of perfume, when we are touched

by another person, when we are fired by a new idea, when we hear another
person cry, or when we ourselves are physically harmed. And, vice-versa,
of course, we change others – when we’re happy, when we’re anxious,
when our feet smell bad. There are real, bodily changes: an orgasm is real,
semen is real, pregnancy is real, and breast-milk is real and helps boy and
girl babies to grow. And the chemical changes in our noses and brains are
real when we smell something pleasant, or noxious. So too do our ear-
drums vibrate when someone speaks to us, or shouts, or tortures us with
white noise. So too do our bodies respond to soft stroking, but they also
bruise, and break, and other people can easily kill us. (Lindisfarne and
Neale 2016: 39–40)
Thus, the adolescent characters of the two films seem to embody the
‘dividual’. It is a world of constant change, and one that keeps chang-
ing the world around them. Due to his visual disability, Leonardo relies
on his heightened sense of touch and smell in order to relate to oth-
ers, catching every whiff of scent in the air. He is permeable to every
touch and sound, and his perceptual self challenges the deceiving world
of those who interact with him. Despite his attempts at showing no emo-
tion, Martin also changes as a result of every interaction with the fantasy
world of Tomaz and the humble world of his distant relatives.
In The Way He Looks, the protagonist ‘looks’ through his heightened
auditory, tactile and olfactory senses. Leonardo perceives disjointed parts
of others, scents and sounds that mix with other scents and sounds fleet-
ing in the air, including his own. In fact, Leonardo’s sensorial world
divides the stylistic realm of the film into two distinct pictorial worlds.
The day scenes and the night scenes correspond to the two perceptual
worlds of the characters in the film: one for the optical and the other for
the sensorially non-optical, accordingly. This divide between the optical
and non-optical is mapped on to the viewer’s sensorial experience, since
the spectator is limited to the visual and aural, but shuns the characters’
72 R. ARMAS
other sensorial experiences like touch and smell. The optical day scenes
match the panoptical adult world as described above, while the non-
optical scenes are paired with the sensorial world of the adolescent parti-
ble body, which is not entirely accessible to the spectator. Viewers cannot
see every performed sensation of the film. The very first scene sets this
stylistic principle. Before the opening credits end, an overlapping sound
of jungle birds and water paddling precedes the fist diegetic scene: an
overhead shot showing Giovana and Leonardo sunbathing by the pool,
and Leonardo producing the water sound with his hand in a slow and
sensual movement. Corresponding with this ‘invisible’ aural world, the
first classroom scene depicts a close-up of Leonardo’s ear in the first
plane with an out-of-focus background. The off-screen sound is that of
the brisk opening of the door as the racking focus to the background
reveals the entrance of Gabriel on his first day at school.
Another example of the disjunction of the two perceptual worlds of
the optical and non-optical is the two sensual shower scenes. As noted
earlier, one of the dominant topics in the narrative of the film is the ‘first
kiss’. After the first interaction between Leonardo and Gabriel in biology
class, the former spends some time alone at home. Before jumping into
the shower, Leonardo plays the sensual Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 on
his room’s sound system and takes off his shirt. The diegetic music turns
non-diegetic and overlaps with the next sequence where Leonardo show-
ers. The sound of the dripping water running down his body from the
shower mixes with the semi-diegetic soundtrack of the classical music.
Suddenly, in a straight front shot, he turns towards the glass door of the
shower and kisses it as if he was kissing the film screen. An extreme close
up shows the kissing from an angle where the glass divides the left and
right sides of the shower door, emphasising the borders between the fic-
tional world of the film and the real world of the spectator. While the
diegetic realm shows how the steam and water of the shower attempt
to cross the glass door, the non-diegetic space is aurally traversed by
the music that character and viewer perceive. The second shower scene
occurs in the public bathrooms of the compound in the field trip. In this
case, the subjective camerawork helps Gabriel explore the naked body of
his male friend. After a day in the sun by the pool, applying sunscreen to
one another, a close-up of Leonardo’s dripping back and buttocks gives
Gabriel an erection that he conceals in shame despite being alone with
his blind friend.
Leonardo’s ‘wet dream’ is another scene where the visual and non-
visual worlds coalesce in this film. The screening of the dream contains
visual elements that help the viewer connect with the perceptual world of
the blind adolescent. It consists of a surrealist depiction of mise-en-scène
and cinematographic techniques where deformed bodily silhouettes
and voices tangle in a mesh of light and darkness. A female voice in the
dream scene utters: ‘Who says we need swimming suits to swim?’ That
voice or the faces that vaguely appear in this scene, however, are loosely
assigned to the particular characters of the film. This scene allows the
spectator to share Leonardo’s fluid perceptual world: a ‘dreamy’ world
where self and other, inside and outside, fantasy and reality, seems to mix
in a fluid sensorial encounter. The sensual voices in the dream indicate
that there is a plan to go swimming in the nude. The ‘wet dream’ scene
transitions to a blackout screen where Leonardo calls his father to help
him to shave: a sensual masculine ritual that signals, in this case, the rep-
aration of male complicity since father and son have no opportunity to
bond other than through the constant interrogation at dinner time.
Leonardo’s sensual and dreamy world is comparable with Tomaz’s
drawing pad fantasy world in Seashore. Always followed closely from
behind by the handheld camera, Tomaz stops over for a break on route to
Beira-Mar, and goes to the bathroom. A close-up of the ‘ocupado’ (taken)
lock of the washroom indicates an ensuing private activity in the stall.
Once Tomaz leaves the bathroom, a close-up unveils the drawing graffiti
that he finished behind the stall door. It depicts the face of a young boy,
as a hard cut moves to a medium close up of Martin on the phone. Tomaz
keeps drawing on his pad during the rest of the trip. During the tense
morning after their arrival at Beira-Mar, he draws while Martin apologises
for having had him wait out in the cold for so long. Again after the diffi-
cult first encounter that Martin had with his family, Tomaz draws. On this
occasion, Martin opens up to his travel companion and shares an anecdote
about when he was a child and got lost on the beach, only to be found by
the lifeguards and an angry father who beat him in punishment. Intrigued
by the drawings, Martin asks if he can see them. Tomaz responds: ‘When
I get better, I will show you’. Later in the film, Martin finds the drawing
pad and peeks at it. Martin is transfixed by a drawing of boy looking back
at shattering waves, which recalls the story that he had shared. The semi-
diegetic sound corresponds to the waves outside of the beach house, as if
the drawing were an actual image of him in front of the waves.
74 R. ARMAS
At this point in the film, Martin attempts for a second time to retrieve
the valuable document, the signifier of the male transaction. However,
on his second attempt, a different kind of bonding occurs, one in which
Martin lets go of his emotional self in search for a different sort of mas-
culine agency. Martin helps his hostile male relative to repair what seems
to be an old piece of furniture, perhaps as a symbol of a past that is being
fixed. He then uses the same straw to share a drink of mate with Mrs.
Marisa and talks openly with his teenage girl cousin. A distinct kind of
bonding ensues, one where Martin’s masculinity pairs with his affective
inner world and a past that gets mended: ‘I should have come here more
often,’ he says, as he leaves his relatives’ rural home without the docu-
ment, promising to visit more regularly.
Once Martin successfully speaks with his relatives, he decides to take
Tomaz to a place where his grandfather used to take him as a child, and
asks his friend candidly about his sexuality. On the way back to the beach
house, accompanied by the non-diegetic music of his harmonica, Martin
calls his father while cleaning up the house and draining half-finished
bottles of beer and wine:
I went to my grandpa’s. Although I was his grandson, I felt weird. But

when I left, when I was in the middle of the road, I didn’t know which
way my home was anymore. I didn’t know if I should go back to the
house you had built or go back to the one they were living in. I was sad. I
thought of all the things I didn’t get to do. Because I knew you wouldn’t
approve. I didn’t get to feel what I was feeling. I didn’t get to care about
the people I cared about. I’m coming back to Porto Alegre without the
document. There are people around me who don’t make me afraid to go
to the beach even when they know that I might get lost. But I’d rather
take my chances.
The last phrase was uttered with Martin on the phone in a frontal take,
symbolically indicating the break in communication with his father, but
also indicating that the adult spectator was the recipient of the mes-
sage on the other side of the screen. The same night after Martin speaks
with his father, he kisses Tomaz and they have sex. The handheld cam-
era moves from the back of their necks to uninhibited frontal close-ups.
The last scene of the film is the morning after their sexual encounter, and
Martin walks away fearless towards the waves creating a graphic match
with Tomaz’s preceding drawing.
Thus, the sensual non-optical fantasy world of Leonardo in The Way

He Looks equates with the pictorial discourse of Tomaz in Seashore. Both
fantasy worlds construct a homoerotic epistemology based on the sensual
perception of the partible ‘dividual’ body of the adolescent. This new
way to know the world through sensorial experience constitutes a way to
repair affective bonds broken under the highly differentiated individual-
istic class system of the neoliberal carceral state. Tomaz’s drawings chal-
lenge the predominant punitive relationship that Martin had established
with his father by connecting at a sensual level with his ‘soul (in)mate’.
The pictorial language explores the boys’ inter-subjective construction,
which compensates for a disconnection with the adult caregiver: ‘Your
father will never change,’ Tomaz says after finding out about the deci-
sion Martin made not to get the requested document, and once again
failing to meet his father’s expectations. The teenagers’ re-paired subjec-
tivity is achieved through their liberation of their sensual bodily expe-
riences. Moreover, the young characters in both films reconstitute their
inter-subjectivity in the fictional scenarios of their fantasies in ways that
project partible representations of self and others, showing the permea-
bility of the borders between reality and fantasy for actors and spectators.
In these two films then, the teenage characters foreground a homoerotic
epistemology based on their partible bodily experience against a sociopo-
litical and economic regime that privileges the containment of the self.
Adolescents and their uncontainable bodies portray a critique of the rigid
attempt to control the body of ‘subordinate inmates’ in discrete individ-
ualities and their painful processes of separation. Contrary to the pursuit
of bodily restraint in the carceral neoliberal model, the adolescents in the
films in question connect with their sensorial fluids.
This bodily experience becomes more immediate in the above-men-
tioned shower scenes. Parallel cinematographic processes occur in
Seashore. One happens when Tomaz loses a game of Truth or Dare, and
has to dye his hair blue. Alone in the shower, the blue dye drips over his
body into the shower drain below followed by a curious camera-eye. The
other shower scene in the film occurs after the party when Tomaz is so
drunk that Martin takes him to the shower and sees him closely from
behind. Both scenes in the two films portray homoerotic epistemolo-
gies of an aqueous uncontainable body, what John Paul Ricco, following
George Bataille’s heterologies, calls the ‘unassimilable’: ‘A queer theory
of bodies and their fluids must not concern itself with the ignoble yet
76 R. ARMAS
ultimately assimilable, but rather must attend to the unassimilable: that

which is neither saliva (noble) nor spit (ignoble) but drool (low, bas)’
(2015: 16).
Drooling, like the overflowing semen of wet dreams, is about the ‘low’
and uncontainable body fluids of the teenage sleeper or daydreamer (hence
the popular association of ‘drooling’ for an appetitive dish or desired
object). Contrary to the heteronormative notions of the ‘noble’ semen of
procreation or the ‘ignoble’ semen of masturbation, the semen of a wet
dream, like drool, enables us to trace the moving locus of the self. The
partible sensual world of Tomaz and Leonardo leaves this imaginative trace
in their fantasies and drawings, just like drool or semen leave a dry trace
on the pillow or underwear. Within the heteronormative social structure
of the neo-fraternal contract, their sensorial experience neither ‘procreates’
like the noble semen, nor ‘dissolves’ like the ignoble masturbation. Lee
Edelman demonstrates how any opposition to the imperative of conceiving
a child as future or hope threatens not only the political institutions that
sustain a politics of reproductive heteronormativity and, more importantly,
the utopian notion upon which meaning itself depends: ‘If […] there is no
baby and, in consequence, no future, then the fault must fall on the fatal
lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive
of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organisa-
tion, collective reality and, inevitably, life itself’ (2004: 13).
The portrayed partible bodily experiences of the teenage characters
in the films underscore a homoerotic epistemology of masculinity repa-
ration in the interstices of the social boundaries established by the neo-
liberal carceral model. The sensual liquid experience of the teenagers in
the films finds the cracks of disjointed past relations and (re)pairs them.
In discussing how different the feature film became in comparison to the
short, Daniel Ribeiro points to the sexual maturation of his actors: ‘In the
feature, since the characters are a bit older, sexuality plays a bigger part
in their lives. Leo is more mature and the way he perceives the world and
himself is more complex and sexualized’ (2014). In short, the film unveils
the porosities of the borders between reality and the fictional world of the
film by enacting the experiences of their actors at a moment when those
experiences are pressing in their personal growth, including their own
subjectivity formation. The pairing of the characters with the real actors
who embody them parallels processes where the adult spectator identifies
with the director, not as intrusive controlling observer, but with his role
as a mediator who contains his actors’ emotional deployment.
Seashore also repairs the ailing memories of its directors through the
mediation of young actors and viewers. The film constitutes an enact-
ment of a repairing verisimilitude by the re-counting of the director’s
teenage world at the border of heteronormative neoliberal contracts of
control and punishment: neither entirely outside nor inside those imagi-
native borders. Carol Mavor in Blue Mythologies refers to the visual effect
of the bruising as the blue coloration that is neither inside nor outside
of the skin. The teenage characters of Seashore and The Way He Looks
inhabit this peripheral space of a duplicitous male agency at the borders
of the neo-fraternal social contract and the carceral hegemonic sociopo-
litical structure of present-day Brazil. Like the painful memory that is
contained in the blue-coloured hair of Tomaz or the swimming pool in
Leonardo’s wet dreams, this skin-deep space of agency is at stake in the
repairing enactments of new voices and looks in the most recent pano-
rama of contemporary Brazilian Cinema.
Notes
1. ‘Retomada’  refers to films produced after the  state-funded company
Embrafilme (1969) was disbanded in 1990 by the National Program
of Privatization during the administration of President Collor de
Melo (1990–1992). Under the government of Henrique Cardoso (1995–
2003), the new Audiovisual Law came into force with fiscal incentives for
film production based on a neoliberal vision of market culture.
2. For the remainder of this chapter, I will use the English name of the two
films analyzed.
3. See, for instance, Sophie Dufays’ ‘From the Child Who Dies to the Adolescent
Who Kills’ (2014: 19–34), and Alejandra Josowicz’s ‘Scribbles from a Little
Girl’ (2014: 35–49) in Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema.
4. For the different psychological developmental stages, I follow the nomencla-
ture established by Gilmore and Meersand (2015), that is, the latency period
covering roughly two stages (5–8 and 8–10 years of age), while adolescence
covers three stages (early adolescence 10–15 years old, middle adolescence
14–16 years old, and late adolescence 16–21/22 years old). See particularly
Chapters 5–7 in The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development.
5. According to the latest edition (2013) of the World Prison Population List,
Brazil (population of about 200 million) tops any other Latin American
country with an astounding 548,003 people imprisoned in 2012. It also
has the third highest prison population rate in the Southern Cone with 274
per 100,000 of national population, compared with Uruguay, which sits a
the top of the list, with 281 per 100,000 and a population of 3.39 million.
78 R. ARMAS
6. Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) is
translated from its original French title Surveiller et punir which literally
means ‘to monitor’, i.e. ‘to invigilate’, ‘to supervise’.
7. Considering Pier Paolo Pasolini’s observations, for Gilles Deleuze in
Cinema I, point-of-view shots in cinema are never entirely subjective or
entirely objective. Deleuze explains his notion of ‘free indirect images’
through the literary notion of ‘free indirect speech’: ‘It is rather a case of
an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable acts of subjecti-
vation simultaneously. […] There is no mixture or average of two subjects,
each belonging to a system, but a differentiation of two correlative subjects
in a system which is itself heterogeneous’ (1986: 73).
Filmography
Beira-Mar. 2015. Dir. by Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon. Avante
Filmes. Brazil.
Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho. 2014. Dir. by Daniel Ribeiro. Lacuna Filmes and
Polana Filmes. Brazil.
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Walmsley, Roy. 2013. World Prison Population List, 10th ed. Available here
http://www.aidsdatahub.org/sites/default/files/publication/World_prison_
population_list_10th_edition_2013.pdf. Accessed 1 Aug 2017.
CHAPTER 4
Sensorial Youths: Gender, Eroticism

and Agency in Lucrecia Martel’s Rey muerto
Inela Selimović
Youths recurrently permeate much of Lucrecia Martel’s short and fea-

ture-length films.1 Rey muerto, produced as part of a collection of short
films, Historias breves (1995), features its youths in conjunction with a
familial breakdown. Although the main conflict in Rey muerto is embed-
ded between two married and embattled adults with three children, a
male youth ultimately frames the conflict’s nuanced affect.2 Keeping in
mind Gonzalo Aguilar’s discussion of the ‘disintegration’ of the family
(2008: 34) as one of the prevalent themes at the core of New Argentine
Cinema (NAC),3 the male youth’s presence in Rey muerto functions, fur-
thermore, as a sensorial medium through which crude violence, ongoing
alcoholism and broken familial ties are increasingly crystallised.
Youths, particularly those subtly caught between adolescence and
adulthood, complexly infuse Rey muerto’s diegetic setting as exponents
of and detractors from patriarchal structures.4 If, as Laura Podalsky
states, youth in Latin American contemporary cinema heterogeneously
and to varying degrees epitomise elements of ‘differential socioeco-
nomic conditions, specific historical trajectories and local institutional
I. Selimović (*) 
Spanish Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

82 I. SELIMOVIĆ
genealogies’ (2007: 112), then Rey muerto offers a rich aesthetic glimpse
of Martel’s early probings into different forms of patriarchal oppres-
siveness in the Argentine context. More specifically, patriarchal oppres-
siveness in this short film becomes singularly exposed and reproached
through a cacophonic activation of senses that supersedes ‘a childish
sensorium’ (Martin 2016: 20). Martel instead mobilises an amalgam of
adult- and youth-driven sensoria around the family in question in synaes-
thetically rich ways.5 Consequently, Rey muerto’s sensoria engender what
Caroline Jones defines as the coordination of ‘all of the body’s percep-
tual and proprioceptive signals as well as the changing sensory envelope
of the self’ (2006b: 8). In so doing, the film underscores the ambigu-
ously erotic and seemingly unintended presence of a local male youth
and his role in triggering Juana’s potential adultery. This chapter studies
Rey muerto’s focus on the sensorial youth as a latent trigger of the pro-
tagonist’s rebelliousness toward patriarchal structures of power. In exam-
ining such rebelliousness, the film reveals the interdependence of senses
as a mode of sociocultural critique (Jones 2006b: 14).6 Martel’s con-
centrated focus on the physical and emotional bruising of the protago-
nist—and the protagonist’s rebellious transgressions thereafter—remains
relevant to broader gender issues in the Argentine contemporary context.
An Erotic Stench
When re-screened in 2016, Rey muerto might rekindle its sociopolitical
relevance without losing ‘its indeterminate singularity’ (Rancière 2009: 6)
in terms of aesthetics. The film’s focus on battered intimacy can indeed
be revisited particularly in conjunction with the appalling intensification
of femicide in Argentina. The short film’s oscillation between the visi-
bility and occlusion of patriarchal oppressiveness, moreover, resonates
with one of the country’s most collectively visible movements against
femicide known as ‘Ni Una Menos’. Condemning the appallingly grow-
ing number of indiscriminate killings of young girls and women in the
Argentine context, ‘Ni Una Menos’ emerged in an emblazed way as
‘un grito colectivo contra violencia machista’ (a collective cry against
machismo-engendered violence) (‘Ni Una Menos’).7 The movement
embodies the cultural antithesis of what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘a hypocritical
sentiment of moral outrage’ (2008: 6). The movement emerged, hence,
to re-emphasise Law 26.485, the promulgation and enforcement of
which by the National Council of Women (Consejo Nacional de Mujeres)
4 SENSORIAL YOUTHS: GENDER, EROTICISM AND AGENCY … 83
have failed to preclude the truth that in 2014 alone every ‘30 hours a
woman was killed’ in Argentina (‘Ni Una Menos’). The aesthetic com-
plexity of Rey muerto simultaneously defies a facile ascription of exact-
ingly determined sociocultural undertones relevant to the Argentine
contemporaneousness. Yet stirring reflections on contemporary occur-
rences, as Giorgio Agamben states, also demands a degree of distance.
‘Contemporaneousness’, explicates Agamben, ‘is that relationship with
time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an ana-chronism [sic]’
(2009: 41). When revisited in 2016, therefore, the film’s central theme
and its sociocultural undertones are hardly passé. Moreover, as Deborah
Martin insightfully argues in The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, much of
Martel’s cinema center-stages ‘the everyday, the intimate and the private
and the way they tease out the relationship of these to wider social power
structures’ (2016: 6). Martin’s observation is applicable to Rey muerto
less because its ‘settings [are] held in the grip of a conservative, patriar-
chal bourgeoisie’ (2016: 3) and more vis-à-vis the film’s multisensory
build-up that frames explicit patriarchal forms of control, regardless of
class, racial, or cultural belongingness.
Critics have already studied the ways children and adolescents pop-
ulate Martel’s feature-length films in sociopolitically and culturally het-
erogeneous ways.8 Yet Martel’s privileging of youths cannot be ignored
in Rey muerto, even if, by this treatment, their presence appears elided
beneath the complex adult relationships or lack thereof. Unlike the sub-
sequent trilogy—La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004) and La mujer
sin cabeza (2008), in which children, adolescents and youngsters con-
sistently abound—Rey muerto, at first, appears to privilege an anguished
adult couple. While the couple’s children remain central in witnessing
the timid agency that their mother, Juana, musters, the unnamed local
youth triggers Juana’s defiance after an erotically sensorial encounter.
Such triggers are revealed gradually yet implied in a flashback that Martel
builds substantially into this twelve-minute-long film.
At the outset of the film, Juana sets out to leave a village in rural
Salta in the middle of a hot, windy and socially active day.9 As Juana’s
defiance unfolds into an emotionally excruciating escape, Rey muerto
frames the escape straightforwardly as a series of multisensory ‘micro-
events’ by fleetingly capturing nearly ‘every mumble, every shake of
the table, every movement of the medium’ (Larsen 2016: 58). One
of the amalgamations of these interconnected microevents is the flash-
back in Rey muerto, an erotically charged segment, within which the
84 I. SELIMOVIĆ
youth’s diegetic presence is rendered as evanescent yet significant.

Martel reveals the youth’s significance subtly by situating the flashback
as a nostalgic memory for him as it simultaneously mediates the context
of Juana’s abusive marriage. The youth’s centrality, furthermore, mani-
fests itself through his voiceless presence but also via the excess of sen-
sorially excited inter-subjectivity that Juana unleashes in the flashback.
The excess becomes evident as soon as the flashback unfolds, brimming
with erotic intimations and marital transgressions without overflowing
into full-fledged adultery. The flashback, moreover, clarifies the abun-
dance of activated senses beyond its own diegetic boundaries (such as
touching, seeing and hearing, among the villagers throughout the film)
that interpenetrate Juana’s prolonged escape. In short, Martel builds an
excessively sensorial diegetic ambiance from the outset of the film, yet
insinuates its source from within the flashback. The sensorial potency
for adultery ultimately fails, as the youth never engages sexually with
the protagonist in the diegetic present. Although the erotic potential
between them ends up deflated, their encounter serves as a turning point
for Juana’s defiance.
Rey muerto’s flashback reveals an utterly private access to intimate set-
tings within Juana’s home. Although the flashback leaves the element of
adultery ambiguous—we are unsure if Juana and the local youth might
have consummated their desire in the past—the same flashback introduces
a raw form of patriarchal control, oppression and abuse. The sequence
frames Juana and the local youth seated in front of each other, confidently
gazing at each other with both lust and reticence. For a fleeting instance,
the sequence threatens to firm up a clichéd outcome, an unrestrained
moment of passionate kissing, as it shifts quickly and intermittently from
Juana’s dazed face to the youth’s. Eroticism is, nonetheless, built and sus-
pended between them, for the sequence toys with ‘a delight in the resist-
ant alterity of the erotic other’ (Davies 1993: 268). Yet the camera swiftly
zooms away from the characters’ erotically aroused faces onto their laps.
This shift leaves the lovers’ gaze suspended, decidedly insignificant, thus
crushing any potential for the clichéd merging of their libidinous long-
ing. Within the characters’ would-be-fatal-attraction-moment, the cam-
era rather frames their hands deeply plunged in bowls of plucked and
semi-disemboweled poultry. If, as Gilles Deleuze emphasises regarding
a different artistic medium, an image ‘is not merely given to be seen. It
is as legible as it is visible’ (2005: 130), then the fleeting image in the
aforementioned sequence is intricately endowed with interlaced senses.

This brief sequence quickly suspends the model of five neatly identified
and classified senses, complexly dating back at least to Aristotle and per-
taining to sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.10 Martel suspends these
senses’ boundaries through synesthesia, thus triggering seeing through
hearing, smelling through touching, or tasting through smelling.11 In so
doing, Martel pushes the ocular to the periphery and integrates a new
multisensory form of erotic longings but also frustrations.
This transcendence of sensation invades the flashback rather quickly.
The characters’ eviscerating of the hens’ entrails (hearts, liver and other
entrails), with their naked fingers, grows synaesthetically erotic, thus lock-
ing the two characters rather fleetingly into ‘a sentient, sensual, and sensi-
ble ensemble of materialised capacities and agency’ (Sobchack 2004: 2).
The freshly slaughtered, visibly sticky and clearly exposed entrails on
the characters’ fingers explicitly hinder their potential to caress, echoing
obliquely what Emmanuel Levinas calls an ‘always inaccessible’ (1989: 51)
and therefore inscrutable touch. In this sequence, laden with competing
senses, however, Martel refuses to subordinate other senses (touch, hear-
ing, taste and smell) to sight (and, by extension, gaze). The sequence, as
do its two characters, consequently remains erotically exasperated through
a set of synaesthetically dynamic shots. The thickness of the summer air
in Juana’s home assumes olfactory qualities. It is visually odiferous, as the
camera privileges the piles of gutted entrails in the sweltering and claus-
trophobic space of Juana’s home.12 The characters’ sexual arousal turns
tactile rather grotesquely, as the disemboweling processes accompany their
lustfully shared glances. Before this sequence comes to an abrupt end,
their erotically charged body movements manifest through their slow, pro-
longed, and sensuous intimation of touching something off screen. The
desire they seemingly share becomes simultaneously mediated, hindered
and mocked through their off-screen touching of raw meat. The lovers’
carnal cues never move beyond a domestic choir, thus limiting their
erotic longing to nothing other than an ocular ‘stench’. ‘Tracing the
path of smell requires thinking by sniffing’, explicates Jones, ‘tracking the
logic of stench in trajectories of the self’ (2006b: 13). The ‘stench’ here
manifests symbolically and via the raw meat privileged by the camera on a
few occasions in the midst of an erotically charged encounter. Indeed, the
unconsummated desire stays connotative via the stickiness and odour of
the raw birds.
86 I. SELIMOVIĆ
The arrival of Juana’s drunken husband further complicates their awk-

ward eroticism and assumes an olfactory quality. The husband’s pres-
ence installs a sensory alertness in an ad hoc manner, shifting the socially
produced ambiance between Juana and the youth. His barging into the
home, with a clouded and aggressive gaze, results in a physical attack
on Juana and the youth. The youth’s bleeding face subsequently fills
up the screen, as Juana’s screams fill the air, under the husband’s heavy
blows, which are audible in the background of the sequence. The com-
plex gradation of violence crowds the sequence, thus intermixing the
spilled entrails, human blood and the woman’s helpless screams. Juana’s
screams instantiate what Deleuze delineates as ‘analogical language’,
that is ‘a language of relations, which consists of expressive movements,
paralinguistic signs, breaths, and screams’ (2005: 92–93). The hus-
band’s violent potency fills up the represented room affectively, as if it
is an unbearable scent, especially when he punches the youth’s face and
makes it bleed. The bleeding character stays in the forefront, amalgam-
ating the blood scent visually and enhancing the youth’s confusion and
the husband’s aggressive presence. Such a visual scent rather obviously
stands in for the husband’s hostility toward the characters’ enlivened per-
sonhoods—their psychological and social selves. This quick amassment
of multisensory experiences indeed underscores a multilayered ‘senso-
rium’ in which the protagonist’s and the youth’s personhoods are briefly
acknowledged and quickly denied.
The Vicarious Youth: Affective Mediations of Tactility

The public quality of rural noise at the film’s outset intermingles with
the intimacies accessed in the flashback to a bus stop during the closing
minutes of the film. When the husband finally catches up with the escap-
ing family, the entire family enters into an affectively confrontational
standoff. His arrival, which is facilitated by the loyalty of his male youths
and younger adults, unfolds into another layered sensorial knot. The first
layer, the tactile, is established as he grabs and adjusts his crotch, reaf-
firming his (familial) dominance. It is a subtle but unmistakable echoing
of Freud’s take on the interconnection between the ego and tactile con-
tact with the surface of the body. Freud states that ‘the ego is ultimately
derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the
surface of the body’ (1923: 26). When the husband imposingly grabs his
crotch, we also see much of his exposed chest beneath his almost entirely
unbuttoned shirt. His bare chest only further reinforces the crudeness
of his arrival. The gustatory supplies the next sensorial layer, as he spits
sideways, thus marking his territory in a predatory way and letting the
family taste it visually. The ocular completes the mix, for he fixes his
confrontational gaze onto Juana, preparing to throw stones toward and
using foul language against her. Such a multisensory arrival frames his
antagonistically uttered words: ‘¿Pensás llevarte las guaguas?’ (You think
you can take the kids?). These sensorial expressions, movements and
bodily experience stay interconnected in the sequence, building up his
bursts of jealousy and anger with enhanced tactility toward his own body
in order to reaffirm his presence outwardly.
The husband’s enhanced tactility stays linked to violence prior to
the bus sequence. His aggressively virile presence manifests itself in his
love of physical human fights/killings and cockfights, as well as in alco-
hol-driven social outings. Violence is never far from his conduct, and it
appears abruptly, as the sequences unfold into his loud monologues in
a nearby pub, bird hunting and his brutal beating of an expiring biker
whom he apparently ran over. At first, such portrayals run the risk of
reducing the husband to an aggressive stereotype of raw masculine ten-
dencies. Yet Martel quickly complicates such a monochromatic possibil-
ity with a sequence focused on cocks trained to fight. In this particular
sequence, mercilessly echoing Clifford Geertz’s classic essay on ‘aroused
masculinity’ (1973: 420),13 the husband gently pets one of the cocks
while frowningly commenting on a sexual harassment incident he wit-
nessed on TV. In a reproachful mode, he tells a story about a female
journalist (Silvia Fernández) to another two elderly men from his village.
During one of her TV reports, he explains to his village counterparts,
a man approaches the reporter and ‘le toca el culo. Es irrespetuoso’
(touches her ass. It is disrespectful). The sequence is rendered as discur-
sively unexpected and offers a stark contrast to the previous sequences
focusing on his violently misogynist presence.
The husband’s ability to register and condemn acts of gender-based
humiliation is evident. Yet the same comment does not disarm his misog-
ynistic conduct at home or in public. Just as his disapproving remarks
end, he is rather easily mobilised to track down his fleeing wife in aggres-
sive ways. Martel enacts this cognitive flip in seconds—from the hus-
band’s visibly unsympathetic approach to gender-based humiliation/
attacks elsewhere to being a favourably engaged practitioner of physi-
cal and emotional abuse at home. The flip disallows the firming of any
88 I. SELIMOVIĆ
essentialist qualities of the character’s subjectivity. His character is not

caricatured, but is swiftly summoned in a few cinematic shots. The brief
sequence with the rooster, a setting normatively associated with men
excited by the violence, status and power that cockfights typically entail,
shows rather ironically the husband’s ability to rebuke—and quickly
reassume—hostile behaviour toward women in particular. Revealing
her characters’ relations to the socially and culturally accepted or defied
norms swiftly, Martel’s film stays focused on the interspersing of socio-
cultural undertones regarding ‘gendered oppression’ (Martin 2016: 98).
Such undertones indeed have been underscored repeatedly in her fea-
ture-length films for their even firmer presence (Martin 2016: 10).
Juana’s response at the bus stop initially borders on weakened tactil-
ity, since her reactions are predominantly sight-oriented until she aims
a recently acquired gun at her husband. Her touch of the husband is
mediated through the gun. This move, for the first time since the film’s
outset, engages the children actively, particularly the eldest daughter,
who mediates between the two parents by offering a bus ticket to the
enraged father. When the father’s response erupts into insults, stoning
and an order that they all return home immediately, Juana utters a crisp
refusal. With Juana’s disobedience, the husband’s projection of his desire
and his authority are publicly rejected and shattered. It is a moment
where Martel ever-so-fleetingly engages with Nietzsche’s account—‘For
it is man who creates for himself the image of woman, and woman forms
herself according to this image’ (1974: 124)—and then vigourously
dissolves it. At the bus stop, Juana’s determination to pull the trigger
creates a dialectical clash between the embattled adults’ enhanced and
weakened tactility, and further engenders an interpersonal discomfort
triggered by the now-absent youth.
The youth’s absence, paradoxically, deepens his vicariously antago-
nistic presence between Juana and her spouse, given the erotic poten-
tial the flashback had insinuated and the husband had interrupted.
When thinking about generating discomfort through different artistic
expressions, Larsen states that ‘discomfort doesn’t stem from the art-
ist’s being a genius, a misfit, or another kind of trans-historical radical
subject, but rather from the subject’s interaction with certain culturally
given relations of symbolic production’ (2016: 51). Indeed, Martel ends
Rey muerto by deeply embedding its sociocultural undertones in cultur-
ally constructed, maintained and recognisable attitudes toward gender
and violence, only to turn them on their head. Unsure if the revolver is
loaded, Juana pulls the trigger, materialising her resistance rather unex-
pectedly. This moment has inspired David Oubiña’s conceptualisation
of ‘un western feminista’ (2009: 13), just as it undeniably evokes Luisa
Valenzuela’s literary tackling of gender and power relations in Cambio
de armas (1985). Soaked in his own blood, especially on his face, hands
and arms, the husband and his multisensory dominance, his outwardly
aggressive tactility, collapse in an instant. The father, now unable to see
or exert his tactility toward those around him, rather instantly becomes
another ‘sidelined’ man, a leitmotif that indeed remains recurrent in
Martel’s subsequent films (Martin 2016: 16). Covering his bleeding
eyes, he is swiftly reduced to uncontrollable screams, instantiating a lit-
erally disabled ‘mirada patriarcal (como presencia visible o invisible)’
(patriarchal gaze [as visible or invisible presence]) (Forcinito 2006). The
screams, ranging from enraged to pleading, generate an affect of a damp-
ened agency.
If the family minors live in and experience fear, vulnerability, or con-
fusion upon the father’s arrival, they now begin to generate a visible
resistance. They do so by phlegmatically abandoning the injured father
in the heat-parched setting. The camera quickly centers on their depar-
ture, keeping the father’s screams off-screen and proving that the power
to abuse can also be the power to incite resilience, resistance and cour-
age. Larsen, echoing much of Brian Massumi’s discussions of affect,
comments on the inextricably palpable contact points between affect and
intensity, or their merging, especially if affect is ‘synonymous with force
or forces of encounter’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 2). ‘Intensities’,
clarifies Larsen, ‘have no form, composition or structure’. He contin-
ues: ‘they are [the] half-present, affect of the body, where they are given
physical reality in the actual event of sensation. The intensity is part of
the extension of time and the body, but never equal to what is lived and
experienced’ (2016: 52). In the context of these critics’ theorisations of
affect, much of the ‘intensity’ in the final sequence of Rey muerto stems
from the affective, even if unintentional, traces of the youth’s presence in
the mother’s immediate surroundings. The youth indeed triggers Juana’s
departure through his erotically charged and odourous, even if frustrat-
ing, quietness.14 As such, the youth in Martel’s short film functions as a
medium, a sensorial medium, that unlocks the protagonist’s agency. The
youth, moreover, remains present vicariously at the end of Rey muerto,
narratively making room for the children’s emotionally firmer presence.
The children now begin to enjoy and project a degree of closeness,
90 I. SELIMOVIĆ
warmth and lessened vulnerability. In the midst of a bloody outcome,

just meters away and for the first time, a sense of calmer awareness grows
increasingly palpable among the surviving characters.
Cacophonic Sensoria and Materiality of Voice

As in the flashback, the final sequence is aggressively viscous yet this time
due to the husband’s bleeding eyes. Violence, therefore, never ceases to
drive Rey muerto’s central argument forward, just as it draws attention to
the dissonance among multiple senses. Violent acts consequently frame
the multisensory—the auditory, tactile, olfactory and ocular—exterio-
risation of Juana’s determination to abandon her marriage. The exteri-
orisation of the protagonist’s decision becomes intensified through the
multifaceted layering of competing senses in the settings she traverses
on the way out of the village. With each step the protagonist takes, she
encounters the onlookers’ gazes, as well as their gestures and remarks.
Martel erects such a platform dialectically between the public interpel-
lations of the mother-wife’s subjectivity (the community’s verbal judg-
ments, physical hindrances, or subtle support)15 and the presence of
carriers of Juana’s familial intimacies (her three children and youth-
lover). The platform is, at first, rudimentarily sensorial: the village inhab-
itants’ whispers, crackles, mutterings, touches and their gazes frame
Juana’s and her children’s movement through the village. By the time
Juana passes by the youth’s home—which instigates his flashback—the
village sensorium peaks in an activated hostility toward Juana, particu-
larly via the husband’s comrades. Most of these youths become mobi-
lised, as already alluded to, to inform the husband of Juana’s intention.
Despite the protagonist’s visible vulnerability, she is an involved
passerby, especially since her reciprocal gaze brims with acute percep-
tion.16 Juana’s perceptive presence disallows that she be viewed solely as
‘the object of vision […] woman-as-spectacle’ (Silverman 1992: 151).
Indeed, the protagonist continues walking hurriedly despite (or because
of) a sensorial matrix that imposes itself around her—auditory (most vil-
lagers speak or whisper), tactile (some of them nudge each other phys-
ically to draw attention to her departure) and visual (she withstands
an onslaught of engaged gazes). The protagonist’s active perception
intermixes with the imposing sensorial setting yet without suspending
her ultimate objective. This moment echoes what Ana Forcinito has
suggested regarding women and the gaze in Martel’s films in general.
According to Forcinito, the ‘cine de Martel implica una exploración no

sólo de las representaciones femeninas sino además de las mujeres como
sujetos de la mirada […] de una pluralidad de miradas que implica […]
una pluralidad de posicionalidades’ (Martel’s cinema implies not only an
exploration of feminine representations but also of women as subjects
who hold their gaze […] a plurality of the gaze, which implies […] a
plurality of positionalities) (2006: 128). Forcinito’s notion of ‘a plural-
ity of the gaze’ is noticeable in Rey muerto, especially when we consider
Juana’s embodied efforts to deter the multisensory onslaught of the vil-
lage: her glances intensify; she shifts from walking to almost running;
she shields her children, purchases a revolver and uses it. In present-
ing Juana in this manner, Martel engages embodiment and perception
in transgressive ways, turning the protagonist into an instance of what
Garry Madison calls the ‘perceiving subject’. ‘The perceiving subject is’,
explains Madison, ‘itself defined dialectically as being neither (pure) con-
sciousness nor (physical, in itself) body. Consciousness … is not a pure
self-presence; the subject is present to and knows itself only through
the mediation of the body, which is to say that this presence is always
mediated, i.e. is indirect and incomplete’ (1992: 94). Echoing much
of Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (1991), Madison engages active perception with social connec-
tions and negotiations always already in flux, where the body and cog-
nitive presence, as Judith Butler holds, resist the binary by positionality.
Yet, if perception is also a form of language, in Walter Benjamin’s terms,
then the protagonist’s acute perception throughout the film is crucial in
tracing the emergence of her own literal and symbolic voice.17
Just as the character of the husband is not reduced to a fixed essence,
an unthinking antagonistic batterer, Juana’s character unquestionably
defies being perceived uniquely as a battered victim. To be precise, Juana’s
multisensory departure serves as a rejection of an interpretive reduction
of her character to quick essentialism-driven brushstrokes. The multisen-
sory departure unfolds through, as already noted, Juana’s being on social
display vulnerably but also willingly. The social display becomes pellu-
cid through the brewing of muted or voiced comments or remarks, or
through the gestures that her departure triggers among the villagers. The
camera shifts sharply from Juana and her three children to several voice-
less gestures or inaudible whispers from both private and public spaces.
Situated within local shops, or on road corners, porches, balconies and
in liminal territories in the neighbourhood, the onlookers thicken their
92 I. SELIMOVIĆ
own multisensory presence through the implicit or explicit ‘scent, sound,

movement and image’ (Jones 2006b: 18). As a result, Martel material-
ises the onlookers’ sensory presence in an ambiguous way—the onlook-
ers’ degrees of support, surprise, disrespect or indifference toward Juana’s
undertaking remain ambiguous. The ambiguity complicates the spectator’s
access to Juana’s subjectivity in deeper ways, especially taking into account
the interdependence of subjectivities and their social relations. Recalling
both Immanuel Kant and Richard Sennett, Harvie Ferguson states that to
‘become fully a person, therefore, requires that we recognize others, equally,
as persons […] [because] we only gain autonomy as persons through
appropriate social relations […] [and] person and self remain closely
identified in the notions of dignity, respect, and character’ (2009: 23).
Juana’s quiet (but determined) walk through the village, compounded by
the activated senses of the onlookers, disallows that we identify or dissect
her ‘social relations’ with the community acutely, thus only deepening the
ambiguity toward her social belonging. In this context, the fossilisation of
battered cognizance on her part becomes equally ambiguous.
The strengthening of Juana’s voice, nevertheless, is represented as
unambiguous. Apart from one sentence Juana utters at the local store
during the first half of the film, her literal voice is largely reduced to
either silence or screams under the husband’s heavy beatings. The final
sequence changes this presentation, engaging Juana and her daugh-
ter in a brief dialogue after the father has been shot. The unnamed
daughter initiates this conversation, as if to affirm their freshly gained
autonomy. When the father’s screams fleetingly die out, the daugh-
ter rhetorically asks—‘¿Se habrá muerto?’ (He must have died?). Upon
hearing the father’s moaning resume, now in the distance, the daugh-
ter asks again ‘¿Si vuelve?’ (What if he returns?). Juana’s response—‘Que
vuelva si quiere’ (Let him return if he wants)—dissipates the potential
for fossilised vulnerability and signals rudimentarily ‘a different tra-
jectory of becoming’ (Grosz 2005: 4). The sequence not only literally
frames Juana’s voice in an agentic way but also deepens a unique, if rudi-
mentary, instance of ‘becoming’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms. In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that
[B]ecoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor

is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy
is applicable to becoming: from the forms one has, the subject one is, the
organs one has, or the function one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles
between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed
and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which
one becomes. (1987: 272)
At their primary level, these philosophical contours imply subjects

engaged with ‘self-differentiation’, as Grosz suggests, and ‘the elabora-
tion of a difference within a thing, a quality or a system that emerges or
actualises only in duration’ (2005: 4). The processes of claiming one’s
self in a finished mode becomes infinitely suspended, thus facilitating
the engendering of unfixed, unbound and always coming-into-being
subjectivities. Martel ends the short film with the protagonist confront-
ing certain sociocultural constraints and encrusted cultural values in an
agentic way as a ‘sonorous being’.18 What is more, the materialisation of
Juana’s voice is intimately linked to the youth’s physical—yet not affec-
tive—absence. The youth’s affective presence echoes what Massumi calls
‘two-sidedness’, that is ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in
the actual and the actual in the virtual’ (2002: 35). As ‘a sociopolitical
category’, reiterates Podalsky, youth is ‘constituted by a variety of inter-
secting discourses (legal, psychological, sociological, filmic) and solidi-
fied by the work of numerous institutions (the state, schools, families)’
(2007: 102). Although the youth instigates Juana’s escape, he, in the
end, stays apathetically behind, affirming his discursive belonging to the
village and its sociocultural torpor. Juana, in turn, does not give herself
over to advancing the infatuation with the youth.
The youth’s phlegmatic approach toward the protagonist’s departure
and activated agency in the end shifts his subjectivity to the narrative
margin. Such a shift, nonetheless, affirms his role as a sensorial interces-
sor, whose presence triggers the protagonist’s subtle ‘calling attention
to anxieties about the future’ (Massumi 2002: 35) in her own micro-
cosm affectively. Indeed, Rey muerto defies being an unbending allegory,
just as it remains unquestionably endowed with a mordant sociocultural
critique. The youth in the film aesthetically ‘focalizes’ (2012: 5), to use
Carolina Rocha’s and Georgia Seminet’s term, the protagonist’s attempts
to further her sociocultural ‘becoming’, as the literal emergence of her
own voice stays dependent on the embodied perceptions of her sociocul-
tural habitus. Martel’s subtle focus on the youth in Rey muerto exposes
certain sociocultural currents of the represented microcosm, whose sen-
soria in due course paradoxically embolden the materiality of the protag-
onist’s own voice, affect and agency.
94 I. SELIMOVIĆ
Notes
1. Although Martel  had produced short films prior to 1995—such as l 56
(1988), Piso 24 (1989) and Besos rojos (1991)—Rey muerto formalizes
Martel’s initial aesthetic presence at home and abroad. See Deborah
Martin’s The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (2016) for an insightful analy-
sis of other short films by Martel—such as Nueva Argirópolis (2010),
Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). Furthermore, in analysing the cen-
tral characters’ sensorial inter-subjectivity, the short film also aesthetically
prefigures Martel’s interest in privileging minors as spectators, carriers
and catalysts of socio-individual occurrences, obstacles and possibilities in
the subsequent trilogy. Indeed, the Salta trilogy—La ciénaga (2001), La
niña santa (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008)—is not the focal point
of inquiry in the present chapter but rather serves as a reference point
from which to indicate the ways in which the said prefiguration solidifies
through minors’ closeness to, or rupture from, the frequently portrayed
familial dimensions. This aesthetic prefiguration, rather simply, reaffirms
Martel’s persistent reproof of patriarchal structures of power within the
Argentine contemporaneousness, especially through non-adults’ multisen-
sory alertness. Zama (2017) is Martel’s most recent feature-length film.
2. By privileging a highly sensorial ambiance in the film, via synesthesia,
Martel intensifies the ultimate interaction between the two central char-
acters. Instead of the ‘waning of affect’, as Fredric Jameson states in his
landmark study and on which Laura Podalsky comments in The Politics
of Affect and Emotion in Latin American Cinema, Martel indeed turns
toward affective dimensions to underscore the protagonist’s agen-
tic undertakings in the final sequence of the film. See Inela Selimović’s
Affective Moments in the Films of Martel, Carri, and Puenzo (2018) for
more on the manifestation of affect in contemporary Argentine women
directors’ films. If, furthermore, affect must be viewed as an outcome and
an ingredient of ‘sensations and instincts’ (2005: 32) in Deleuzian rudi-
mentary terms, then Rey muerto’s focus on generating its overall affect
manifests gradually through synesthetic sensations.
3. Argentina’s relatively recent cinematic revival has kept up its spirited
pace since the Law of Cinema was passed in 1994, congealing into a
renowned cinematic trend known as the New Argentine Cinema (NAC).
Aesthetically heterogeneous, NAC emerged with the proliferation of dig-
ital cameras, film schools and festivals as well as ad hoc collaborations
with and between young and aspiring directors. As Raúl Beceyro, Rafael
Filippelli and David Oubiña have insistently shown, its core filmmak-
ers—particularly Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro, Pablo Trapero, Martín
Rejtman, Lucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri—sought to disaffiliate
themselves from the 1980s aesthetically, thematically and structurally.
4. In addition to Martin’s work, see, for instance, Carolina Rocha and
Georgia Seminet’s Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and
Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012) and Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Laura Podalsky, ‘Out of Depth:
The Politics of Disaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American
Cinema’ (2007), to mention just a few directly relevant works.
5. For conceptual discussions of synesthesia see Richard Cytowic, The Man
Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary
Insights into Emotions, Reasoning, and Consciousness (1993: 52).
6. For the relationship between synesthesia and the viewer, see Laura Marks’
Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000).
7. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish are mine. On 3
June 2015, 200,000 individuals joined in the Congreso Square to protest
against femicide. The protests were not limited to Buenos Aires, another
120 cities and villages took part in the same effort.
8. Martel’s films continue to draw critics’ attention. See Aguilar (2008),
Andermann (2012), Forcinito (2006), Oubiña (2009), and Page (2009).
9. Much of the short film takes place in Guachipas in rural Salta.
10. De Anima, Book II, Chapter 6.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s classical work involvedly unpacks the notion of
sensual interdependence and perception. See, for instance, The World of
Perception (2004: 60).
12. The sticky climate accentuates the characters’ carnal presence and their
emblematic implications. Martel prevents the spectator from hearing the
characters object to the heat. Instead, the filmmaker makes their semi-naked
bodies and heat-exhausted faces mediate such objections indirectly through
a few cinematic shots. The husband often wears an unbuttoned shirt; other
male characters (adolescents and adults) are often shirtless, including Juana’s
would-be-lover; and the couple’s children’s heat-struck faces are unclean and
their bodies covered with layers of white dust. These sun-drenched, heat-
struck and semi-naked subjects pack the sequences scorched by the Salta heat,
thus immediately materializing the olfactory. Such a setting further intensifies
the sensorial echoes that accompany, threaten or embolden Juana’s escape,
just as it initiates Martel’s cinematic commitment to Salta’s geo-cultural spe-
cificities in the Salta trilogy. Juana’s and her children’s heat-exhausted, sweaty
and sun-beaten bodies additionally uncover the materiality of fear and vulner-
ability—but also courage and agency—or their uneven mélange.
13. Geertz’s classic essay on cockfights and their sociocultural implications
among Balinese men, for instance, offers culture-specific but also broader
observations on the exhibition of power relations among men through
cockfighting. ‘In the cockfight’, explains Geertz, ‘man and beast, good
96 I. SELIMOVIĆ
and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and
the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of
hatred, cruelty, violence and death. It is little wonder that when, as is the
invariable rule, the owner of the winning cock takes the carcass of the
loser—often torn limb from limb by its enraged owner—home to eat, he
does so with a mixture of social embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aes-
thetic disgust, and cannibal joy’ (1973: 420–421). Martel’s Rey muerto
echoes the notion of ‘aroused masculinity’ on numerous occasions sub-
tly and beyond the cockfight ring only to get thwarted each time—the
youth’s arousal is suspended by the husband’s sudden arrival and the
couple’s intimacy is never a possibility. It is not surprising, then, that the
filmmaker shows the husband pet a cock right before he is informed of
his wife’s escape, which is a sort of social blow to the husband publicly.
He quickly confronts his ‘social embarrassment’ before the bearers of the
news by re-engaging his ‘aroused masculinity’ via enhanced tactility in an
aggressive way.
14. The youth sees Juana leave the village from his balcony and never utters a
word, even when their gazes lock fleetingly.
15. At the village store, the owner, with his wife and children, buys back sev-
eral items from Juana and communicates support by simply uttering,
‘Apúrate, Juana’ (Hurry, Juana).
16. See Merleau-Ponty’s classic theorizations on perception via sensing. For
Merleau-Ponty, sensing is a ‘living communication with the world that
makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life’ (2012: 53).
17. Benjamin states that ‘all communication of the contents of the mind is
language, communication in words being only a particular case of human
language and of the justice, poetry, or whatever is underlying it or
founded on it’ (1996: 62).
18. For Merleau-Ponty, language phenomenologically could be viewed as an
expression, and a facilitation, of our ‘sonorous being’ (2004: 269).
Acknowledgements I express my gratitude to Wellesley College and the

Huntington Fund for supporting my research for this chapter.
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Stanford University Press.
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———. 2006b. Mediated Sensorium. In Sensorium: Embodied Experience,
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Martin, Deborah. 2016. The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel. Manchester:
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Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2004. The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis.

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———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes. London:
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PART II
Gender and Class

CHAPTER 5
“Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception,

Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa
grande
Rachel Randall
Following reforms to Brazil’s labour laws approved in July 2017, which

have been characterised as highly disadvantageous to the working classes
(Martins 2017), several commentators have identified the colonial rela-
tionship between the casa grande (landowner’s house) and senzala (slave
quarters) as a lingering paradigm of contemporary Brazilian society.1
Director Fellipe Barbosa explores this notion in his debut feature-length
fiction film, which is entitled Casa grande (2014) in reference to
Gilberto Freyre’s seminal description of the formation of patriarchal soci-
ety on Brazil’s slave plantations in Casa Grande & Senzala/The Masters
and the Slaves (1933) (Merten 2015).
The film focuses on the seventeen-year-old Jean as he prepares to take
Brazil’s competitive university entrance exams and struggles to liberate
himself from the control of his upper-class parents, Hugo and Sônia,
with whom he and his sister reside in an exclusive carioca neighbour-
hood. As his father struggles to conceal the fact that he has gambled
R. Randall (*) 
School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

102 R. RANDALL
away the family’s fortune, Jean concentrates his efforts on wooing

the opposite sex. When his parents are forced to fire their chauffeur
Severino, Jean gleefully seizes the opportunity to travel by bus to his
renowned private school São Bento. On the way home he meets Luiza,
a mixed-race eighteen-year-old,2 who attends a state school and whose
family lives near to Rio de Janeiro’s best-known favela, Rocinha. The
pair quickly begin a romantic relationship.
Casa grande’s focus on Hugo’s downfall could support an interpreta-
tion of the film as one that sympathises with a decadent privileged class
in decline, or that yearns nostalgically for a time when the power of this
class was more firmly entrenched. Indeed, both the family’s surname,
Cavalcanti—which belonged to a well-known ‘dynasty’ of colonial land-
owners mentioned by Freyre (2003: 404–405, 427)3—and mother
Sônia’s strong connection to French culture, function as clear symbols
of their membership of the Brazilian elite. However, various elements
of the film’s plot, in particular Jean’s adolescent troubles, which reflect
his own father’s crisis of hegemonic masculinity, enable it to enact an
explicit socio-political critique of the continuation of patriarchal, colo-
nial-style relationships in Brazil today. Moreover, Jean’s teenage propen-
sity for self-deception and deceit echo his father’s implied involvement
in corrupt practices, which are associated with real financial institutions
and wealthy individuals mentioned in the film. Its mise-en-scène and
production of affect are particularly effective in the way that they under-
score the importance of Jean’s emotional connections with his family’s
domestic employees, in particular Severino, who ultimately serves as a
surrogate father figure. However, these alliances are significantly under-
mined by the film’s problematic sexual politics, which are foregrounded
by the spectral repetition of a postcolonial domestic relationship at its
close.
The film’s temporal setting in 2012–2013 is revealed by its references
to social policies and legal measures introduced by Brazil’s Workers’
Party (PT) governments (2003–2016). Along with its title, these refer-
ences strongly allude both to the film’s critique of class and race rela-
tions in Brazil today, and to a concern for the socio-economic and
corruption-related crises that the country is facing. Indeed, its narra-
tive is framed by two crucial public events; the first is the approval of
the ‘Lei de Cotas’ (‘Quota Law’) by Brazil’s Supreme Court in August
2012. This measure obliges the country’s prestigious public universities
5 “EU NÃO SOU O MEU PAI!”: DECEPTION, INTIMACY AND ADOLESCENCE … 103
to reserve a proportion of the places available for a mixture of non-

white, low-income and state-school educated students, in order ensure
that a greater number of them can access higher education.4 Entry to
Brazil’s public universities is regulated by the highly competitive vestib-
ular exam, which privately-educated students are often better prepared
to pass. Shortly after the film’s opening, Jean’s teacher initiates a class-
room debate to canvass the São Bento students’ opinions about the
constitutionality of the quota system, which, she suggests, has just been
approved. The film appears to conclude just under a year later, in 2013;
this is revealed by a shot of a newspaper article that Hugo reads, enti-
tled: ‘Ações da OGX, de Eike Batista, vivem pior momento na Bolsa’
[Eike Batista’s OGX posts record plunge (in share price)]. Eike Batista
is a well-known Brazilian business magnate; in 2012 he was the richest
individual in the country, as a result of his oil and gas company (OGX).
By July 2013, his wealth had plunged from $30 billion to $200 million
(Spinetto et al. 2013). His fortunes are tied to those of Jean’s father
Hugo who, it is implied, has invested a large amount of his (and his
friend’s) money in Batista’s companies.
The film proved a success among national audiences; this is perhaps
because it combines a social conscience that can satisfy bourgeois spec-
tators with a predictably popular coming-of-age narrative formula,
which focuses on adolescent ‘first love’ and sexual initiation. Indeed,
the film scooped the only prize based on audience votes at the 2014 Rio
International Film Festival. Barbosa has stated on various occasions that
the film is semi-autobiographical, admitting that when he was a teenager
‘tinha “vergonha de ser rico”’ [he was ‘ashamed of being rich’] (Almeida
2015).5 It represents his attempt to deal with the distress he felt when
his own family concealed their financial crisis from him after he had left
home (Merten 2015). Prior to this, Barbosa too lived with his parents in
a house in a privileged Rio neighbourhood (Barra da Tijuca) and stud-
ied at São Bento (Almeida 2015). Perhaps this influenced his choice
to employ ‘natural’ teen actors, including various boys studying at São
Bento at the time the film was made (Miranda 2014). This decision—
which distinguishes Casa grande from other fiction films that focus on
the upper middle-class and the ‘elite’—permits the adoption of a some-
what anthropological, yet sympathetic, perspective on privileged youth in
Brazil today.
104 R. RANDALL
Adolescent–Maid Relationships on Film

When Casa grande was released, various critics highlighted the concerns
it shares with O som ao redor/Neighbouring Sounds (dir. Kleber Mendonça
Filho 2012) (Almeida 2015; Merten 2014), and later with Que horas ela
volta? (dir. Anna Muylaert 2016) (Oricchio 2015). All three films depict
the intimacy and distance that, as Deborah Shaw has emphasised, char-
acterise the portrayal of the employer-maid relationship in contemporary
Latin American cinema (2017: 127). Indeed, Barbosa’s film forms part of
a wave of recent productions from the region that interrogate class priv-
ilege by exploring the ties that bind domestic workers and their bosses,6
several of which (like Casa grande), allude strongly to the way that the
memory of slavery continues to weigh on modern-day domestic labour
relations, and particularly on relationships with ‘live-in’ maids.
Brazil is the country with the highest number of (formally regis-
tered) domestic workers in the world (Gallas 2016), and Barbosa has made
it clear that recent changes in the nature of domestic labour motivated his
desire to depict the boss-worker relationship on screen (Almeida 2015). In
2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) introduced the first
international convention of domestic work; in 2013, the PT administration
in Brazil responded by approving a constitutional amendment on domestic
labour, which limited the number of working hours per week and endeav-
oured to guarantee workers’ right to severance pay in the case of unfair dis-
missal, among other protections (The Economist 2014). The legal changes
introduced in Brazil, together with a slow down in economic growth,
made it harder to afford a ‘live-in’ maid, and the proportion of the work-
force employed in this type of labour also shrank (Gallas 2016).7
Within the panorama of recent Latin American films that repre-
sent domestic workers, Casa grande shares the greatest similarities with
the fiction films Que horas ela volta? and the Chilean La nana (dir.
Sebastián Silva 2009). All three focus on the bonds that exist between
privileged adolescents and domestic servants. Casa grande depicts Jean’s
intimacy with housekeeper Rita and emotional reliance on the family’s
driver Severino—of whom Jean asks romantic advice, instead of his own
father—while Que horas ela volta? dwells on the emotional and physical
tenderness that exists between Val, a live-in maid, and her employers’
teenage son, Fabinho, who she has cared for since he was a young boy.
In La nana, live-in housemaid Raquel, who has worked for her employers
for twenty-three years, dotes on her bosses’ adolescent son Lucas, while
she clashes with their daughter Camila. In sum, all of these films evoke
the tenderness, intimacy, resentment, and even flirtation that character-
ise the relationship between maids and the adolescent offspring of their
employers.
On one level, it is unsurprising that the adolescent-maid relation-
ship is a central feature of these productions: Casa grande is inspired
by Barbosa’s memories of his youth (Genestreti 2015); La nana was
filmed in Sebastián Silva’s former family home, and Silva has stated
that the ‘genesis’ of its screenplay was his adolescent experiences grow-
ing up with maids (Movieweb 2010); while the character of Val in Que
horas ela volta? is based on Anna Muylaert’s childhood nanny, with
whom she had a close relationship (Balloussier and Genestreti 2015). It
is clear that the emotional ties that bind young people and their fami-
lies’ domestic employees animate these films, and are ripe for a form of
cinematic dramatisation that draws heavily on the production of affect.
Consequently, these films—and Casa grande in particular—can be fruit-
fully analysed by adopting the approach developed by Laura Podalsky
in The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American
Cinema (2011). As Shaw has pointed out, Podalsky does not focus on
films featuring maids or servants (except for La ciénaga) (Shaw 2017:
128), however she is interested in the fact that many contemporary films
from the region adopt affectively provocative cinematic techniques as a
form of socio-political critique, often to express disconnection or aliena-
tion (Podalsky 2011: 103–105).
Podalsky suggests that these techniques are particularly prominent in
films focusing on young people, which perhaps provides a second ration-
ale for the adoption of teen protagonists in the films discussed above.
While contemporary films of youth have been criticised for a lack of
political engagement by some (see Bentes 2013: 124–125), Podalsky
argues that they often substitute explicit political critique for sensorially
laden practices, which ‘attest to the affective charge of everyday life for
young adults’ (2011: 102) by inscribing ‘contemporary affective disjunc-
tion’ in terms of ‘depth perception’ and thereby registering ‘structures
of feeling that question (and at times disrupt) dominant discursive for-
mations’ (2011: 103). The production of cinematic affect is a particu-
larly useful register when interrogating how the bonds that lead domestic
workers to be considered (and often to consider themselves) ‘almost one
of the family’ simultaneously permit their emotional and labour exploita-
tion. I suggest, therefore, that both fiction and documentary film are
106 R. RANDALL
particularly apt for undertaking a critique of private privilege and domes-

tic power relations. They are able to attest to the familiarity and proxim-
ity characteristic of domestic labour relations that have developed over
the course of their young protagonists’ childhood and adolescence, as
will be shown in the case of Casa grande.
Privileged Masculine Adolescence

Barbosa’s film can, nonetheless, be distinguished from La nana and Que
horas ela volta? in that it frames events primarily from the perspective
of its teen protagonist, rather than from that of the domestic worker(s).
The film draws on various stereotypical discursive formulations about
(masculine) adolescence, which characterise it as a phrase associated with
‘rebellion’ and as a period of crisis, which necessitates self-discovery, and
the development of (a more ‘fixed’) subjectivity upon entry into adult-
hood (Frota 2007: 155). Indeed, it is perhaps the perceived intensity and
liminality of adolescent experiences, which are marked by bodily change,
puberty and (possibly) sexual experimentation, that have compounded
teen characters’ deployment in contemporary cinema as catalysts for
affectively-charged experiences.
Nonetheless, it is crucial to acknowledge the constructed nature
of adolescence, just as the naturalisation of childhood as a period of
innocence and dependence has been problematised in various studies
(Jenkins 1998: 2; Goulart and Soares 2006: 186; Bruhm and Hurley
2004: xxiv–xxv). Indeed, the notion of adolescence (and its modern
connotations) emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and
began to thrive only after the Second World War (Frota 2007: 149; Holt
2016). Consequently, as Ana Maria Frota argues, it is necessary to dis-
card approaches that universalise or naturalise the experiences of ado-
lescence, and to acknowledge that this notion developed under specific
historical and cultural conditions, namely at a moment when increasing
numbers of families disposed of an income that allowed their children to
remain financially dependent on them for longer (2007: 156). The link
to increasing privilege that exists at the origin of our modern conception
of adolescence is significant, and may account for the recent recurrence
of teen protagonists in Latin American films that probe domestic privi-
lege. Indeed, it is crucial to analyse the depiction of Jean’s experiences in
Casa grande as an expression and interrogation of the discursive and his-
torical formations that have shaped white, upper-middle class, masculine
adolescence in Brazil, which could, furthermore, be considered to con-

stitute a (problematic) ‘norm’ of adolescence (Frota 2007: 155).
One key historico-cultural relationship that, as I suggest, has strongly
influenced cultural notions surrounding privileged masculine adoles-
cence in Brazil, is described by Freyre in Casa Grande & Senzala. In
his study of the domestic arrangements that developed on Brazil’s sugar
plantations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Freyre pays
particular attention to the intimate relations that he considers crucial to
Brazil’s development as a country characterised by mestiçagem (mixing)
on linguistic, religious, cultural and ‘racial’ levels. First of all, it was com-
mon for the offspring of a white or European-descendant landowner to
be tended by an African, or Afro-descendant ama de leite or mãe preta
(wet-nurse), between whom extremely close connections were often
forged (2003: 435). Secondly, Freyre argues that the landowner’s sons
were, from a relatively young age, strongly encouraged to pursue sexual
relationships with the family’s darker skinned female slaves (in particular
mulatas), who were burdened by a popular belief in their promiscuity and
potential to corrupt young men, which is strongly criticised by Freyre. He
argues that it was the exploitative power relations that existed under the
slave-owning system (2003: 398–399), and the intimate master-slave rela-
tions that it enabled from infancy (2003: 459), that provoked ‘a precoce
voluptuosidade, a fome de mulher que aos treze ou quatorze anos faz de
todo brasileiro um don-juan’ (2003: 403) [the precocious voluptuous-
ness, that hunger for a woman, which at the age of thirteen or fourteen
makes of every Brazilian a Don Juan (Freyre 1963: 329)].8
Although the concept of adolescence was not clearly delineated dur-
ing the period that Freyre is analysing, his description of these relation-
ships—which he suggests were born of ‘a pegajenta luxúria em que nos
sentimos todos prender, mal atingida a adolescência’ (2003: 403) [a
vicious lustfulness in which we all feel ourselves ensnared the moment we
reach adolescence (1963: 329)]—have undoubtedly imbued the mod-
ern-day depiction of relations between male teens and female empregadas
with both maternal and sexual connotations. In the film Casa grande,
these traits are condensed in the character of Rita, who is not Afro-
Brazilian, but is identified with the country’s plantation-based history
through her northeastern accent and relationship to the family’s other
domestic servants, Severino and Noemia, who are both darker skinned.
The contemporary cultural association of the northeast with the lin-
gering relevance of Brazil’s slave-owning era exists in various films that
108 R. RANDALL
depict modern-day female maids, including O som ao redor, which is set

in Recife (Pernambuco) and opens with images of an old sugar mill.9
Val in Que horas ela volta?, who comes from Pernambuco, is also given a
regional accent by actress Regina Casé; she mothers her bosses’ only son
Fabinho, while acquiescing to his (apparently frequent) requests for mas-
sages, and allowing him to sleep alongside her in her single bed on one
occasion. In Casa grande, Rita’s interactions with Jean are more overtly
sexualised, however she also frequently endeavours to mentor him, par-
ticularly in his (unsuccessful) romantic relationships with other women.
Interestingly, both Jean and Fabinho are framed in identical poses in
these films, with their heads resting in the maids’ laps (Fig. 5.1).
The awkward synthesis of sexual and maternal connotations that char-
acterises the male adolescent’s relationship to the live-in maid is best
encapsulated in both Casa grande and La nana when Rita and Raquel
choose to use the fact that they change the boys’ semen-stained sheets
in order to embarrass them, despite the fact that both also enjoy the lat-
ter’s flirtatious attentions. The representation of these relationships find
a clear precursor in Freyre’s description of the colonial period in Brazil,
when he comments, ‘já houve quem insinuasse a possibilidade de se
desenvolver das relações íntimas da criança branca com a ama-de-leite
negra muito do pendor sexual que se nota pelas mulheres de cor no
Fig. 5.1 Jean and Rita in Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe Barbosa (2014)
filho-família dos países escravocratas’ (2003: 367–368) [there have been

others who have hinted at the possibility that the inclination to dark-
skinned women to be observed in the son of the family in slave-own-
ing countries is a development out of the intimate relations of the white
child with its Afro-Brazilian wet-nurse (1963: 278)].10
The Public and the Private

By dialoguing with Freyre’s description of the overtly patriarchal struc-
tures established on the colonial sugar plantations, Casa grande under-
mines the false division of the public and private realms upon which the
modern capitalist society depicted in the film relies. For the purposes of
this analysis, the ‘private’ sphere refers to the domestic, conjugal, familial
domain, while everything that lies beyond this—that is public regulation
and private enterprise (or ‘civil society’)—pertains to the public sphere.11
In ‘The Fraternal Social Contract’, Carole Pateman observes that patri-
archalism (‘the traditional world order of father-kings’) is often repre-
sented as having been defeated by the modern ‘contract theorists’, whose
ideas paved the way for ‘capitalist society, liberal representative govern-
ment and the modern family’ (1989: 36), as they argued that all men
were born free and equal, rather than naturally subject to their fathers.
Pateman emphasises, however, that ‘political theorists can represent the
outcome of this theoretical battle as a victory for contract theory because
they are silent about the sexual or conjugal aspect of patriarchy’, which
is portrayed as though it were ‘non-political or natural and so of no the-
oretical consequence’ (1989: 37). The contract theorists could not (like
the patriarchalists) subsume men’s sexual ‘right’ to women under pater-
nal—that is, political—rule. Instead, they concealed its political origins
by proclaiming men’s conjugal right as natural (1989: 39). She con-
cludes, therefore, that ‘the separation of “paternal” from political rule,
or of the family from the public sphere, is also the separation of women
from men through the subjection of women to men’ (1989: 43). In this
way, the ‘fraternal social contract’ instituted a new, ‘modern patriarchal
order’ that is presented as divided into public and private spheres, both
of which are ruled by men (1989: 43).
The Cavalcanti mansion in Casa grande symbolises a bourgeois
determination to hold the public and the private in a false dichotomy,
by delineating the domestic space from the external world. The house
is surrounded by thick vegetation, together with a walled perimeter
110 R. RANDALL
and large metal gate. During the film’s lengthy opening sequence, the
outside of the house is shown in a static shot from the back garden
where Hugo bathes in the jacuzzi, next to the pool (Fig. 5.2). As Axel
Andersson points out, swimming pools in films about the elite often
symbolise the drive to subjugate nature (water) to ‘the artifice of moder-
nity’, and ‘should be read against the background of a highly political
interest in private and public worlds’ (2014: 78). The artificial in the
shape of these spaces (and other objects, such as cars), are designed to
shore up ‘secluded worlds with their backs turned to society’ (Andersson
2014: 83). A deep concern about security (common among the Brazilian
middle and upper classes) is indicated by the fact that the house is also
is rigged with cameras and alarms, although the only intruder caught is
Jean when he returns late from a night out and later jumps over the gar-
den wall.
Although the camera dwells on the house’s imposing exterior at its
opening, as soon as Hugo has gone to bed, the camera follows Jean as
he descends the stairs and enters the shadowy, intimate space of Rita’s
flat, making sure not to set off the house’s internal alarm system. Her
dwelling is just outside of the main family home and is separated from
it by a locked gate. The location of her rooms simplistically evokes the
spatial relationship between the colonial casa grande and senzalas, which
Fig. 5.2 The Cavalcanti Mansion in Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe Barbosa

(2014)
were separate from, but on the same plot of land as, the former. There,
Jean repeatedly pressures Rita for physical intimacy and she appears to
delight in teasing him by describing her sexual exploits and allowing him
to rub moisturiser into her legs, but refusing him sex (at least while she
is still employed by his parents). The film’s opening sequences thereby
acknowledge the social inequality upon which the glistening façade of
the casa grande relies: by adjusting the spectator’s ‘depth perceptions’,
the film forces us to ‘adopt a new type of sensibility – one that cannot
ignore the emotional charge of history marginalized in the rationalized
realm of traditional politics’ (Podalsky 2007: 120–121).
Indeed, the naturalisation of (lower-class) women’s subjection to men
is encapsulated by Jean’s apparent belief that he is entitled to Rita’s body,
which he grabs and strokes in spite of her repeated refusals. This is clearly
meant to recall the colonial relationship between slave women and the
landowner’s sons, who, on one level, were encouraged to have sex with
young, female slave girls because, if the slave fell pregnant, her offspring
would automatically become their father’s property and thus contribute
to their potential prosperity and authority (Freyre 2003: 456). This ina-
bility to distinguish between private, domestic relationships and public,
professional ones is further foregrounded by Hugo’s and Sônia’s reliance
on their domestic employees. As Tiago de Luca has observed in his anal-
ysis of the film, ‘visually, this is often expressed through a deep-focus spa-
tial strategy’ (2017: 208). The casa grande members are framed in the
foreground—often undertaking a professional or ‘public’ activity—while
the workers are engaged in domestic tasks in the background. Sônia, for
instance, deals with Severino’s legal representative (who has come to
inform her that the former chauffeur is suing them for unfair dismissal),
while Rita and Noemia cook behind them (Fig. 5.3). On another occa-
sion, while Hugo responds to a headhunter’s questions about his profes-
sional experience via a video call on his desktop, Rita serves him coffee,
although her head is cut out of the frame.
According to Freyre, a second reason that sexual relationships between
the landowner’s sons and enslaved women were encouraged was that this
quickly enabled young boys to lose their virginity and affirm their status as
‘men’ as early as possible. This was considered desirable by their parents
as they thereby avoided ridicule for being ‘effeminate’ (‘maricas’) (Freyre
2003: 456). The framework outlined by Freyre provides a rationale for
Jean’s desperation to ‘passar do beijo’ [go beyond kissing] in the film and,
specifically, to have sex either with Rita or (later) with his girlfriend Luiza.
112 R. RANDALL
Fig. 5.3 Reliance on domestic employees in Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe

Barbosa (2014)
Jean’s sister Nathalie makes it clear that she is well aware of his clandestine
night-time visits to Rita, and it seems plausible that Jean’s parents also are,
given the high levels of surveillance in the house. The way in which Hugo
constantly violates Jean’s privacy and intrudes on his sexual space (namely
Jean’s bedroom, where Hugo walks in on Jean masturbating) recalls
Michel Foucault’s description of a highly-medicalised nineteenth-century
campaign to prevent child masturbation (2003: 248), which both aided
the constitution of the modern ‘cell’ family (in the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury), and was motivated by a desire to open up young people’s bodies to
political and moral criteria (2003: 256), perhaps even to ensure that chil-
dren were inculcated with socially desirable sexual impulses.
Indeed, as Walescka Pino-Ojeda has pointed out, various contem-
porary Latin American ‘coming-of-age’ films demonstrate that a boy’s
passage to manhood must be ‘executed within a single hegemonic
socio-political structure in which issues of gender, sexual dynamics,
and class function both organically and indivisibly’ (2014: 89). Raewyn
Connell similarly argues that both the class system and a system of patri-
archy operate together in order to transform the male child into a male
citizen (1990: 514), which is not a spontaneous occurrence and is often
accompanied by pain and trauma. Pino-Ojeda’s analysis of the Chilean
film Julio comienza en julio (dir. Silvio Caiozzi 1979) explores a similar
dynamic to that present in Casa grande: both films’ male teen protago-
nists are pressured to have heterosexual sex in order to affirm their mas-
culinity and class allegiance. Indeed, their relationships with subaltern
women are used to interrogate the extreme socio-economic inequality
that characterises Brazilian and Chilean society. Caiozzi’s film is set in the
1920s and depicts the traumatic patriarchal rites forced upon the fifteen-
year-old Julito, son of a wealthy landowner. Julito is encouraged to estab-
lish his masculinity via ritualised sexual relations with local prostitutes and
is subsequently forced to relinquish the emotional attachment he devel-
ops to one of these women, María (Pino-Ojeda 2014: 92–98). According
to Pino-Ojeda, in the film, ‘the presence of females in the house revolves
around servitude, being delineated either through domestic labor or in
providing sexual gratification’, and both aspects ultimately facilitate the
male hegemonic subjects’ (naturalised) patriarchal authority (2014: 93).
Unlike Julito, Jean’s lack of ‘virility’ appears to present a problem in
Casa grande: the possession of a woman’s body is figured as the cru-
cial ‘threshold’ that must be crossed in order for him to enter manhood.
Indeed, Pateman suggests that the genesis of political power lies in man’s
conjugal or sex right, rather than in his fatherhood, because, in order
to have sons, men must have sexual access to a woman’s body (1989:
38). It is highly symbolic, therefore, that both Jean and Hugo are denied
sex by their respective partners. On one occasion, the film cuts from a
sequence that depicts Luiza refusing to have sex with Jean, to Hugo and
Sônia in bed; Sônia responds to Hugo’s advances by saying ‘tô rezando’
[I’m praying].
The Crisis of Hegemonic Masculinity

Jean’s ultimately unsuccessful romantic relationship with Luiza, uncer-
tainty about his future career path, and inability to settle on which
subject he should study at university, symbolise a broader crisis of
hegemonic masculinity in Brazil. Michael Kimmel defines ‘hegemonic
masculinity’ as ‘the image of masculinity of those men who hold power’,
that image being the one usually associated with men who are (among
other things) young, urban, white, heterosexual, fully employed, success-
ful at sports and (possibly) fathers (1994: 125). Jean’s repeated mirror-
ing of his father Hugo—who would embody ‘hegemonic masculinity’
were it not for his unemployment and impending bankruptcy—together
with the film’s repeated references to Freyre’s national, historical
114 R. RANDALL
framework, indicate the broader symbolic implications of these charac-

ters’ private and professional crises. As Pateman’s delineation of the fra-
ternal social contract would suggest (1989: 43–45), their struggles are
manifested in their inability to perform hegemonic masculine roles in a
public capacity, which leads to their failure to exert authority via their
fraternal bonds with other men. This is exemplified in Jean’s case by the
fact that his male friends constantly tease him, in particular when he does
not succeed in kissing any girls on a night out at a club. His teenage
insecurities are a particularly compelling way of exploring this crisis of
masculinity because, as Michael Messner points out, male adolescence
is ‘probably the period of greatest insecurity in the life course, the time
when the young male becomes most vulnerable to peer expectations,
pressures and judgement’ (1987: 199).
The film’s socio-political critique reaches its apex when Jean brings
Luiza to a barbecue at his family home, hosted by his parents. The con-
versation turns from a discussion of which subject Jean is planning to
study at university to an argument about the recent federal approval of
the quota-based system for the allocation of places at public institutions.
Luiza is eligible for a quota place, and is preparing to sit the vestibular
alongside Jean. In a microcosmic representation of the class-based and
political polarisation that has recently divided Brazil, the debate about
quotas ultimately pits her against Hugo, who is made to personify a
neoliberal ideology when he claims that all he has achieved is a prod-
uct of his own merit and strength in the face of adversity. Luiza, on
the other hand, reminds the guests of the extreme levels of racial and
socio-economic inequality that continue to blight Brazil, which, together
with a poor state secondary school system, necessitate affirmative action
in the distribution of public university places. The scene dispenses with
any uncertainty as to the film’s stance on quotas, yet in order to do this,
as De Luca has also noted, it ‘has to sacrifice nuance and wit for a cer-
tain didacticism’ (2017: 210). The film does not skirt the fact that the
‘democratization’ of race relations, which Freyre identified as a unique
characteristic of Brazilian reality, ‘has not translated into social and eco-
nomic inclusion’, since black and mixed-race Brazilians are much more
likely to be poor, and to suffer as a result of the ‘insidious racism’ still
present in the country (De Luca 2017: 210). Furthermore, the issue
that the film selects as a lens through which to explore race relations and
socio-economic inequality is particularly provocative and affecting pre-
cisely because it has implications for people’s children.
Interestingly, the role played by Luiza in the film’s diegesis is com-

parable to that of Val’s daughter Jéssica, who comes to stay with her
mother at the home of Val’s bosses in Que horas ela volta? Both charac-
ters are state-school educated young women preparing to sit the vestib-
ular; they provoke upset in the affluent households that they enter by
questioning naturalised elite privilege. Despite not having had the same
opportunities as the rather less mature Jean and Fabinho, Luiza and
Jéssica appear better prepared for impending adulthood. (Indeed, Jéssica
has actually already become a parent, which signals that she has left her
childhood firmly behind.) Both know what they want to study at uni-
versity—engineering and architecture, respectively—and they are thus
symbolically associated with constructing a more democratic version of
Brazil in the future. Although girlhood has been figured within modern
theories of subjectivity as queer because it has no clear endpoint (other
than those defined in relation to the masculine subject, i.e. by becom-
ing a wife or mother) (Driscoll 2002: 54, 57), these young women
appear self-possessed and in control of their professional destinies. They
could be characterised as what Anita Harris terms ‘future girls’, who,
she argues, are frequently figured in late capitalist discourse as having
the flexible subjectivities that are necessary to compete in a precarious
market-driven society (Harris 2004: 6). Their extremely positive depic-
tions and, particularly in Jéssica’s case, ability to overcome what seem to
be practically insurmountable obstacles in order to achieve their goals,
hint at both films’ ultimate reliance on neoliberal ideology, in spite of
their simultaneous critique of it.
The Space of the Swimming Pool

The argument at the barbecue precipitates the end of Jean and Luiza’s
relationship, as she remarks that Jean and Hugo are ‘iguaizinhos’ [exactly
the same], a comment that is visually confirmed moments later when
father and son both angrily knock on either side of Jean’s bedroom door,
while Hugo insists that Jean unlock it. Immediately afterwards, Jean and
Luiza go to a motel with rooms for rent by the hour. Luiza attempts to
seduce Jean and it seems that she wants to have sex with him for the first
time, but Jean appears distracted and uncomfortable. Luiza undresses
and joins Jean, who is wearing only his underwear, in the room’s jacuzzi.
As they sit alongside each other, he asks her: ‘você tem certeza que você
é virgem?’ [are you sure that you’re a virgin?], to which Luiza takes
116 R. RANDALL
offence and storms out of the motel, signalling the conclusion of their
relationship. This is one of several moments when Jean is humiliated or
challenged while his body is exposed. Earlier in the film, while swimming
timed lengths at the school pool, Jean’s coach tells him: ‘pode melhorar’
[you can improve], and as he enters the changing room in his speedos, a
friend spanks him with an item of clothing and says his trunks make him
look like ‘uma moçinha’ [a little girl].
It appears, as Sheri Chinen Biesen suggests, that the swimming pool
(or jacuzzi) in film can provide ‘a site where social, cultural and aesthetic
forces converge to reveal critical aspects of gender distress, class critique
and sexual awareness’ (2014: 37). In the case of Jean’s relationship to
Luiza, their physical exposure and vulnerability also underscores their
differences in skin tone—the significance of which Jean has been forced
to reflect on at the barbecue—as well as Jean’s inability to perform the
active sexual role expected of him. Interestingly, as in other films about
adolescence, the cloying, ‘controlled’ natural space of the swimming
pool is contrasted with the space of the beach,12 which functions as a
trope in ‘teenpics’ because this location’s ‘symbolic potential’ is closely
related ‘to the liminal nature of teen identity’, as adolescents are posi-
tioned in a zone of uncertainty about their ‘childlike freedoms and inno-
cence and their desires for […] carnal knowledge’ (Whitney 2002: 56).
The association of the coast with free-flowing desires is confirmed in
Casa grande as it is the location of Jean and Luiza’s first kiss. Rio de
Janeiro’s public beaches have, furthermore, functioned in the social
imaginary as sites that theoretically permit more egalitarian relationships,
given that they enable citizens from a variety of class backgrounds to
mingle.
The film affectively evokes Jean’s physical discomfort and vulnerabil-
ity in the swimming pool and jacuzzi sequences because, as Matthew
Gutmann points out in his study of masculinities in Latin America, ‘the
body is often the arbiter of last resort’ (2003: 9), particularly where the
achievement of manhood following puberty and sexual performance are
concerned. Richard Parker observes that in Brazil a particular emphasis is
placed on the distinction between masculine atividade (activeness) and
feminine passividade (passivity) (2003: 310), which are used to struc-
ture both heterosexual and homosexual relationships (2003: 311). An
‘anatomical male’ who allows himself to be sexually dominated sacrifices
his categorization as homem and is termed viado (queer or gay) (2003:
311). The viado is ‘subject to the most severe symbolic, and often physi-
cal, violence found anywhere in Brazilian society and is a constant object
of ridicule and shame, a circumstance that serves to stigmatize and mar-

ginalize deviant gender performances and at the same time reinforce
normative patterns of masculinity and femininity’ (2003: 311). It is for
this reason that earlier on Rita has instructed Jean: ‘um homem tem que
pegar (a mulher)’ [a man has to pounce (on a woman)]. Jean’s own fear
of appearing virginal or effeminate is explored through his friends’ and
family’s teasing. Indeed, Hugo asks of the disco that Jean goes to with
his peers: ‘Fosfobox não é uma boate gay?’ [isn’t Fosfobox a gay club?],
to which Jean unhappily responds: ‘não é uma boate gay, ela já foi’ [no
it’s not a gay club, it used to be].
Corruption and Deceit
Luiza’s offence at Jean’s question about her virginity is possibly a prod-
uct of miscommunication. The film heavily implies that Jean is a virgin,
although when Luiza assumes that he has already had sex with a pros-
titute, Jean does not correct her—presumably in order to seem more
manly. Although Luiza’s interpretation of his question in the jacuzzi is
never clearly defined, it is possible that she assumes he is casting asper-
sions on her honesty or purity, when in fact he is worried that she
will realise that he is utterly sexually inexperienced. The film is thor-
oughly pervaded by such instances of miscommunication, and even
outright deception. While Jean cheats on a school test, lies about his
whereabouts to his father, and to Luiza about his ability to dance forró,
his sister Nathalie is caught stealing money from Hugo’s closet. Their
acts of adolescent deceit are simply a reflection of their father’s modus
operandi and are used as an oblique form of reference to the corrupt
elite practices that have kept their class in power, as they have natural-
ised the unequal and exploitative relationships that maintain their privi-
lege. Indeed, Hugo actively conceals the terrible extent of his bankruptcy
from his family and friends in a variety of ways. Once Jean realises that
Hugo has lied to him by suggesting that Severino has gone on holiday
(rather than admitting that he has been fired), Jean yells: ‘para de mentir,
só uma vez!’ [stop lying, just for once!], and the pair begin to fight phys-
ically on the lawn outside the house. Shortly afterwards, Noemia, the
only domestic employee who has not yet been dismissed, resigns from
her post, revealing that Hugo has not paid her for the last three months.
It appears that the social fabric that holds the home and family together
begins to unravel as the employees leave. Hugo’s ties to Brazil’s corrupt
financial elite can be inferred not only from his choice to buy shares in
118 R. RANDALL
Eike Batista’s company,13 but also by his links to Daniel Dantas. Dantas,
one of Brazil’s most prominent bankers, founded the Opportunity finan-
cial group. He was convicted of attempting to bribe a police officer in
December 2008 (in order to avoid other charges) and was sentenced
to ten years in prison (The Economist 2008), but was later acquitted
on a technicality (Folha de S.Paulo 2016); this lends credence to many
Brazilians’ claims that the financial and political ruling class consistently
escape punishment for their crimes. In the film, while on the phone to
a headhunter, Hugo declines to send his CV to Dantas’ Opportunity
because, he says, he worked there before and did not like Daniel, which
may imply his possible previous involvement in corrupt practices and a
strong desire to avoid his name being further associated with Dantas’.
Towards the film’s conclusion, Jean’s anger at his father provokes him
to run away from the exam room where he is about to sit the vestibu-
lar and to track down Severino, who he finds living in a visibly deprived
area. As Jean walks through the neighbourhood, the shaky, seemingly
handheld camerawork contrasts with the static shots that have been
used to depict the casa grande, as well as those who inhabit it—who
are often framed separately from each other, or in close-up. Indeed,
the unsteady camera underscores the emotional nature of Jean’s reun-
ion with Severino, as they embrace and Jean begins to cry—their bodies
united in the same frame. It appears that Jean can only gain emotional
solace by visiting Severino, rather than with his own parents. Similarly
to other films depicting domestic workers and their employers, as Shaw
has observed, Casa grande appears to hint that the path to social change
can be found in these kinds of emotional shifts (2017: 138), which are
provoked by the creation of ‘affective alliances’ (Podalsky 2011: 8) and
through the development of a ‘politics of situated feeling’ (2011: 15).
Indeed, it is at this point that Severino acquires a greater subject status
as Jean (and the spectator) discovers that he lives with Noemia and that
they have a daughter together. Up until this point the family’s (former)
domestic employees have been confined by their labour roles and our
knowledge of them is limited because of the fact that Jean is the film’s
principal focaliser (as De Luca has also observed 2017: 211).
Jean and Rita
Nonetheless, although Jean appears to reject familial and class-related
expectations when he runs away from the vestibular to reunite with
Severino, this symbolic rejection is largely negated when, shortly
afterwards, Jean sleeps with Rita, who he meets at a party in Severino’s

neighbourhood, thereby re-enacting a relationship with clear colo-
nial and Freyrian undertones. As director Anna Muylaert has stated,
in response to comparisons between her film Que horas ela volta? and
Casa grande: ‘achei o final de (Casa grande) machista: comer a empre-
gada não é solução, é repetição’ [I thought (Casa grande’s) ending
was machista: sleeping with the maid is not a solution, it’s repetition]
(Balloussier and Genestreti 2015). Earlier in the film, Rita has been
fired by Sônia, after the latter snoops in the former’s room and discov-
ers sexually explicit photographs that an anonymous individual has taken
of the housekeeper in various different locations throughout the house.
Despite finding these amusing, Sônia uses them as an excuse to let Rita
go, thereby saving more money. De Luca suggests that the film’s ending,
which sees Jean and Rita in bed together, is not an instance of ‘power
subjugation’ because Rita is a character who is ‘in full and proud control
of her sexual agency as a woman’ (2017: 212). At some moments, the
film appears to invert the power dynamic of this postcolonial sexual rela-
tionship via Rita’s teasing of Jean, who accuses her of sadism while they
watch a horror film together on television. However, Rita’s strong belief
in the need for men to fulfil an aggressively active sexual role demon-
strates that she is thoroughly confined by the dominant symbolic sys-
tem of sexual relations (described by Parker [2003: 310–311]), which is
regurgitated in various characters’ comments and which remains largely
unproblematised throughout the film. Furthermore, Sônia’s discovery
of the photographs, and Rita’s obsession with recounting her exagger-
ated sexual escapades to Jean, risks converting her into a humorous,
sex-crazed stereotype and aligning her with the adolescent male fantasy
of the ‘randy maid’, which reached its troubling cinematic zenith in the
pornochanchadas (sexual comedies) popular in Brazil during the 1970s,
namely in Como é boa nossa empregada/How good our maid is (dir. Ismar
Porto & Victor di Mello 1973), which features various maids being pur-
sued by apparently sex-crazed young men.
In the film’s closing sequence, Jean gets up from Rita’s bed, pulls the
sheets back to reveal her naked body, which he stares at and kisses, later
climbing up on to her window sill to smoke a cigarette. De Luca sug-
gests that the fact that Rita is shown in the foreground and Jean in the
background, in this final static scene, affirms the way in which ‘subjec-
tivities dictated through social position may be reinvented as spaces are
reappropriated’ (2017: 212). Given that Jean stares at—and the camera
120 R. RANDALL
dwells upon—Rita’s naked torso, the possible significance of the film’s

ending does not seem so clear-cut; indeed, its brief inversion of sexual
power relationships is arguably undone as its mise-en-scène thoroughly
reinstitutes the male gaze (Fig. 5.4).14 Whether or not Jean has rejected
his postcolonial domestic privilege, or even satisfactorily resolved the
film’s crisis of hegemonic masculinity by ‘coming-of-age’, is also drawn
into doubt given that his relationship to Rita is one that combines sex-
ual and maternal elements. Elisabeth Badinter insists that in order to
become a man satisfactorily, it is necessary for the boy to differentiate
himself from the feminine, domestic sphere and define himself against
what produced him (the female body) (1997: 67, 70–71). By sleeping
with Rita, it is not clear that Jean has satisfactorily done so. Indeed, ear-
lier on he has even asked Rita if he can ‘treinar’ (practice) with her before
trying to have sex with Luiza—someone who is not (unlike Rita) sym-
bolically subsumed within his family.
The film’s ending is thus highly ambivalent and could be criticised
for indulging in nostalgia for the emotional and sexual exploitation
that domestic service may permit. In this sense, it demonstrates further
parallels with Freyre’s text, which, while condemnatory of the abusive
relationships that were enabled by slavery, also fondly reflects on the
domestic intimacy between slaves and landowners that, according to
Freyre, led almost all Brazilians to bear,
Fig. 5.4 Concluding scene of Casa grande, dir. by Fellipe Barbosa (2014)

a marca da influência negra. Da escrava ou sinhama que nos embalou.

Que nos deu de mamar. Que nos deu de comer, ela própria amolengando
na mão o bolão de comida. Da negra velha que nos contou as primei-
ras histórias de bicho e de mal-assombrado. Da mulata que nos tirou o
primeiro bicho-de-pé de uma coceira tão boa. Da que nos iniciou no amor
físico e nos transmitiu, ao ranger da cama-de-vento, a primeira sensação
completa de homem. (2003: 367)
[the mark of (African) influence. Of the female slave or “mammy” who
rocked us to sleep. Who suckled us. Who fed us, mashing our food with
her own hands. The influence of the old woman who told us our first tales
of ghost and bicho.15 Of the mulatto girl who relieved us of our first bicho
de pé,16 of a pruriency that was so enjoyable. Who initiated us into physical
love and, to the creaking of a canvas cot, gave us our first complete sensa-
tion of being a man. (1963: 278)]
As David Lehmann has pointed out, passages such as this one betray
Freyre’s subject position: he is aligned with the ‘us’ about whom it is
written and to whom it is addressed—an upper class, lettered, white
readership (2008: 209). Indeed, Freyre was a member of the north-
eastern Brazilian elite, and the way that the voluptuousness of African
influence is represented in his text verges on ‘othering’ and exoticising
it. Barbosa occupies a similar subject position; he even began to conceive
the screenplay while he was studying at Columbia University in the US,
which was also the location from which Freyre wrote his study (Merten
2015). It is perhaps for this reason that, although both of their texts
function as clear indictments of the socio-political and economic systems
that existed in the country at different times, they may be characterised
by a problematic yearning for an affective or sexual intimacy that relies
on highly unequal power relationships.
In conclusion, Casa grande’s interrogation of the postcolonial quali-
ties of the domestic sphere, and of the maid-adolescent relationship, can
clearly be aligned with a recent tendency in Latin American films to fore-
ground the ways in which personal relationships require political critique.
Barbosa’s decision to dialogue with Freyre’s exploration of the exploita-
tive, intimate relationships that were a product of slavery is therefore apt,
particularly given that these relationships clearly continue to haunt the
Brazilian cultural imaginary. Both the privileged ability of film to evoke
affective ties and the association of adolescence with emotional vulner-
ability and social alienation make Jean’s relationship to his father and to
his family’s domestic employees the ideal vehicles for the film’s critique
122 R. RANDALL
of elite privilege and corrupt practices. However, in spite of its (rather

didactic) denunciation of socio-political inequality, the film does not sat-
isfactorily problematise the sexual politics that help to sustain the patri-
archal structures that continue to characterise late capitalism, which the
film at times even partially reproduces.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their
support of my current research through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.
Notes
1. See edition 691 of news magazine CartaCapital, ‘A casa grande faz a
festa’ (July 2017).
2. Luiza identifies as parda (brown); she states that her mother is mulata
and her father Japanese.
3. An idiom in Brazil that plays on the power and privilege of the Cavalcantis
is: ‘Quem viver em Pernambuco não há de estar enganado: Que, ou há
de ser Cavalcanti, ou há de ser cavalgado’ [If you live in Pernambuco, do
not be fooled: either you are a Cavalcanti, or you get crushed (author’s
translation)]. Cavalcanti is also the surname of the actor who plays Jean:
Thales Cavalcanti.
4. See Lei de Cotas para o Ensino Superior (2012).
5. Translations into English of articles in Portuguese, and of dialogue from
Casa grande, are the author’s own, however, English translations of
Freyre’s Casa Grande & Senzala are taken from Samuel Putnam’s The
Masters and the Slaves (1963).
6. These include: La ciénaga (dir. Lucrecia Martel 2001), Cama aden-
tro/Live-in Maid (dir. Jorge Gaggero 2004), Santiago (dir. João
Moreira Salles 2007), Chance (dir. Abner Benaim 2009), La nana/The
Maid (Sebastián Silva 2009), El niño pez/The Fish Child (dir. Lucía
Puenzo 2009), Recife Frio/Cold Tropics (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
2009), La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (dir. Claudia Llosa 2009),
Zona sur/Southern District (dir. Juan Carlos Valdivia 2009), Empleadas
y patrones/Maids and Bosses (dir. Abner Benaim 2010), Babás/Nannies
(dir. Consuelo Lins 2010), Doméstica/Housemaids (dir. Gabriel Mascaro
2012), Hilda (dir. Andrés Clariond 2014), Qué le dijiste a Dios? (dir.
Teresa Suárez 2014), Réimon (dir. Rodrigo Moreno 2014), Relatos salva-
jes/Wild Tales (dir. Damián Szifrón 2014), La visita (dir. Mauricio López
Fernández 2014) and Aquarius (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho 2016).
7. Unfortunately, there are now signs that this trend is in reverse (Gallas
2016).
8. I have used Samuel Putnam’s English translation of Casa grande e senzala,
entitled The Masters and the Slaves (1963), throughout this article.
9. This association is also made, either explicitly or implicitly, in Doméstica,

Recife Frio, Babás and Que horas ela volta? The link is unsurprising given
that the country’s sugar plantations were concentrated in the North East
until the nineteenth century.
10. The author has amended two of the race-related terms used in this quota-
tion from the English translation in order to modernise it.
11. Carole Pateman notes that this was the distinction through which our
modern notion of society was constituted by the contract theorists.
However, in many discussions of civil society, ‘public regulation’ is con-
trasted with ‘private enterprise’, thereby presupposing that ‘the politically
relevant separation between public and private is drawn within “civil soci-
ety”’ (1989: 34).
12. This contrast between the swimming pool and the beach is also set up
in Heitor Dhalia’s film of adolescent girlhood À deriva (2009), see
Chapter 4 of Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American
Cinema (2017). See also the chapters by Maguire and Armas in this
volume for further exploration of the swimming pool and/or beach as
spaces that are used to explore adolescent sexualities.
13. Batista was convicted of fraud after the film was made (BBC News 2017).
14. This image was used in the film’s publicity campaign, and on (at least one
version of) its DVD cover.
15. In this context bicho could be translated as ‘monster’, but can be used to
refer to any non-descript animal.
16. Putnam explains that a bicho de pé is a type of flea that burrows beneath
the skin of the foot and lays its eggs there (Freyre 1963: 278).
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CHAPTER 6
Young, Male and Middle Class:

Representations of Masculinity in Mexican
Film
Georgia Seminet
What has changed, if anything, since the middle of the twentieth century is
only the speed at which change happens, and therefore the now exponen-
tially increased unlikelihood that one generation can hand the world over
successfully to the next. Males are floundering in every direction, hapless
boys, while at the same time they struggle to display a masculine prowess
their social circumstances do not permit them fully to experience.
—Pomerance and Gateward (2005: 4)
The opening quotation from Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward

alludes to an important theme found in the two Mexican films studied
here, Fernando Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos/Duck Season (2004) and
Alonso Ruizpalacio s’ Güeros (2014): namely, that of rapidly changing
societies and the effects on developing masculine subjectivities. In the
case of Mexico, scholars from a variety of disciplines speak of a crisis
G. Seminet (*) 
St Edward’s University, Austin, TX, USA

128 G. SEMINET
of masculinity invariably linked to a parallel crisis of the middle class in

which the conditions and speed of social change have unmoored gender
expectations, in particular hegemonic masculinities, from their ideologi-
cal and social foundations. When we examine the cycle of crises that the
Mexican middle classes have experienced since the late 1960s, the use of
the word ‘crisis’ almost seems like an understatement.1
The ever-increasing number of productions dedicated to screen-
ing Latin American youths during such insecure times has not gone
unremarked by scholars. For example, the portrayal of Latin American
youth subjectivities in film has been explored in books and articles by
Laura Podalsky (2011, 2012) and edited volumes by Carolina Rocha
and Georgia Seminet (2012, 2014) where we find discussions of young
male and female subjectivities debated from a variety of perspectives. On
the topic of the middle class as both the subject and object of changes
in the Mexican film industry, a recent book by Ignacio Sánchez Prado,
Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012
(2014), is a valuable contribution to film studies. Sánchez Prado explains
the central role played by the Mexican middle classes in the restructur-
ing of production processes during the implementation of neoliberal eco-
nomic policies in Mexico. He meticulously traces how a drastic reduction
in state-financed films has led to an increase in the portrayal of themes
near and dear to the middle classes, foregrounding their anxieties about
corrupt politics, economic insecurity and the roles of men and women in
society.
Studies on masculinity in Mexico have produced a considerable bib-
liography in recent years. A sample of some of the most recent and
oft-cited works would include books by Matthew Gutmann from an
anthropological perspective (1996, 2002, 2003, 2006) and Alfredo
Mirandé (1997). Víctor M. Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein
(2012) analyse masculinity from a historical perspective, while Rafael
Montesinos (2005) approaches the subject from the perspective of soci-
ology and gender studies. From the fields of literary and cinema stud-
ies, examples include single-authored books by Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz
(2003) and Sergio de la Mora (2006) as well as an edited volume by
Ignacio Sánchez Prado and Ana Peluffo on masculinities in nine-
teenth-century Mexico (2010). An important contribution on boys’
masculinity is the aforementioned edited volume by Pomerance and
Gateward, Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005);
while I draw on several studies from this particular volume, its essays are
6 YOUNG, MALE AND MIDDLE CLASS … 129
mainly focused on the development of masculine identity in English-

speaking countries.
This list of recent contributions to the discourses on youth, gender
and class in film is not exhaustive, but it does hint at the interest the
topic has generated over the last 15–20 years. My purpose is to probe
the imbrication of male and middle-class subjectivities as they are
explored in Temporada and Güeros.2 Separated by ten years, each of
these films is the debut feature of the two directors, and both are set
in Mexico City and explore the subjectivity of young men. I argue that
these films foreground affective experiences as part of the coming-of-age
trials and tribulations of the male characters, and in doing so, usher in an
emerging representation of masculinity that reflects changing social con-
ditions in Mexico. I understand masculinities in this context as defined
by R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, in their linking of mas-
culinities and social embodiment: ‘Bodies participate in social action by
delineating courses of social conduct—the body is a participant in gen-
erating social practice’ (2005: 851). Embodiment, however, can also be
performative, a concept that recalls Judith Butler’s explanation of gen-
der as ‘performativity’ that ‘is not a singular act, but a repetition and a
ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalisation in the context
of a body’ (2002: xv). Temporada and Güeros multiply these ‘singu-
lar acts’ through a variety of performances of masculinity, showing that
middle-class masculinities are varied and plural. Thus, it is important to
note that embodiment in these auteur films constitutes, and is consti-
tuted by, parodies and self-referential performances that subvert the tra-
ditional subject–object gaze. This serves as a reminder not to objectify
the masculine subjectivities that are projected, and is particularly impor-
tant because the films represent an evolving understanding of gender,
one that is premised on ongoing social change and the development of
masculine subjectivity as process. I will first turn to a more detailed look
at the current state of the Mexican middle classes and the representation
of masculinity. Each of these strands of my argument will be followed by
analyses of key aspects of the films.
Both Temporada and Güeros feature young men on the verge of limi-
nal experiences that will only be partially resolved over the course of the
films. The male characters of both films are cornered into situations as
a consequence of random events that set the stage for an in-depth con-
sideration of their personal crises, metaphorically linked through the
filmic narratives to an exploration of the representation of masculinity.
130 G. SEMINET
In Güeros, brothers Sombra, or Shadow (Tenoch Huerta), and Tomás

(Sebastián Aguirre) are dealing with the death of their father. Sombra is
also struggling unsuccessfully to write his thesis in the middle of a stu-
dent strike while having frequent panic attacks and pining over his love
interest Ana. Temporada de patos features three different background sto-
ries for each of the three male characters. Their stories unfold over the
course of a tedious Sunday afternoon in the home of Flama. Best friends
Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño), along with a pizza
delivery guy Ulíses (Enrique Arreola), are in dire need of therapy, a con-
clusion that can be drawn as we learn of the heavy emotional baggage
with which each young man is saddled.
Temporada stages what turns into a therapy session, facilitated by the
consumption of pot brownies, in which each of the male characters is
able to explore the affective aspects of male subjectivity. Temporada is an
anti-action film that highlights the paralysis felt in transitional moments
of life that necessitate keen emotional maturity in order to be success-
fully navigated. For example, Flama’s parents are going through a nasty
divorce, Moko is harboring doubts about his sexuality, and Ulíses, older
than Flama and Moko, is conflicted about his role as a traditional male
figure in a stagnant economy in which he can find no foothold for per-
sonal growth. Flama and Moko are only 14, so their emotional tool-
kits are not yet honed for deep, emotional self-questioning (though the
pot helps). However, their ability to articulate deep emotional conflicts
develops over the course of the film as they explore their affective sides,
albeit deliberately slowly, like the constant drip of the water faucet in the
background. Luckily, they have the guidance of 16-year-old Rita (Danny
Perea), the next-door neighbour who comes over for the afternoon and
graciously supplies the pot brownies. Rita, and the older Ulíses (early
20s approximately) are also weighed down by unresolved family con-
flicts, which in the case of Ulíses are related to broader socioeconomic
problems in Mexico. In the case of Rita, who confesses to a dysfunctional
family situation (her mother forgot her birthday, which is ostensibly why
she has come over to use Flama’s oven and bake herself a cake), her emo-
tional trauma is left unexplored, which is a point I will return to later.
As in Temporada, the young men in Güeros are also struggling to cross
the threshold into a more emotionally fulfilling and stable space. Sombra
and his roommate Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), who are in their early
20s, are university students sharing an apartment in Mexico City. Tomás,
Sombra’s 14-year-old brother, arrives at their apartment, having been
sent from Veracruz by his mother to live with his older brother because
she can no longer deal with his troublemaking. Seemingly, as a widow
who now sews for a living (and, as we learn later, never completed high
school), she is ill equipped to deal with the rebellious Tomás. Once reu-
nited in Mexico City, the brothers and Santos set out (or rather, are
chased out of their apartment) on a whimsical journey to find an aging
rock star, Epigmenio Cruz. Along the way they stop by the campus of
the National Autonomous University of Mexico (the UNAM) during the
student strikes of 1999. At this point, the boys are joined by fellow uni-
versity student Ana (Ilse Salas), the love interest of Sombra. As is the case
for Rita’s role in Temporada, in Güeros, Ana’s presence creates the con-
ditions that allow for the development of Sombra’s masculinity. And also
like Rita, she has unresolved family issues that are bracketed, and remain
unexplored in the film in favour of pursing the development of the male
characters.
The screening of male subjectivities in Mexican cinema is not a con-
temporary trend, but rather reflects a long history in which masculini-
ties are constructed in the service of political and social ideology. In
Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film, Sergio de la
Mora charts the development of the macho figure that exemplifies the
patriarchal ideology predominant in films at the height of Mexican cin-
ema’s golden age. His aim is to examine ‘the particular self-conscious
form of national masculinity and patriarchal ideology articulated via the
cinema and also vigorously promoted by the postrevolutionary State as
official ideology’ (2006: 9). His study covers a broad swathe of produc-
tions spanning from the 1950s to 2004. Referencing Teresa de Lauretis,
de la Mora refers to ‘micro-political practices’ that inform and feed into
the construction of gender (2006: 9). The effects of these practices, he
affirms, are at ‘the “local” level of resistance, in subjectivity and self rep-
resentation’ (2006: 9). Temporada and Güeros are exemplary of such
practices given their intense, narrow focus on the representation of male
subjectivity. An aim of this chapter is to delve into the representation of
adolescent and young adult male subjectivities as micro-political practices
that characterise becoming male in middle-class Mexico as a process or
journey interlaced with the social constructions of class and gender. The
portrayal of male subjectivities undermines traditional masculinities and
resists objectification of gender roles, a move that responds to the con-
temporary need to have flexible and adaptable subjectivities in uncertain
times.3 In this sense, the deconstruction of masculine subjectivities in
132 G. SEMINET
Güeros and Temporada corresponds to the neoliberal deconstruction of

the paternalist state that ultimately destabilises the middle class, unmoor-
ing the identities and subjectivities developed upon its foundation and
perpetuation.4
Cinema and Middle-Class Subjectivity

In Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012,
Ignacio Sánchez Prado reveals the increasing importance of the middle
class as a target audience for Mexican film throughout the 1990s. As
Sánchez Prado points out, the importance of the middle-class audience
also triggers a change in the subject of films such that middle-class lives
and concerns become a central focus of popular commercial films. While
this is in contrast to earlier decades in which ‘Mexican cinema […] was
decisively focused on a specific social class [the urban popular classes]
that lacked the economic power to sustain a viable film’ (2014: 5), it is
necessitated by the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, a
political process that begins in the 1980s and continues throughout the
1990s. As the industry moved from a state-supported model to ‘one of
mixed public-private and fully private schemes’ (2014: 6) the film indus-
try adapts its subject matter to feature its most prominent audience. The
reduction of state support for the Mexican film industry, ironically, lib-
erates directors who respond to changes with an increase in films that
reflect middle-class lives and concerns on the screen (2014: 8). Sánchez
Prado‘s work sheds light on the growing relationship between the film
industry and its middle-class spectators, cogently demonstrating how the
film industry adapted its product to the new realities of a free market
economy.5
Neoliberal economic reforms, however, were not necessarily ‘liberat-
ing’ for the middle class, though certain sectors of the middle class did
benefit more from market reforms than others. From a historical per-
spective, Louise Walker, in Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle
Classes After 1968 (2013), charts the growing cynicism and disap-
pointment of the Mexican middle classes with their government over
the course of several decades. Beginning with the crucial date of 1968
through the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s, and ‘the crack’ that occurred in
1994,6 Walker emphasises the extent to which the lifestyle of the mid-
dle classes has been eroded over decades. Economic crises, corruption
and political and economic reforms have undermined the confidence
of the middle classes in the role of the Mexican state, specifically the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Walker’s assessment of the
state of the middle class from the late 1960s up to 2000 points to an
environment of economic insecurity for the middle class, ‘The economic
(and political) crises of these decades are, in part, routine crises, neces-
sary to ongoing capital accumulation, but they led to a profound shift
from the mid-century state-led development to the neoliberalism of the
late twentieth century’ (2013: 15). The choice by both Eimbcke and
Ruizpalacios to film Temporada de patos and Güeros in black and white
evokes Walker’s description of the middle class after 1994. The effect of
the black-and-white aesthetic calls attention to the characters’ need to
make stark choices, echoed in the contrasts created by the use of black
and white, and it also intensifies the aura of aging and deteriorating infra-
structures that leave such an impression on the spectator. Well into the
twenty-first century, the middle class continued to face hardship. The
recession of 2008 that began in New York affected the jobs and purchas-
ing power of the middle and working classes: ‘The recession turned a
reasonable decade for Mexico’s economy into a dreary one. In the ten
years to 2010, income per person grew by 0.6% a year, one of the lowest
rates in the world’ (‘Making the Desert Bloom’, 2011).
Emerging Masculinities
Rafael Montesino’s volume Masculinidades emergentes/Emerging Masculinities
describes a crisis in traditional masculinity that parallels a larger cultural crisis
provoked by the lack of solid employment opportunities and the emerg-
ing role of women, in particular in urban environments (2005: 42–45).
Montesinos posits that as a result of the economic changes, and changes
in the status of women in urban areas in particular, ‘Una nueva imagen
masculina que ha dejado de predominar en la reproducción de los espa-
cios urbanos, y que proyecta una disposición a compartir integralmente la
vida con una mujer que emerge como su igual’ (a new image of masculin-
ity is emerging that must now share urban space with women who have
become his equal) (2005: 67). In Montesinos’ estimation, sharing social
space with women implies a challenge for a society in which the caricature
of the macho as ‘men incapable of adapting to the changes being regis-
tered in modernity’ remains persistent (2005: 67). He does, at any rate,
go on to posit the disappearance of the stereotype of the traditional male
or ‘Mexican macho’ (2005: 67).
134 G. SEMINET
In the same volume, Griselda Martínez reiterates the idea of a crisis of

masculinity but explains and emphasises the relational nature of the crisis
and how it is entwined with the development of women’s subjectivity:
Esta nueva presencia femenina significa el desarrollo de la imagen de la

mujer y la necesaria disminución de la imagen masculina. De tal forma que
esa crisis que sufre el hombre moderno se deba al sentir que su identidad
genérica se encuentra disminuida en relación con el pasado. Es el choque
cultural provocado por las identidades femeninas emergentes y una identidad
masculina en construcción que no tienen claro su puerto de llegada. (2005:
71, emphasis in original)
[This new feminine presence signifies the development of the image of women
and the resulting diminution of the masculine image. The crisis of gender
identity suffered by modern man could very well be due to the feeling that
his gender identity has been attenuated in relation to the past. The result-
ant cultural clash is provoked by emerging female identities and a masculine
identity in construction that is as yet unable to identify its port of call.]
Martínez’s understands the crisis as involving the relationship between

women and men. We can see this relationship play out in Temporada and
Güeros and though they highlight, almost exclusively, masculine subjec-
tivity, the representation of masculinity is dependent upon the support-
ing but key role of the women characters.
Taking the research presented in Montesinos into account, it is clear
that anxiety on the part of the middle class is compounded for men.
The crisis of each feeds off the other, adding to feelings of insecurity
that have, in many societies, gone hand in hand with globalisation. Now
we will turn to the films to see how these crises are played out in the
coming-of-age stories of young men.
Temporada de Patos
Temporada unfolds in Flama’s home in the borough of Nonoalco
Tlatelolco in the apartment building Niños Héroes. Tlatelolco was one
of the areas devastated by the quake, and ironically, Flama lives on the
eighth floor of a building that used to have sixteen floors before the
quake. This detail obviously draws attention to the long and fraught his-
tory of Mexico City, but it is also invites us to compare the history of the
real niños héroes (heroic children) to Flama and Moko, who seem more
like slackers than heroic, and certainly do not, at least for the moment,
display the qualities of patriotism or bravery symbolised by the niños
héroes.7 Dan Russek characterises Flama and Moko as ‘Not entirely vul-
nerable but still economically and psychologically dependent on adults,
they occupy an ambivalent threshold between the largely carefree exist-
ence of the child and the future trials of the adult’ (2012: 191). As will
be discussed further on, as Flama and Moko engage with Ulíses and Rita,
their portrayal as slackers falls away to reveal more emotional depth that
will push them to reconcile the rational and the emotional, thus prepar-
ing them for the ‘future trials of the adult.’
Flama, who resides with his mother in the apartment where the story
unfolds, shows no signs of having reached puberty. The first clue regard-
ing this is signified by his absolute lack of interest in Rita. In fact, he
tries to turn her away, and dissuades her from coming in, but she insists
on being let in briefly to bake a cake. He allows her to come in, but
quickly goes back to sit on the sofa with Moko, waiting for the electricity
to be restored so they can play on the X-box. Flama’s lack of attention
to Rita is puzzling, particularly because we expect a response more in
line with our understanding of hegemonic masculinities and stereotypes
about libidinous teenage boys. In another scene that questions Flama’s
sexual orientation, he and Moko have locked themselves in the bathroom
to look at porn. Flama matter-of-factly clarifies for Moko, who earlier
was the subject of Rita’s advances, what his reaction to her kissing him
should have been. He points to an open magazine (supposedly with a
picture of man with an erection), but Moko stares at it confused. Flama’s
very matter-of-fact attitude, rather than excitement when looking at
porn, makes us question our heteronormative assumptions about the
boys’ sexuality. Up to this point we have judged Flama based on his per-
formance as a male, but a crack emerges in our assumption at this point.
Flama’s sexuality remains ambiguous as there are few clues available
to the viewer to label him, but this in itself represents an example of an
evolving understanding of masculinity. However, it is Moko who sur-
prises us as he reveals to Rita that he desires Flama. After she flirts with
him, tries a few silly things to get his attention, and then finally kisses
him, Rita realises that something is up with Moko, especially since he
has no physical response to her advances. In a shot focusing on Rita and
Moko from above, as if they were psychologist and client in a therapy
session, Rita easily coaxes out of Moko the confession of his desire for
Flama. In retrospect, the cracks in Moko’s performance of a hegemonic
136 G. SEMINET
masculinity were foregrounded in earlier scenes in which he cautiously

watches Flama from behind as he dresses, and also by the incorporation
of the Molotov song, ‘Puto.’
There are two interesting points to be made about emerging mas-
culinities in this sequence of events. First, we witness a performance of
masculinity that is disassociated from sexuality (Moko ‘acts’ like a het-
erosexual boy, but the ‘act’ does not match his sexuality), a move that
completely undermines any heteronormative assumptions we may have
about masculinity. Second, it is ultimately Rita who orchestrates the con-
ditions that result in Moko being able to articulate his fears and desires.
First as a sympathetic listener, and later by encouraging everyone to get
stoned, which makes them talk more; Rita thus performs the relational
role of the female, ushering the male characters to a new understanding
of themselves through affect, which I use here to mean ‘a nonconscious
experience of intensity; […] a moment of unformed and unstructured
potential’ (Leys 2011: 42). Her personal story is mostly marginalised in
the film, but the interaction between Rita and the young men exempli-
fies what was theorised earlier, ‘Gender is always relational, and patterns
of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model
(whether real or imaginary) of femininity’ (Connell and Messerschmidt
2005: 848). In my view, Rita plays the role of therapist, spiritual guide or
mentor in the coming-of-age narrative, coaxing forth new articulations
of becoming masculine that are multiple and plural.
Ulíses, who is likely in his early 20s, embodies the crisis of the
middle-class male. During the long Sunday afternoon he spends with
the teenagers, we hear his life story, which he delivers to the camera as
though no one seems to be listening to him, but eventually Flama leaves
his room to join Ulíses sitting on the floor. Ulíses’ story is one of inter-
rupted plans. He was not able to finish his university studies because he
had to drop out of school to support his grandmother. He first works in
an animal shelter, leading to a disturbing flashback of a pile of euthanised
dogs, a memory which clearly pains/troubles him; consequently, he
leaves the shelter to take a pizza delivery job. Ulíses’ story underscores
the difficulty of the path to the middle class. Unable to afford an educa-
tion and simultaneously care for his grandmother, Ulíses chooses instead
to support her. As a consequence of his decision, he has not been able to
return to college and remains underemployed with no hope for a better
job. Upon hearing the story, Flama has more respect for the delivery guy
that he had treated badly early in the film. Though he is obviously older
than the two boys, he has assumed the traditional masculine role as head
of the household. He has assumed his moral responsibility, a sacrifice that
Flama understands, but the type of work available to him and the impos-
sibility of studying have left him melancholy regarding his future.
In a final instance of emerging masculinity, Flama, under the influence
of pot, admits his anxiety over the divorce of his parents and the possibil-
ity that he might move, which means leaving Moko. In his stoned state,
Flama articulates a deep emotion for the first time in the film. As each
male has successively revealed his secret fears, Flama is the last to express
what he has buried in his unconscious, his sadness and anger over the
divorce. In an act of catharsis, he shoots items in the house with his pel-
let gun so that his parents cannot fight over them. The crisis of mascu-
linity in Temporada is not resolved, but by revealing their affective side,
each of the males has embodied a different performance of gender, aided
in the process by Rita.
Güeros
In Güeros, Sombra and Santos are also perceived as slackers, and embody
what Pomerance and Gateward call the man-boy, ‘a condition in which
male children of the modern age find it difficult, if not impossible, to
achieve adulthood’ (2005: 13). In this case, the ‘condition’ is directly
tied to the crises of masculinity and the middle class. Paralysed by ennui
and lack of finances, the two young men resist even leaving the apart-
ment. When urged by Tomás to go out and do something, Sombra’s
reply is ‘what’s the point, if we are only going to eventually return to the
apartment anyway?’ Soon after, however, they are forced to leave when
the downstairs neighbour realises that they are once again trying to steal
his electricity. At this point, Tomás is out of the house, and a terrified
Santos literally drags Sombra down the endless stairs as the irate neigh-
bour chases them. The chaotic scene also occurs, symbolically, during a
tremor. Ruizpalacios has characterised his film as representing the move-
ment from stasis to action, as that moment in life when you decide you
must act (cit. Tribeca 2014). Interestingly, the tremor links the moment
in the film when the boys are forced into action to a similar period in
history in which the middle classes reacted to government ineptitude
after the 1985 quake. The tremor represents this tipping point from
stasis to action. The fact that the boys’ journey begins during a tremor
links their fate to a prior moment in history symbolising the defection of
138 G. SEMINET
middle-class loyalties from the paternalist state that proved it no longer

had their best interests at heart.8
The boys, similarly unmoored following their departure from the
apartment, are forced on to the road in their beat-up car, encountering a
variety of people and social spaces in what the director calls a ‘Black and
White coming-of-age road movie in Mexico City’ (cit. Tribeca 2014).
For Sombra and Tomás, losing their apartment is secondary to having
lost their father. Their search for Epigmenio Cruz, who was a favorite
singer of their father’s, symbolises their need to work through their grief.
Each of the brothers is affected by his loss in a different way. Tomás lis-
tens obsessively to the Cruz tape on his Walkman, though we never hear
it, and Sombra is debilitated by anxiety attacks that he calls ‘the tiger.’
It is, of course, their experience on the road (the move from stasis to
action), along with a love interest for Sombra, which helps him over-
come his indifference to the world.
The boys have a couple of adventures that bring them into contact
with other expressions of male subjectivity. When they are first chased
away from their apartment, they take a wrong turn and are surrounded
on a small street by local thugs. One, who has a gun, insists on riding
with them. They are forced to drink litres of beer (Tomás gets sick) and
listen to his chatter. When he goes into a store to get more beer, they
hop into the car, terrified, and drive away. Strangely, Sombra tells Tomás
not to think badly of the young thug because, like everyone else, he
just wanted love. It is interesting that Sombra realises the importance of
affective experiences, though until forced to leave the apartment, he did
not seek these out.
In their second encounter, they enter the UNAM during a strike.
Almost barred from going in, and called ‘scabs’ for breaking the strike
in the first place, they are given access by a friend. They make their way
to an auditorium where Ana is making a plea to hundreds of fellow strik-
ers for solidarity in order to achieve a resolution with the University.
However, the audience is packed with groups who are in no mood to
accept the offer to dissolve the strike. An ensuing argument between
Ana and her boyfriend in the audience (‘su novio’ according to Santos),
leads the students to start yelling at her to take her clothes off. The scene
reveals some interesting takes on masculinity and class. Ana’s boyfriend
contradicts her citing a defense of the right to strike as a right of the
working class. He posits the fight to retain free tuition (which is the basis
for the strike) as a working-class imperative because without free tuition
many students would not be able to attend the university. However, his
concern for the working class is not extended to a concern for her as
he insults her (Ana is white and likely upper class), to the delight of the
audience. At this point, his supporters start shouting ‘striptease, strip-
tease!’ When a fight breaks out in the auditorium, Ana slips away and
joins Sombra. The aggression exhibited by the students, largely male,
toward Ana is hypermasculine and hostile, in stark contrast to Sombra,
who is almost passive in the face of aggression, a trait he compensates for
with his intellect and wit.
Ana chooses to join the three young men, making them a foursome,
on their search for Epigmenio Cruz. She serves the same purpose for
Sombra as Rita had for Flama, Moko and Ulíses: she provides balance
through affect. Sombra is overly intellectual, and his paralysis is a symp-
tom of his lack of affect. Leys states that ‘Affect is the body’s way of pre-
paring itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative
dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience’ (2011: 442). As
they spend more time together, Ana and Sombra become close, and
the affection that she extends to him restores balance to Sombra, ena-
bling him to experience masculinity as embodied. Sombra’s incipient
empowerment is demonstrated when they finally meet Epigmenio, who
is rude to Tomás. Sombra delivers a speech to Epigmenio, who is old
and dying, and actually falls asleep, but it does not matter. The fact that
he defended his brother’s quest finally puts Tomás, who was obsessed
with Epigmenio, at ease. The happy ending reflects the restoration of
Sombra’s masculine role. However, Sombra was only able to reach this
equilibrium with the support of Ana.
Conclusion
The stories of the young protagonists belie fears and insecurities asso-
ciated with being part of a fragile middle class, which is represented by
their unstable lives: Flama’s parents are divorcing, Moko has to bear the
burden of his sexual identity alone and Ulíses bears the sole responsibil-
ity for the care of his grandmother. In the case of Güeros, Sombra and
Tomás have no father. In the face of the outer lives falling apart, the
male subjects in these films search for an anchor in the form of affect. It
is through the female characters that they are offered support for their
journey. Embodiment has come through the exploration of affect that
provides a balance to their rational masculinity. Laura Podalsky writes,
140 G. SEMINET
referring to a different group of films that includes Temporada but not

Güeros that ‘these films are less interested in the struggles of their pro-
tagonists with their natural or social environments than in using the
screen as a mobile canvas to trace the unfolding of subjectivities in time-
space’ (2011: 163).
Finally, both films rely on humor and irony to make serious points
about masculinity and the world external to the frame that are crucial
to understanding the personal struggles of the young men. In Güeros,
an example is the young men’s reliance on the young girl Aurora, who
lives one floor below them and has Down’s syndrome. Not only does she
facilitate the young men stealing electricity from her parent’s apartment
by passing cables from her apartment to theirs, but she also comforts
Sombra during a panic attack on a string phone. Though humorous, this
example also foregrounds the fact that, at the beginning of both films,
the young men are emasculated. Sombra and Santos are dependent
for their electricity on a young girl with Down’s syndrome. The exam-
ple represents the paralysis in the face of modern life and their inability
to balance their rational brains with their emotional ones. This lack of
affect, as I have argued, is countered by the female subjectivities embod-
ied in Rita and Ana, and even Aurora. Though the films intimate that
both women have family struggles of their own, their issues are ulti-
mately marginalised, privileging instead their role as therapeutic counter-
parts for the young men. Though we cannot be sure about the extent
to which each woman has an understanding of the affective role she is
playing in the lives of the young men, it is clear that female subjectivity is
intimately entwined in the emergence of middle-class masculinities.
Both films’ use humor, parody and social critique to grapple with the
affective dimensions of male subjectivity, and though the events in the
films are often presented humorously, the emotional hurdles that boys
and young men must jump in the process of ‘becoming masculine’ are not
trivial. By the end of the films the male characters exhibit a revised mascu-
linity with which they can be at ease, comfortable in their own skin. The
essence of both films is found in the exploration of the ‘big questions’ in
life: sexuality, love, death and family, and how the young men understand
and integrate these concepts into their subjective experiences through
micropolitical practices that empower them. Their ‘infraordinary’9 stories
are fleshed out through the writing and cinematic choices of Eimbcke and
Ruizpalacios who focus on the process and performances of young men
coming of age in the Mexican middle class in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. See the books by Louise Walker (2013) and Héctor Aguilar Camín and
Lorenzo Meyer (2010) for historical studies on the Mexican middle
classes.
2. Dan Russek (2012) and Laura Podalsky (2012) have also examined simi-
lar topics in Temporada de patos, though from different approaches and in
combination with other films.
3. When referring to traditional masculinities, I am thinking of the descrip-
tion offered by Sergio de la Mora, first of the macho image perpetuated
in the ideology of the cinema of the post-revolutionary Mexican state: a
protagonist who is ‘virile, brave, proud, sexually potent, and physically
aggressive’ (2006: 9). Of course, a lot of space and time passed, and the
traditional macho is no longer the predominant image of the Mexican
male, in particular in mainstream commercial cinema targeted at the mid-
dle classes, but the shadow of that larger-than-life figure still looms large.
4. Louise Walker paints a sobering picture of the adaptability of the middle
classes following the ‘crack’ of 1994: ‘Although NAFTA promised prosper-
ity, the Mexican peso collapsed in late 1994 and the middle classes suffered
yet another economic crisis—el crack. Their survival strategies included
selling assets, borrowing money, giving up mistresses, taking in Spanish lan-
guage students, cancelling auto insurance, and reducing consumption by
resoling shoes, eating out less, and buying cheaper clothes’ (2013: 202).
5. The focus on middle-class tastes does not offer a panoramic vision of the
diversity in the industry. There are many films produced that reflect the
mores of the working class as well. Sánchez Prado (2014) makes a distinc-
tion between his focus on political films and other popular genres.
6. Walker parallels Sánchez Prado’s characterisation of the importance of
the middle class in late twentieth-century Mexico. Sánchez Prado (2014)
chronicles the middle class alongside changes in the film industry, demon-
strating how their perspective on society came to be the predominant
trend in the political cinema of the period, whereas Walker, as a historian
and not a film scholar, traces the rise of a reconstituted middle class whose
turning point comes following the earthquake of 1985. She provides a his-
torical analysis of the middle class ‘story’ to fill a lacuna in which the mid-
dle class is ‘conspicuously absent from the scholarly and popular writing
about this history’ (2013: 198).
7. The niños héroes represent the epitome of patriotism and bravery. Rather
than surrender Mexico’s Chapultepec Castle to US forces in 1847, dur-
ing the Mexican-American War, they died defending the castle. According
to legend, one boy from the group, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself in the
Mexican flag and jumped to his death from the top of the castle, thus sav-
ing the flag from falling into enemy hands.
142 G. SEMINET
8. This is one of the major premises of Walker’s study of the middle class. She
writes: ‘This middle-class story, though, is lodged in both the Ministry of
the Interior intelligence reports and the presidential archives. In these doc-
uments another story of the earthquake, another discursive event emerges.
Residents of Tlatelolco experienced the incapacity, and even unwillingness,
of the PRI to resolve their problems. The PRI perceived the antipathy of
the middle classes with anxiety and dread. In fact, the party saw the unrav-
eling of its official Institutional Revolutionary project within its archetypal
social group, the middle classes’ (2013: 199).
9. In an interview, director Ruizpalacios describes the experiences of his charac-
ters as ‘infraordinary, rather than [the] extraordinary’ (cit. Salovaara 2014).
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———. 2003. Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. Durham:
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———. 2006. Men and Masculinity: The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in
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———. 2012. Landscapes of Subjectivity in Contemporary Mexican Cinema.
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CHAPTER 7
Beyond Pink or Blue: Portrayals

of Adolescence in Latin American Animated
Film
Milton Fernando González-Rodríguez
This chapter considers some of the most salient portrayals of female and
male adolescents in animated feature films produced in Latin America
since the turn of the twenty-first century. It explores how animated
spaces are deeply constrained by social categories, particularly in terms
of class and ethnicity, and how these spaces maintain long-established
tropes surrounding such categories. Yet, this chapter also shows that
there have been some paradigm shifts in the representation of Latin
American youth, specifically from a gender perspective. The underlying
notion is that these are images consumed mainly by younger generations
and that their ideological implications cannot be underestimated. Along
these lines, special emphasis is placed on the pedagogical effect of recon-
figured notions of girlhood and boyhood across various dissemination
outlets where animation plays a significant role.
Though the development of animation technology has increased the
production and consumption of animated film across Latin America,
M. F. González-Rodríguez (*) 
University of Iceland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

146 M. F. GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ
the medium is by no means a novelty in the region. Almost forgotten is

the fact that the world’s oldest animated feature film, El Apóstol/The
Apostle, is a silent political satire produced in Argentina in 1917. Quirino
Cristiani, the Italian-born illustrator behind this production, is also cred-
ited with the first sound animated feature film, Peludópolis (1931).
Contentiously, both films served as platforms to present, in Cristiani’s
own words, ‘an “amiable” caricature of President Yrigoyen, the leader
of Argentina’s Radical Party, who pledged to fight corruption’ (Osmond
2010: 32). From its early phases, it became clear that animation had
the power to disseminate ideologies and values by means of enchanting
imagery, erroneously perceived by many, at first sight, as innocent or sim-
plistic. Although the production of animation across the continent lan-
guished for almost four decades, the political character of the medium
rose to prominence again during the militant stage of Latin American
cinema in the 1970s. Increased television ownership rates across the
continent in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a major diffusion of ani-
mated televisual media originally produced in the United States. Until
modern times, American hegemony within the visual realm remains
one of the major obstacles faced by local illustrators, a development
that might exert negative effects on the audiences on a long-term basis.
Admittedly, the tendency of U.S.-produced animated media to ‘offer
up an externally-constructed, highly condensed and almost parodical
representation of Latin American national identities for Latin American
audiences’ (Goldman 2013: 26) can have disruptive effects on young
viewers. In this sense, recent animated narratives produced locally are
agential attempts to reclaim mediatised spaces, and serve as reflective
accounts of Latin Americans’ understandings of themselves. Over the
last decade, technological advances have encouraged the use of animated
images for all intents and purposes, recalibrating and expanding the spaces
in which this art form is consumed, and conquering new dissemination
outlets that range from the advertisement industry to educational material.
Animated films are graphic representations created in labs and stu-
dios where technology plays a significant role. Hence, ‘animation pro-
vides more technical options and fewer creative obstacles than other film
genres’ (Artz 2015: 94). Thematically, they can combine a wider range
of symbolic figurations, graphic abstractions and fantasised scenarios.
Since animated productions aim mostly at younger viewers, there are a
considerable number of narratives touching upon the notion of child-
hood and adolescence. By focusing on the figures of female and male
7 BEYOND PINK OR BLUE: PORTRAYALS OF ADOLESCENCE … 147
adolescents, it becomes clear that illustrated storylines display similar

patterns of representation to those commonly seen in narratives where
the central figures are adults. One identifiable commonality is the influ-
ence of transnational conventions and presumptions about an ‘imagined’
teen that rejects geographical, and often cultural, limitations. Recent ani-
mated visuals attest that ‘teen film not only has narrative content cen-
tred on coming-of-age trajectories and the questions of maturity but
has produced, and continually refines, an historically significant audio-
visual vocabulary that cannot be reduced to film style’ (Driscoll 2011:
162). In the Latin American case, this vocabulary includes allusions and
references to class-related variations and the social dimension of eth-
nicity, elaborated from within societies known for marked disparities
between their members. In varying ways, illustrated narratives such as
Los Pulentos/The Pulentos (dir. Werne Núñez, Chile, 2005), La leyenda
de la Nahuala/The Legend of the Nahuala (dir. Ricardo Arnaiz, Mexico,
2007), Minhocas 2/Worms 2 (dir. Paolo Conti and Arthur Nunes, Brazil,
2013), Un gallo con muchos huevos/A Rooster With Many Eggs (dir.
Gabriel Riva Alatriste and Rodolfo Riva Palacio, Mexico, 2015) and
La leyenda del Chupacabras/The Legend of Chupacabras (dir. Alberto
Rodriguez, Mexico, 2016) offer a glimpse of how illustrators have cho-
sen to express, among other aspects, gender-based differences, socio-eco-
nomic divisions, assumptions linked to race and the enduring legacy of a
colonial hierarchical order.
Illustrations of Girlhood and Boyhood

Conceived by Ricardo Arnaiz, Las leyendas stands out for attempting
to produce animated versions of urban legends, myths and fables easily
recognised by most Mexicans. According to data collected by Canacine
(Mexican National Chamber of the Film Industry), the four produc-
tions, La leyenda de la Nahuala (2007), La leyenda de la Llorona/The
Legend of the Llorona (2011), La leyenda de las momias/The Legend of
the Mummies (2014) and La leyenda del Chupacabras (2016), have alto-
gether attracted over eight million domestic cinema viewers.
It is an understatement to describe the films as a systematic study
of national folklore. All four productions are based on narratives inti-
mately linked to specific geographical locations across the country and
are enhanced with scenic illustrations that highlight the physicality of
eighteenth-century Mexico. The saga revolves around Leo San Juan, a
teenager who appears as slightly reluctant to accept his destined role to

combat adversity and defeat dark forces. Over the course of the series,
Leo grows, matures and becomes ultimately more committed to his
unsolicited quest of fighting frightful creatures, such as Nahuala, Llorona
and Chupacabras.
Although the young boy remains hesitant to embrace his calling, he
progressively understands that his ability of interacting with otherworldly
entities is crucial to ensure the triumph of good over evil. Privately, Leo
is set to prove he is braver than his brother Nando, and in this sense, the
story is informed by traditional notions of masculine honour and duty.
In terms of social background, Julián Woodside observes that Leo comes
from a mestizo well-to-do family who ‘posee una panadería y cuenta con
una nana’ (own a bakery and have a nanny at their disposal) (2012: 74).
In his quest, the young hero receives help from a supernatural group of
friends that includes Don Andrés (an old Spanish knight), Alebrije (a
colourful mythical creature), Finando and Moribunda (two sugar skulls)
and Teodora Villavicencio (the ghostly figure of a teenage girl from the
future). Set in colonial Mexico, this is, in all respects, a portrait of a
stratified society in which hierarchies seem unchallengeable, even in the
after-world. According to Ánima Studios, the rationale behind these pro-
ductions was a need to portray authentic Mexican stories, complemented
by a biting sense of humour and a dash of fear (Gutiérrez 2016).
The films serve as platforms to witness the expected transformation
of young Leo, a hesitant yet courageous hero-in-the-making, but also
to illustrate the overarching structures of gender and class. By means of
stereotypical representations, Leo is presented as a character who grows
and develops into a dominant, protective figure. Despite his mortal
condition, he proves to be able to confront life-threating dark forces,
encountering voracious creatures and merciless antagonists and emerg-
ing miraculously unscathed each time. Teodora, by contrast, despite
her supernatural condition, enhanced with the powers of flight and
the ability to disappear and reappear at will, does not seem to evolve.
She remains a caricatured version of a twenty-first-century infantilised,
overtly pampered, spoiled, upper-class girl, who is meticulously tailored
to come across as a good-hearted but snobbish, obnoxious and some-
what selfish secondary figure. In animated visuals, ‘characters either dis-
play grit and determination to escape from restrictive cultural constraints,
or, just as often, characters find or are granted superpowers that allow
them to use magic or supernatural gifts to escape their surroundings’
(Artz 2015: 99). It becomes evident that Teodora’s role is intrinsically

linked to her condition as an otherworldly being, only visible to Leo and
to other ghostly creatures. Her good intentions and attempts to help the
main hero are presented as minor gestures. Teodora stands out mostly
for her exaggerated use of English loanwords, her continuous references
to fashion and her obsession with social media. Leo, however limited
by his human nature, manages to fight against mythical animals, evil
witches, gloomy deities, unreliable spirits and zombies, whereas ghostly
Teodora, despite her magical powers, merely shows signs of uneasiness,
anxiety and fear.
The parallel realities of Leo and Teodora can be explained by the
dichotomies of past/present, local/cosmopolitan and human/ghost,
but also by the references Arnaiz makes to what gender constitutes.
Through practical jokes, forced puns and double entendres, the sequel
conveys the idea that women are weak and subaltern to men. Remarks
such as ‘ni que fuera niña’ (as if I was a girl) or ‘como princesa’ (like
a princess), employed to refer to a soft action executed by a man, are
used to infer that there is a considerable difference between both gen-
ders, the male counterpart being the preferable one. The treatment of
gender renders the approach to class and ethnicity more visual, particu-
larly because the stories are supposed to take place in eighteenth-century
Mexico. The figure of indigenous Xóchitl, a teenage girl working as a
maid for the Villavicencios, denotes the hierarchical structure that sep-
arates her from Teodora, the daughter of her employers. In a passage in
La leyenda de las momias, Teodora goes as far as to complain that, since
evil forces have captured Xóchitl, her house has been untidy and her dog
has been left unattended. In varying ways, the script of the stories shows
pervasive aspects of Mexican cultural memory, set in colonial times but
based on modern stereotypes and conventions (Woodside 2012). Las ley-
endas’ saga confirms that animated narratives are generally exempt from
fidelity to historical conditions because viewers respond both cognitively
and physiologically to the meanings expressed in the stories (Bjökqvist
and Lagerspetz 1985). It is evident that Arnaiz includes intentionally
anachronistic, hybrid and recognisable elements to make the stories more
appealing. In fact, many of the tropes that are strengthened by these
illustrations resemble deliberate attempts to conform to the cultural
repertoire and set of ideologies of potential audiences.1 The sense of
humour, for instance, is carefully calibrated to resonate with patriarchal,
machista worldviews.
Paradoxically, during the decade since the first film was released, the
representation of young girls in Las leyendas has become more essential-
ist and stereotypical. In a similar vein, the newer films are more inclined
to subordinate class to ethnic divisions, and to suggest prescriptively
that indigenous and dark-skinned characters are to remain in subaltern
positions.
By analysing the first and third films, it is possible to find portrayals
that champion a less archetypical approach to gender. Xóchitl in La ley-
enda de la Nahuala and Valentina in La leyenda de las momias stand out
for their ingenuity, bravery and strength. Although they are portrayed as
heroes according to a male-biased paradigm, their roles counterbalance
the centrality that Leo is given throughout the films. In La leyenda de la
Nahuala, Xóchitl is originally depicted as a powerful indigenous entity
whose help proves crucial in saving the city of Puebla. In this film, Leo,
who is still a child, has the task of rescuing his brother from a haunted
house jealously guarded by Nahuala, a wicked creature with the ability
of taking any human shape she desires. Xóchitl acts as a protective fig-
ure, counteracting against any threat or aggression from the evil spec-
tre. A gendered reading of the story is that Nahuala, the most powerful
and menacing force, is the ghostly version of an indigenous woman.
Through addition and deletion of elements, the story distorts the orig-
inal Mesoamerican folk tale by manipulating and obscuring the figure of
Nahuals, good-hearted spirits believed to serve as connections between
the humans and nature (Woodside 2012), although it does highlight the
rootedness of indigeneity in national folklore. The film marks the first
encounter of audiences with Leo and Nando, but also with imagery that
acknowledges that a mestizo society is embedded in an autochthonous
pre-Columbian past. Leo’s quest is not easy but offers plenty of opportu-
nities to display many of the indigenous elements found in the Mexican
psyche and repertoire of ‘cultural legends’ (MacLaird 2013: 61).
As for Valentina in La leyenda de las momias, she embodies the
mourning daughter of a miner who has died in an accident caused by
a greedy European searching to revive his dead wife. The young girl
is notorious for her strong sense of agency, which contests the clear-
cut gender differences found throughout most of the sequel. Valentina
shows more signs of bravery and commitment than Leo. She is coura-
geous, fast, daring and resilient, most likely because of her humble back-
ground and her position as an orphan, an aspect she has in common with
Leo. Her quest is to clear her deceased father’s name, as he has been
accused of causing the explosion in the mine. In line with the male-
dominant tropes that abound in the film, Valentina dresses as a boy with
a cape in order to be able to roam around Guanajuato searching for the
truth about the accident. Passing as Luis is the only way she thinks it
is possible to fulfil her goal. Supported by her token of masculinity, the
young girl saves Leo’s life and teams up with him to free the city from
the dark forces that have awakened the dead. The teenage pair pledge
to work together until they have completed their task, a promise they
keep despite Leo’s astonishment when he discovers Luis does not exist.
With a kiss on the mouth, they part ways once order has been regained.
In the final scene, a Catholic nun drives Valentina away in a horse-drawn
carriage while Leo’s invisible team celebrates that evil has been defeated.
The imagery conveys the idea that she will have a bright future and that
despite being an orphan, there is a sense of hope and change. The fig-
ure of the nun, slightly unnerved by the kiss that Valentina gives Leo,
foreshadows and reminds audiences the adventures have come to an end
for her, while the liberated boy can prepare himself for his next quest.
After all, it is eighteenth-century Mexico and girls need to abide by cer-
tain rules. As for hovering Teodora and Xóchitl, they are destined to
remain in their condition of stable, invisible spirits that follow and assist
Leo along his way. Their main commitment seems to be to respond to
the needs of the young hero without any signs that this sense of stagna-
tion fuels anxieties. From a class perspective, Xóchitl remains peripheral
to Teodora, bound to perpetual servitude and with little opportunity for
growth.
In the first film of Las leyendas, superbly fictitious scenarios, alluring
hybrid elements, sumptuous colours and the richness of detail do not
shelter the illustrations from the reality of the adult world. The chosen
palette, used to articulate differences between genders, is used expres-
sively to denote connections between ethnicity and social status. The
highly decorative appearance of the sequel does not conceal the uneven
dichotomies boyhood/girlhood and mestizo/European, especially in the
most recent film, La leyenda del Chupacabras. Leo has the virtues, vigour
and character that reflect his condition of an imagined, desirable male
figure, but also the status of someone who might play a role within soci-
ety. As for Teodora and Xóchitl, their invisible nature as spirits echoes
their vaporous indefinable influence within the story, and in society at
large. Artistically, the portrayals of class and gender are symbolic, index-
ical, semiotic and iconic. Leo wears a white shirt and brown trousers,
Teodora is confined to various hues of pink, and colourful combinations

are mostly reserved for characters of other ethnicities, e.g. Nana Dionisa
(Leo’s dark-skinned nanny) and Xóchitl.
As is the case in other realms of the world, recent animated visuals have
turned their attention to minorities, resulting in the inclusion of indige-
nous elements as part of the cultural repertoire of Latin American chil-
dren (Bradford 2007). Through various techniques, ethnicity has emerged
as an identity marker within films catering for children, partly because it
offers ample opportunities to create stereotypical characters and carica-
turise traits affixed to social groups. Animation has become a platform to
denote that there is more than one version of adolescence across Latin
America. Admittedly, middle-class teens playing in a rock band (Los
Pulentos, Chile, 2007) face different challenges to an accented, indige-
nous young maid (La leyenda de la Nahuala, Mexico, 2007), a sporty girl
who is rocked by hardships (Minhocas 2, Brazil, 2013) or a shy adolescent
about to lose his home (Un gallo con muchos huevos, Mexico, 2015).
Originally, the production of animated visuals was encouraged by the
‘great profit potential of the all-ages audiences’ (MacLaird 2013: 61).
The eventual success of films such as La leyenda de la Nahuala—one of
the most awarded and widely screened Latin American animated films—
emboldened producers to expand upon and extend the themes related
to mestizo and indigenous heritage; Nikté (Mexico, 2009) and Rodencia
y el diente de la princesa/A Mouse Tale (Peru, 2012) are evidence of this
development.
Ethnicity and Social Status in Animated Visual Texts

Directed and co-produced by Ricardo Arnaiz, Nikté tells the story of a
twenty-first-century teenage girl who falls asleep and dreams she is trav-
elling in time to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. In her dream, the city
of Tabasco turns into an ancient metropolis known as Yocan. Modern
Mexico is left behind and the ruling power is in the hands of the Olmecs.
In her new life, Nikté is an orphan—a recurrent theme—who has been
adopted by a middle-class family. Disgruntled about the household
chores her adoptive mother assigns her, the young girl becomes obsessed
with the idea of ascending to a higher class, and privately aspires to reign
over Yocan one day. After learning of a prophecy that forebodes the
descent of a princess from the sky, Nikté decides to convince the Olmecs
that she is the emissary they have been awaiting. Nikté is unaware that
the prophecy also states that she is required to complete several tasks
before she can reign over Yocan. Supernatural elements, ghosts, mon-
sters, giant animals and humanised insects are part of the plot, which are
not a novelty for this type of animated narrative. Yet, the story does not
imply that pre-Columbian civilisations are unnatural, primitive or bar-
baric. Olmecs are portrayed as a civilisation intimately linked to supernat-
ural forces, but not necessarily from an essentialist or excessively parodic
viewpoint. Despite the qualities of the narrative, Arnaiz’s film was object
of controversy among communities of Olmec and Mayan descent. The
director was accused of plagiarism (Reyes 2009), but also of the reduc-
tion and manipulation of elements taken directly from Mayan culture,
or from copyrighted stories based on Mayan heritage. The film was criti-
cised for lacking accuracy in its depiction of rites, architectural structures,
natural landscapes and the use of tools.
However, Nikté makes an important contribution for three reasons.
First of all, large studios had not previously produced films or televised
series of this budget that were entirely dedicated to indigenous themes,
nor had there been any previous attempts to screen an indigeneity-
oriented narrative for children in so many movie theatres. Secondly, this
movie raised awareness about portrayals of indigenous traditions, cul-
ture and history, and the risks incurred by misrepresentations or exces-
sive hybridisation of elements taken from pre-Columbian heritage for
the sake of entertainment. Even if Nikté was conceived based on poor
historic documentation—Mayan instead of Olmec mythology—it did
shed light on forgotten ancient and contemporary Olmec heritage.
Admittedly, Arnaiz resorts to inaccuracies and recurs to stereotypes
in order to increase the appeal of the film among audiences (Córdoba
Flores 2013). However, for viewers of Olmec descent, it was an oppor-
tunity to see elements of their culture being included as a valid and wor-
thy part of Mexican history. Thirdly, given that Nikté is presented as an
indigenous girl, she has the potential to become a role model, at least
for young female spectators, in a country where feminine characters are
not often depicted as heroes, and certainly not if they belong to ethnic
minorities. It is worth noting that she fulfils her task and attains her goals
without having any superpowers, or the deep wisdom affixed to native
characters in many illustrated narratives.
As is often the case in many filmic representations focused on native
communities, ultimate power is not given to those who believe that tech-
nology can overrule nature, or who are driven by greed and selfishness;
nor is it to be found in the hands of those who fail to acknowledge the

legitimacy of pre-Columbian societies or those who ignore old traditions.
Indigenous adolescents are depicted as characters trying to come to
terms with the societies in which they live, struggling to accept authority
(mainly from parents), desperate to prove themselves, but always willing
to follow tradition, adhere to ancient customs and conform to the norms
of their community.
A valid observation is that a compilation of indigenous elements and
familiar archetypes strengthens the stereotype of indigenous characters as
a distant Other, individuals of a different nature that are either innocent
and noble, or merciless and savage (Van Ginneken 2007), or spiritual,
powerful, caring, and wise defenders of nature (King et al. 2010). Due to
the many possibilities that animation offers, their physical characteristics
are exaggerated, and modified to render the films more attractive, and
entertaining. In general, the clichéd image of indigenous communities
in the role of ‘New Age’ entities unable to harm anyone, or of ‘passive,
wise sages’ (Hearne 2008: 94) who witness their own destruction, is still
widespread. In line with imagery frequently found in cartoons produced
in the other countries (for example, in the United States), indigenous
youths are presented as bearers of their cultural legacy. The close-knit
networks behind the production and distribution of animation explain
the transnational nature of this medium, and the proliferation and dis-
semination of topics and tropes. The internationalisation of this form of
art/entertainment explains why there are standard elements found in
teen films (Driscoll 2011), the status of outsider being one of them.
Rodencia y el diente de la princesa depicts the quest of a young mouse,
Edam, to find his place in the world. The story is set in a kingdom of
mice, known as Rodencia, but with all the traits of an ancient Andean
civilisation. Rodencia is about to be destroyed by their archenemies, the
Rat Kingdom, unless they manage to find a little girl’s tooth. Driven by
his desire to excel, the introvert mouse in his teens decides to join two
brave warriors in the quest for the tooth. Edam lacks self-confidence,
partly because he has never thrived as a wizard despite both hours of
practice and the relentless patience of his master. This originally scripted
production, directed by David Bisbano, ranked as the second most pop-
ular film of 2012 in its home country (Arce Ruiz 2012), and the first
Peruvian animation film to be sold to markets outside Latin America.
Bisbano’s film forces an anthropomorphic reading upon its viewers,
who quickly realise that Edam epitomises the figure of a young boy of
Quechua descent. The use of colour evokes the richness of an Inca-
inspired magical world, decorated with structures, shapes and abstrac-
tions that make indirect demonstrative reference to Andean culture, in
one way or another (Del Aguila 2011).
By referring to himself as a campesino (farmer), Edam alludes to what
indigenous communities call themselves across the Andean region. His
clothes include a poncho, and a chullo (an Andean hat with earflaps), and
the magic words he uses are in Quechua. Edam has upwardly mobile
aspirations, even though he is aware that he belongs to the lowest seg-
ment of society, and that he is not a particularly talented wizard. His luck
changes when he decides to embark on the mission of finding the tooth,
and subsequently succeeds in doing so. Edam marries the princess, and
is set to become the King of Rodencia. In this sense, the producers of
the film do not portray Andean mice, thus people, as passive, or helpless
communities. Characters are neither framed as the exotic Other, speak-
ing accented Spanish or belonging to the past. Rodencia y el diente de
la princesa is an important contribution because it includes the use of
Quechua as a part of the cultural legacy of the country, and coherently
reflects and critiques the social contrivances that impinge upon ethnic
minorities.
Although the story does not normalise the use of the Amerindian
language completely, reserving it for magic words, it does highlight
the centrality of this language for the ethnic communities of the coun-
try. Bisbano’s film can be understood as an example of inclusivity, given
that it conveys to audiences the message that wearing a poncho, a chullo,
and speaking Quechua are not markers of inferiority or derogation. In
fact, in line with the internationalisation of this item as a stylish accessory
(Chico 2013), during several of the screenings across Peru, there were
examples of children and adults who came to the movie wearing chullos.
Paradoxically, Rodencia y el diente de la princesa also offers an inverted
reflection on the interrelation between ethnicity and social status (class).
In the last scene, it becomes evident that the current king of Rodencia
comes from Argentina, has blue eyes, and dwells in a European-style
palace. Edam’s father-in-law and his courtiers are not depicted wearing
chullos, but refined attire that clearly distils the Eurocentric, medievalist
notions that Bisbano scrutinises throughout the film. A possible reading
of the story is that certain of these structures are unchangeable.
Animation as Cultural and Pedagogical Artefact

Due to recent developments in the field of animation, the production of
illustrated visuals is gaining ground as a mediatised practice that material-
ises in artistic, cultural, but nonetheless pedagogical artefacts. It becomes
impossible to ignore the social and instructional value of illustrated nar-
ratives. An important aspect to consider is the relation between media
and society and the numerous ways in which media influence how view-
ers perceive the world (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler 2010).
Considering the age of their audiences and the topics they cover,
animated productions lie at the intersection of entertainment and edu-
cation. Illustrated narratives that focus on adolescents cater to a broad
spectrum of viewers, including teenagers who interpret them as self-
reflective formulations and guiding indications. Studies have found that
young audiences seem to learn more from fiction than fact because it
is more appealing to them (Qvortrup 2005). In varying ways, teenage
characters have the power to serve as role models for coetaneous audi-
ences, but also as role models for younger spectators who will eventually
reach puberty and enter their adolescent years.
From an ethnicity and social status point of view, it is worth reflecting
on how media present hierarchies, particularly in visual texts that offer a
racialised approach to class. In many cases, for some of these young audi-
ences, this might be the first time they learn about pre-Columbian herit-
age, their descendants or the hybrid nature of Latin America. Examining
current trends in indigenous representation has also become relevant
because some of these films have broken box office records (Rodríguez-
Bermúdez 2007), and have reached audiences across the region, and
beyond. Most of them have made use of animation to present adven-
tures where magical pre-Columbian civilisations or indigenous char-
acters are portrayed as heroic or powerful. Emulating North American
animated visuals, Latin American productions do not avoid displaying
‘the inevitable, if uncomfortable, force of colonisation, simultaneously
offering a soft critique of past practices and perceptions, even as they
ground national origins and identities in (relation to) indigeneity’ (King
et al. 2010: 163). Yet, images of minorities based on positive clichés can
also lead to unrealistic expectations, reinforced stereotypes and mislead-
ing perceptions of self (Cabrera 2010); these are all effects which can
negatively impact indigenous viewers. Distinct from other formats that
include a broader range of audiences, animated productions are engi-

neered to attract chiefly vulnerable, easily influenced and manipulated
spectators. The figure of teenage girls and boys in these texts therefore
has an artistic and didactic edge.
Visual texts are widely consumed and the imagery they depict is
thought to reflect social ideas, beliefs and values. Despite their relatively
positive, gaudy, fantasised and figurative compositions, often assumed
not to be representational, mimetic or realistic, animated storylines pro-
mote and advocate sensitivities. Youth is depicted according to the set of
ideologies adult illustrators believe the audience will share, but also based
on their own perception of how an idealised teen should be, or on the
set of values to which they believe teens should adhere.
This is particularly relevant in the case of younger viewers for whom
the visual arts become their first encounter with elements or social
groups with whom they have never come into contact, or for those
who are still trying to interpret their surroundings. Cartoons have long
attracted and catered for younger audiences and are strongly believed to
have an impact on audiences and their sense of the world with endur-
ing effects beyond their adolescent years (Moyer-Gusé and Riddle 2009).
Stories that approach girlhood and boyhood from different angles, and
which highlight the preference of one over the other, recklessly inculcate
these notions among unbiased, overly credulous viewers.
As noted by Diaz Soto, enchantment in visual texts ‘is not without
its price if it seduces its audience into suspending critical judgment on
the messages produced by such films’ (2000: 104) in terms of ethnic-
ity and class, but certainly also in terms of gender. Animation remains
a male-dominated medium where most of the main characters are
men/boys and examples abound of stories where female figures are
barely present. Widely acclaimed Metegol/Underdogs (dir. Juan José
Campanella, Argentina, 2013) stands out for reaching many more audi-
ences than any other Latin American animated feature film, but also for
suggesting that women do not belong in the world of football, and for
its one-sided treatment of ‘male values’ such as team spirit, paternity and
fraternity (Garton 2015). Campanella presents a mystical abstraction of
the centrality of football in the Argentine psyche, but also provides a
portrait of machismo, by implying that women are only minimally needed
in a story that revolves around competitive sports. Young girls are a
minority in animated stories, mainly because a prominent convention in
cartoons is that ‘no questions about social hierarchy are broached’ and
that the ‘hero’s tasks and triumphs always re-establish status quo, wealth
and power as normalcy’ (Artz 2015: 101). This seems to apply to stories
where a young girl attains her goals, but her happiness is complete once
she meets the prince of her dreams (Nikté), or where a princess simply
awaits her saviour (Rodencia y el diente de la princesa). Ultimately, as ani-
mation becomes more widespread, the best hopes rest on a future gen-
eration of female illustrators who advocate for a more diversified range
of female characters. Ultimately, involvement of women in the field of
animation seems to be crucial in the dismantling of gender-oriented
hierarchies.
Conclusion
As with other visual arts, production is linked to resources and other
market factors, which do not necessarily translate into cultural outputs
in which all sectors of society are included either as subjects or view-
ers. Animation is a format that reinforces hierarchies and reaffirms the
centrality of the concepts of class and gender. Since the focus in those
narrative discussed above is on creating enchanting stories that res-
onate among audiences, specificity and historicity are not priorities.
These animated stories present adolescence as a stage in which a sense
of self-awareness can be awakened, but also as the chronological step in
the attainment of goals and the instigation of change. From a gender
perspective, illustrators depict teenage girls either as leading characters
with certain degree of autonomy, or as passive, subaltern and supportive
figures. In all cases, animated stories portray adolescent males as strong,
daring, independent and central figures, often entitled with the task of
saving their communities, families or female lovers. In terms of class,
the tradition of animation of preserving hierarchies explains depictions
of indigenous teen maids, affluent mestizo adolescents and European-
looking sovereigns. Social mobility for young characters is an option,
except when it contravenes long-established hierarchies informed by
colonial understandings of ethnicity and race. Metaphorically, illustrators
are more willing to invert, mix and combine the colours pink (commonly
assigned to girls) and blue (alluding indexically to boys) than the iconic
hues of black, brown and white, commonly used to convey notions of
ethnicity.
Note
1. It is necessary to consider that not all children do see these films and that
going to the movies or watching cartoons is not an option for everyone
across Latin America. Here, the key point is to realise that to be part of the
audience is not enough to be able to afford a movie ticket or own a televi-
sion set. As it has been pointed out, across Latin America, childhood with
all it entails becomes ‘a privilege of the rich and practically non-existent for
the poor’ (Goldstein 2008: 415).
Filmography
La leyenda del Chupacabras. 2016. Dir. by Alberto Rodriguez.
La leyenda de la Nahuala. 2007. Dir. by Ricardo Arnaiz.
Los Pulentos. 2007. Dir. by Julio Pot.
Metegol. 2013. Dir. by Juan José Campanella.
Minhocas 2. 2013. Dir. by Paolo Conti and Arthur Nunes.
Rodencia y el diente de la princesa. 2012. Dir. by David Bisbano.
Un gallo con muchos huevos. 2015. Dir. by Gabriel Riva Alatriste and Rodolfo
Riva Palacio.
Bibliography
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lla. Luces, December 26. Available here http://archivo.elcomercio.pe/luces/
cine/2012-cine-peruano-muchos-estrenos-poca-taquilla-noticia-1514662.
Artz, Lee. 2015. Animating Transnational Capitalism. Journal of Intercultural
Communication Research 44 (2): 93–107.
Björkqvist, Kaj, and Kristi Lagerspetz. 1985. Children’s Experience of Three
Types of Cartoons at Two Age Levels. International Journal of Psychology 20:
77–93.
Bradford, Clare. 2007. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s
Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2012. Encyclopaedia of Urban Legends. Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO.
Cabrera, Luis. 2010. The Practice of Global Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Canacine. 2017. Histórico de Taquilla. Online Source. Available here http://
www.canacine.mx. Accessed 13 Mar 2017.
Chico, Beverly. 2013. Hats and Headwear Around the World: A Cultural
Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Flores, Córdoba, and José María. 2013. La leyenda tepehua del eclipse de sol.
Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana.
Del Aguila, Sonia. 2011. ART Lima: “Filme peruana animado íntegramente en
3D costará 4 millones de dólares”. El Comecio, February 2. Available here
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mente-3d-costara-millones-dolares-noticia-707670. Accessed 9 Oct 2017.
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Peter Lang.
Dovey, Jonathan, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2007. From Margin to Center:
Biographies of Technicity and the Construction of Hegemonic Games
Culture. In The Players’ Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and
Gaming, ed. J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Berg.
Garton, Gabriela. 2015. “Memorias”, machos y mujeres en Metegol de Juan
José Campanella y Eduardo Sacheri. XI Jornadas de Sociología. Available here
http://cdsa.aacademica.org/000-061/955.pdf. Accessed 9 Oct 2017.
Goldman, S. Karen. 2013. Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros: The
Representation of Latin America in Disney’s “Good Neighbour” Films. In
Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality
and Disability, ed. Johnson Cheu. London: McFarland.
Goldstein, Donna. 2008. Nothing Bad Intended: Child Discipline, Punishment,
and Survival in a Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In Small Wars:
The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Gross, Larry. 2002. Minorities, Majorities and the Media. In Media, Ritual,
and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes, James Curran, and Elihu Katz. London:
Routledge.
Gutiérrez, Vicente. 2016. Ánima Estudios construye franquicia cinematográfica.
El Economista, October 18. Available here https://www.google.co.uk/search?-
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gfe_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=C1rbWdTZHYqA4gSph5Aw. Accessed 13 Mar 2017.
Hearne, Joanna. 2008. Indigenous Animation: Educational Programming,
Narrative Interventions, and Children’s Cultures. In Global Indigenous Media:
Cultures, Poetics, and Politics, ed. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart.
King, C. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo.
2010. Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary
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Knopf, Kerstin. 2010. Aboriginal Media on the Move: An Outside Perspective
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Hafsteinsson and Marian Bredin. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.
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contemporáneas 36: 65–84.
PART III
Gender and Politics

CHAPTER 8
Growing Pains: Young People and Violence

in Peru’s Fiction Cinema
Sarah Barrow
Peru has a sporadic and idiosyncratic history of film-making, domi-

nated by Lima-based directors and by tensions among cultural creators
over how to use cinema, in both political and social terms, as part of the
shaping of a sense of a nation that recognises its enormous diversity. The
transformative process of ‘coming of age’ has been used as a narrative,
thematic and ideological device in much of the fiction cinema that has
emerged from Peru over the last four decades. Moreover, a large major-
ity of the more internationally well-known and critically acclaimed feature
films from this period have dealt with the violence between government
and insurgent group Shining Path that rocked Peru from 1980 onwards,
using the conflict as a key dramatic device for the exploration on screen
of those tensions that still run deep in Peruvian society today. Indeed,
an initial cluster of Shining Path feature films, made between 1988 and
1998 by the likes of Lima-based directors Francisco Lombardi (The Lion’s
Den, 1988), Marianne Eyde (You Only Live Once, 1992) and Alberto
Durant (Courage, 1998) and so-called ‘regional’ film-makers Mélinton
Eusebio (Tears of Fire, 1996), portrayed events through fiction cinema
S. Barrow (*) 
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

166 S. BARROW
with an immediacy that resonated with emotional intensity. Such direct-

ness reflected to some degree the fact that the production journeys of
these titles overlapped with some of the worst excesses of the political and
social violence of Shining Path, including restrictions under the Fujimori
regime of freedoms of expression, and with significant shifts in the fund-
ing policy for film production in Peru that resulted in further precarity.1
This essay focuses on two Peruvian feature films that deploy young
protagonists to revisit a nation’s troubled past marked by political vio-
lence, which thereby situates them as part of a trend in Latin American
cinema to mobilise the perspective and experiences of young people for
broader purposes (Smith 2015: 165; Rocha and Seminet 2012: 126).
Whilst critical attention has been paid to the topic of violence itself as a
cinematic metaphor for the struggle for identity and nation formation
in Latin America, and the image of the child is a widely debated device
for exploring the processes of self-discovery, this chapter goes further
by interrogating the specific use of the image of a young person at the
very epicentre of this period of social, political and cultural turbulence in
Peru. The analysis of Paloma de papel/Paper Dove (dir. Fabrizio Aguilar
2003) and Las malas intenciones/Bad Intentions (dir. Rosario García-
Montero 2011) highlights a desire by the film-makers to mediate their
own memories of events and of the aftermath of Shining Path violence
from the perspective of their young protagonists. In so doing, the analysis
also explores questions of personal and collective identity and of mem-
ory in films whose protagonists’ lives have been dramatically and traumat-
ically affected by the struggles of the recent past. Taking inspiration from
the work of Karen Lury and adapting it to this context, I argue that the
young person’s story in each case serves as ‘metonym for wider suffer-
ing’ and as blank screen on which to ‘project adult emotions and fears’
(2010: 106–107). Moreover, I reveal some of the affective strategies used
to create works of fiction in the context of larger public debates about
past traumas and current anxieties that have adapted topical stories and
have succeeded in connecting with audiences worldwide who may have
little knowledge of the specific circumstances that frame each narrative.
Returning Home: Paloma de papel/Paper Dove

Paper Dove was the first feature film of the new millennium made with
state backing to take the political violence between the Shining Path and
the military as its explicit subject. It was also Peru’s Oscar entry in 2004
8 GROWING PAINS: YOUNG PEOPLE AND VIOLENCE IN PERU’S … 167
and is still noted as one of the biggest local hits in terms of box office
receipts. In an interview given at the time of the film’s screening at the
2004 Havana Festival of Latin American Cinema, the young director
explained that his debut feature was a tale based on reports he heard on
TV about the violence while a young boy himself; he further confirmed
that for him it was really important ‘to tell stories that [were] linked to
[his] country and its problems’ (2004: 7). His film takes what at first
glance appears to be quite a conventional formal approach to the coming
of age of its young protagonist, but interweaves it into the context of
Peru of the 1980s and 1990s in a way that reveals more about the deep
social schisms left by that conflict.
Despite that sense of local specificity, this is a film that works on
several levels, with broad themes that help to ‘bring into focus subject
matter that resonates across historical and cultural boundaries’, along-
side more locally based issues that ‘arise within, and remain relevant
to, a highly specific historical or cultural formation’ (Hjort 2000: 106).
The local issue at the heart of Paper Dove is clearly the effect of politi-
cal violence on an Andean community, and on its children in particular;
its main perennial concern is linked to the experience of transitioning to
adolescence in extreme circumstances. This is a tale of abrupt ‘coming
of age’ recounted from the point of view of a boy caught in the cross-
fire of insurgency versus military. Young Juan (Antonio Callirgos) is pre-
sented as an unwitting victim of both sides, in that his abduction by the
insurgents and the act of his mother’s brutal killing in his presence are
emphasised as reasons for his being part of Shining Path. Moreover, the
voiceover that frames the opening and closing of his story stresses that
Juan’s experiences represent the lot of hundreds of young indigenous
people who suffered a similar fate. The film was widely viewed through-
out Peru, offering the chance for this important period of Peru’s history
to be remembered and debated in the public sphere. It demonstrated a
refusal to let such a significant chapter in the nation’s recent past remain
silenced as had been the case throughout much of the 1990s. For his
efforts, the director was acknowledged in August 2004 with a prize from
the Peruvian section of Amnesty International for bringing violations
against human rights in Peru to the attention of audiences worldwide.
The first half of Aguilar’s film has the air of a fairy tale replete with
visual and aural motifs that are nostalgically resonant of a happy child-
hood—the recurring motif of the paper dove itself, the bells and the
toys. Set amidst the towering Peruvian Andes during the 1980s, Paper
168 S. BARROW
Dove adopts Juan’s perspective from the outset with point-of-view shots
during games of hide and seek. At first, the viewer is invited to consider
his life in the rural community as tranquil and secure, mapped out during
a deceptively gently paced first act that focuses on Juan’s everyday life
as a child. Despite the veil of serenity, however, certain events make it
clear to the audience that the fictional location is situated within a site
of conflict, in the emergency zone identified by the military during the
civil war, where community leaders were forced to organise autono-
mous peasant patrols to protect themselves. When the conflict inevitably
reaches his village and affects his own family, Juan is obliged abruptly
to deal with an adult world of loss, betrayal and violence. He is consist-
ently abused by his stepfather Fermín (Aristóteles Picho), and is in the
end betrayed by him to the Shining Path rebels. The boy is delivered
to them and forced into a traumatic process of ‘re-education’. He is
renamed ‘Cirilio’, and forced to learn the skills of war craft, as well as
basic Shining Path philosophy. Juan differs from many of the other cap-
tured children, in that he remains unswervingly intent on escape, but is
caught in the crossfire of a ferocious battle between Shining Path and
armed forces on reaching his village. His beloved mother is killed and
he is imprisoned. The film ends as he returns to the village several years
later, apparently determined to try to rebuild his life amongst the ruins
that now lay there. The final image closes as he embraces his two, now
grown-up friends in the spot where they parted years before.
By adopting certain elements of the fairy tale-fantasy subgenre, Paper
Dove interweaves fantasy with reality, the everyday with the extraordi-
nary and highlights the terrifyingly unnerving aspects of the boy’s situ-
ation. As critic Federico de Cárdenas suggested, this approach may best
be appreciated by focusing on what happens to Juan as he is dragged
away from his idyllic reality ‘and submerged in a nightmare full of mon-
sters and violence’ (2004: 42). Like the boy from the tale that Freud
refers to in his essay on the uncanny, Juan ‘cannot banish the memo-
ries associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved
[mother]’ (1955: 227). The ‘monster’ in this case is represented by the
alcoholic, treacherous stepfather Fermín, set up in direct contrast to the
kindly, paternal ‘magician’ character of the Old Man/El Viejo (Eduardo
Cesti), the village blacksmith. This neat oppositional structure of ‘ogre
vs magician’ is easy for the boy to understand. By contrast, the monsters
within the Shining Path group are less straightforward for him to iden-
tify. Charismatic political leader Wilmer (Sergio Galliani) is presented as
a complex figure. For example, the viewer is invited, via scenes that dwell
upon Wilmer’s explanations to Juan about why he has been abducted, to
try to understand what has led Wilmer to act as he does, to appreciate
why he and others like him are prepared to deliver themselves completely
to the revolutionary cause.
It is exactly this sort of attempt at clarification, if not justification, of
Shining Path ideology from the point of view of a young protagonist
that continues to lead to critiques of naivety for giving exposure to the
motivations of the insurgents.2 In another interview given on the film’s
festival tour, Aguilar conceded that:
It’s certainly difficult to satisfy everyone. I didn’t intend to make any of

the characters seem evil, although eventually it’s impossible not to take
sides. Nor did I want to create stereotypes … This was definitely my main
dilemma: to humanise the killers, those people who killed others; who
believed in terror; who used bombs. (cit. Madedo and Fanelli 2004: 2)
By representing the Shining Path as people who refer to their families

as people they care about and who care for them, the film controver-
sially draws attention to the humanity of those who were perceived as
the main perpetrators of violence. For example, Juan witnesses the great
affection shared by two sisters involved in the insurgency, and their tragic
story is established as a parallel to the familial loss he suffered when his
own mother is massacred. Several observers protested at the naivety of
taking a child’s-eye view of such a complex conflict. Pablo Rojas, for
example, writing in Butaca San Marquina, asserted that Aguilar: ‘reveals
a lack of understanding of the universe represented in his film […] like
those indigenista writers who produced work based on one summer visit
to the mountains’ (2003: 9). Ricardo Bedoya described the evocation of
an Andean idyll as sentimental, with a touristic emphasis on the benign
beauty of the environment, resulting from an admiring, deferential gaze
that disregarded the roughness of such a reality. For him, this was exactly
the approach often described as ‘that superficial field of study of Indian
culture, with its sentimental roots, dazzled by the blue sky, the behaviour
of the peasants and the green countryside’ (2003). The film offended
Rojas further for failing to use the Quechua language that would have
been spoken by Juan’s community, and for overlooking the deep poverty
and internal antagonisms which were exploited by Shining Path leaders
when recruiting villagers to join their cause.
170 S. BARROW
Nevertheless, there are moments when the film offers some detailed
analysis of the specific context. For example, Wilmer attempts to explain
Shining Path ideology to Juan and to make some address to the form
of Maoism on which their manifesto was based, referring to the need
to make the struggle of naked class interests palpable, and to reject the
urban, modern and ‘westernised’ sector of society. However, the lesson
falls short of acknowledging the harsh socio-economic context of the
Andean communities which allowed Shining Path to flourish in these
areas. Shining Path even relied, in its early days, on this misconception
of its aims of liberating the passive, oppressed peasants in its efforts to
secure international support. While it is undoubtedly true that the
Andean section of Peruvian society suffered a great deal from margin-
alisation, racism and unfair business practices on the part of the Lima
authorities, many have argued that the actual aims of the insurgents were
far less altruistic. As one observer explains, Shining Path leaders were
fully cognisant of the fact that:
The peasant represented the new revolutionary man, freed from western
and bourgeois values. In the Peruvian context, where traditional Andean
culture with strong pre-Hispanic elements still existed among the peas-
antry, a close identification of peasant identity with revolutionary iden-
tity necessarily implied that Andean culture took on an important role in
Sendero’s conceptualisation of class. (Mauceri 1996: 128)
Furthermore, it was generally known that Shining Path insurgents were

well aware of how best to promote their anti-urban and anti-Western
cause amongst these Andean communities, projecting an alternative
vision of Peru’s identity while reaffirming the indigenous, mestizo, peas-
ant and the poor. While the vision of this presented in Paper Dove may
not have reflected the complex and fragmented reality of Peruvian soci-
ety, it does reflect its powerful appeal among the marginalised popular
classes that remained estranged from the modern, white, urban society
and state of Peru’s elite.
Aguilar’s film, with its narrative focus on the experiences of the young
boy, does not address this complexity, and yet that perspective and the
strategy of self-discovery do offer the chance for viewers to gain an
understanding of this significant period of Peru’s history. Through the
boy’s story of loss (of mother and friends), betrayal (by his step-father
and insurgent leader) and redemption, deep social fissures and unjust
hierarchies are exposed. The film and its young protagonist introduced
viewers across the world to a socio-political reality that is rarely debated
within the global mass media. While some might argue that a film such
as this serves only to exoticise other cultures and sanitise the brutality
of conflict, there always exists the possibility, however limited, for ‘a
structuring of filmic identification across social, political and cultural sit-
uations, through strongly perceived or dimly felt affinities of social per-
ception or historical experience’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 351).
The fragile image of the child’s paper dove that forms both the title
and the recurring visual motif of the film was aptly symbolic of a sim-
ilarly fragile peace that has remained more or less intact since 1992.
Moreover, the narrative choice to focus on a child who is abducted from
his childhood idyll allows the film, like those that Emma Wilson discusses
in her text on ‘missing children’ to ‘mobilise questions about the pro-
tection and innocence of childhood … about the past (as childhood is
constructed as nostalgic space of safety) and about the future (as fears for
children reflect [the] anxiety [of] future generations’ (2003: 2). Juan’s
post-conflict return to the site of trauma is also emblematic of the ten-
tative return to the ‘homeland’ made by many young Peruvians. Several
have spoken in interviews about their ‘coming of age’ at a time of great
uncertainty and change for them personally as well as for their nation—
politically, socially and economically. To be sure, the time period por-
trayed at the close of this film, the starting point in fact for the flashback,
signalled both the tail-end of the conflict with Shining Path and the
hardening of the repression of Fujimori’s regime and continuing anti-
terrorist legislation which in turn led to a pervading sense of distrust,
lack of freedom, isolation and lack of social cohesion. Claudia Llosa, for
example, a contemporary of Aguilar and acclaimed director of works
that also feature traumatised young protagonists (Madeinusa [2006]
and La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow [2009]), explained that when her
generation was young, ‘everything was difficult in Peru … [we] needed
to run, needed to leave the past, to start over again, and to start think-
ing that things could happen for [us]’ (cit. Matheou 2010: 373). Some
have returned, both physically to the country and psychologically to the
past with their own take on important events, having first travelled else-
where in order to become film-makers. Thus, it is possible to read the
‘coming of age’ of these film directors, like that of protagonist, Juan, as
a liminal state of possibility, as a period of growth, transformation and
reformulation.
172 S. BARROW
Taking Control: Las malas intenciones/Bad Intentions

I turn now to a consideration of another first feature-length film made
almost one decade later that marked a new return to the theme of
Shining Path violence from the perspective of the child, deploying it as
a signifier of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995), that is to say as a repeated
background marker whose meaning is widely understood both by the
characters of the film and by contemporary audiences familiar with the
modern history of Peru. It frames the poignant and darkly comic story
of a girl who retreats to a world of mythical national heroes in order to
cope with the harshness and loneliness of the real (political and famil-
ial) world around her. Rosario García-Montero’s debut feature tracks a
young girl’s coming of age towards adolescence amidst unstable familial
and political circumstances.3 This more recent example of the Peruvian
‘dirty war’ on screen took six years to come to fruition, required six
funding schemes (a mix of the national with the transnational), and was
successful on the arts cinema festival circuit, most notably achieving a
nomination for the Berlin Crystal Bear award where it had its premiere
screening in 2011. It foregrounds an intimate and darkly absurdist por-
trayal of the effect of stultifying privilege on its protagonist Cayetana,
a pampered but lonely nine-year-old girl growing up in the suburbs of
Lima in the 1980s, trapped by the walls of her comfortable family home
and disconnected from the outside world. While she has every material
luxury available, she suffers, in that her parents are often absent for long
periods and she is raised largely by the household staff.
Left to her own devices, Cayetana retreats into a fantasy world where
she surrounds herself with historical Peruvian ‘heroes’ (from Tupac
Amaru to Miguel Grau) who accomplished extraordinary deeds and
suffered painful deaths. As the director recalls, she drew on her own
childhood experience to craft a script ‘with an inner voice - an inner gaze -
that seems completely detached in its absurd tendencies, but is actually
deeply rooted in precise and specific traumas, that are both very local
and universal at the same time’ (cit. Yi 2012). This non-standard hero-
ine is portrayed as hard and vulnerable, full of contradictions, lonely, sad
and confused. While outside the house, conflict is about to erupt as the
Shining Path insurgents edge closer to the capital city, Cayetana’s own
world falls apart when she learns that her mother is pregnant and she
becomes convinced that she herself is doomed to die when the baby is
born. The film drifts between fantasy and reality in a way that allows its
writer-director to present some quite disturbing images of violence as

imagined by the girl, and which allows the spectator to experience the
narrative from her distorted point of view. Of particular interest here is
Cayetana’s situation as ‘only child’, as an ‘abandoned child’ (in that, her
family is largely absent) and the extent to which her pre-pubescent mal-
leable identity might be read as pointing to the broader crystallisation of
national identity at a time of intense change (Driscoll 2002: 2).
The idea for this debut feature film originated in the director’s own
experiences of growing up in Peru in the 1980s, and her child protag-
onist thus becomes the cipher for her own perspective. She forces the
viewer to watch events unfold through the eyes of a girl who is com-
pletely unsure about what is going on around her on both the personal
and the political front, and takes comfort in the certainty of her fantasy
‘heroes’.4 The film’s engagement with socio-political concerns is under-
stated; it is little more than part of the mise en scène, adding to a sense
of the ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) of the project. And yet, echo-
ing Laura Podalsky, ‘it is there in [the] sensorial charge that one finds
the politics in this ostensibly apolitical film’ (2011: 111) about an alien-
ated girl. Indeed, critics emphasised the film’s affective features in their
reviews, with those extracts picked up by the production’s own press.5
Such features include the interweaving of social drama with fantasy as a
powerful means through which to convey the girl’s deep anxieties, sense
of loss and isolation along with a repeated use of medium and close-up
shots on Cayetana’s face to help build what feels like an intense empa-
thetic connection between spectator and protagonist.
The invisible yet ever-present threat of death and violence transmutes
strangely in the mind of this child who is particularly susceptible to influ-
ence from authority figures, real and imagined. Cayetana is overwhelmed
by guilt from a firebrand Catholic priest; she yearns for affection from
her absentee father who is frequently referred to as a womaniser; and
perhaps most intriguingly, she is obsessed with the centuries-old historic
revolutionary heroes of South America’s past, envisioning entire imag-
inary adventures with them. When Cayetana then finds out that her
mother is pregnant, her neuroses converge illogically but no less potently
into the belief that she will die when her mother gives birth to the child.
Indeed, death—the fear and the fact of it—quietly pervades the entire
film, emphasised aesthetically by the way the film is shot in steely grey
and blue hues that look cold to the touch, and that calls attention to
the way the film draws out the emotional charge of a moment of deep
174 S. BARROW
epistemological crisis for the girl as she leaves childhood behind and
advances towards what seems to her like the nightmarish world of ado-
lescence. For, on the one hand, and in her mind, Cayetana’s very exist-
ence is threatened by the pending arrival of a baby brother and the
possibility that her relationship with her mother might become further
distorted; more broadly, Peru’s capital city and its inhabitants are about
to be torn apart by the arrival of the civil conflict on their doorstep. The
fear of a baby arriving to the family should also be understood in the
context that Cayetana is not the daughter of her mother’s partner, which
stokes a fear that she will be displaced by a baby shared between the new
couple. In Cayetana’s mind, the date of the baby’s birth will determine
her own expiration date; while this is a product of her lively imagination,
it does turn out to be the case that the very day her mother goes into
labour, the terrorists announce their attacks in Lima through the cruel
device of hanging dogs at representative landmarks around the city. The
film thereby emphasises the links between birth and death in several dis-
tinct yet overlapping ways, while also stressing the intense intertwining
of the personal with the political as the girl approaches adolescence.
The film opens, closes and is punctuated by scenes that show
Cayetana being driven home from her private college, first by the elderly
hired driver who serves as a father figure, then by her mother whose dif-
ficulty negotiating the roads draws attention both to her own disoriented
state of mind and her disconnection from the city and finally, by the new
chauffeur who tries to insist that the newly blacked out and reinforced
windows remain firmly closed to protect her from the perceived dan-
gers of the streets. It is clearly a long journey that Cayetana finds boring,
especially given that she is unable to read the signs of social change all
around her. For example, on one occasion, Cayetana is in the car with
her father; she sees something out in the darkness: a fiery hammer and
sickle burning on a hillside. When she asks her father what it is, he tells
her it is just burning trash, nothing important. Even though it has been
established for the viewer that this is Peru in 1982, and the burning trash
is the unambiguous mark of another act of terror by the Shining Path,
the girl seems to exist in a fenced off ‘indecipherable present’ (Podalsky
2007: 110), which only makes sense for her by allowing into her imag-
inary world the heroic ghosts of this nation’s past. And yet, just as her
father does, even these figments of her imagination let her down. She
has to find a way to save herself, and indeed in the final scene, which
has similar emotional resonance to the ending of Paper Dove in terms
of its ambivalent indicator of a moment of transition, Cayetana finally

lets the world in and embraces the uncertainty of her future. She defies
her new driver/protector by winding down the darkly tinted, reinforced
window of the car, weeping uncontrollably as she does so, in a moment
that is ultimately suggestive of her impending transformation beyond
childhood.
Thus, the film deploys the Shining Path conflict largely as the back-
drop for a dark portrait of Cayetana’s morbid childhood, and of her
looming coming of age. The violence and its aftermath are part of the
mise en scène; they are part of the backdrop of the film, which helps to
link the narrative and its characters with Peru without explaining those
events precisely. For Cayetana, the strengthened windows, heightened
walls and candles to cope with the electricity blackouts are all part of her
everyday life: she is annoyed that she can no longer peer over the garden
wall to chat with the neighbours who live in far more impoverished cir-
cumstances, but she does not appreciate the broader significance of the
social divisions that are thereby indicated.
The intensification of Cayetana’s own early adolescent anxieties seems
to reflect the social and political tensions presented more broadly through-
out the film. The clearest example is when Cayetana’s well-to-do family
visits their summer residence on the coast and they attempt to board a
small boat to get some privacy away from crowds on the beach. In the
process of doing so, they are surrounded by a large group of boys, sev-
eral of whom cling onto the boat as it leaves the shore. Close-up shots of
their faces are ambiguous and discomforting in tone, lacking clarity as to
whether they should be read as desperate or aggressive or somewhere in
between, but most certainly emphasising lack of understanding between
the two groups and an underlying resentment. Elsewhere in the film, it is
Cayetana’s apparent reluctance to acknowledge the realities of life around
her, and her seeming refusal to want to leave childhood behind and
engage more fully and responsibly in the social and the familial context
that is of interest here. The core message of the film appears to be that
engagement in the real is essential as part of growing up, but Cayetana
only just reaches the start of that journey and struggles to let go of her
imaginary hero figures who have accompanied her through much of her
childhood when her real family has let her down. As her grandmother
states as they go to visit her newborn brother in the hospital: ‘You can’t
act as if nothing is happening’.
176 S. BARROW
As evidence of its resonance and status as part of so-called national

cinema, Bad Intentions—like Paper Dove nearly a decade before—was
selected by the Ministry of Culture to be Peru’s nomination for the
foreign language award at the Oscars, having already won awards at
all the major events in Peru itself. A film that features the Shining Path
conflict so prominently was again chosen to represent its nation at the
most prominent of all awards events for cinema worldwide. Moreover,
its young actress was nominated for a prestigious Young Artist Award
2013 for her powerful performance as the young girl who strug-
gles to come terms with the reality of the changing world around her.
Meanwhile, García-Montero won a special prize at the annual Lima
Film Festival, the premiere event for cinema in Peru and a significant
date on the broader Latin American festivals circuit, for her effective and
sympathetic direction of children within this film; more notable still are
the interview opportunities shared by the director and her star at such
events as the Berlin Film Festival, where the young girl was literally
handed the microphone by the adults and invited to speak about her
own experiences, providing further evidence of the intertextual relevance
of this film.6
Local Stories and Global Intimacies

In drawing this analysis to a close, some thoughts are offered on the sig-
nifying and affective strategies used to create works of fiction that have
drawn on local stories with intimate origins, and which have touched
audiences worldwide who may have little to no knowledge of the spe-
cific political conflict that frames each story. That is to say, both Paper
Dove and Bad Intentions draw on the memories of coming of age of their
film-makers (writer-directors in each case) to create works that have res-
onated on both a national and an international scale, melding the top-
ical with the perennial, the personal with the political and heightening
the anxieties of adolescence through their association with social rupture
on a grand scale. In the later film, the status of the conflict is shifted
in such a way as to emphasise that while for society this was a period
of great trauma, for a young person progressing rapidly towards ado-
lescence, there are often more important concerns, usually much closer
to home. At the same time, the absurdity of conflict is drawn out by,
for example, the powerlessness of the adults to help their young people
make any sense of the violence they encounter and through, in the case
of Cayetana’s mother and step-father, their assumption that their wealth

alone will protect them.
Moreover, these stories of young people transitioning to adulthood
amidst a two-decade period of devastating violence that swept an entire
nation have become emblematic of the concerns of a nation in crisis, as
shown through the impact of their circulation and reception. Both films
represented Peru at festivals and top awards events and received funding
from government-backed schemes, as well as from prestigious European
co-production partners. Their protagonists have thus come to stand for
many other young people who were caught up, often unwittingly, in the
struggles between Shining Path and armed forces at a moment of intense
personal anxiety, rupture and questioning of self-identity often associ-
ated with adolescence. Indeed, their stories are compelling in part due
to their troubling and troubled positions as witnesses, as uncertain per-
petrators and as victims of the trauma of war. Moreover, both Juan and
Cayetana struggle to articulate their experiences just as they struggle to
work out their place in the world, thereby retreating and taking comfort
in the imaginary, fantasy worlds they created during childhood.
Lury’s suggestion is that the perspective of the young person as una-
ble/unwilling to speak about traumatic events ‘allows for a confusing,
often stuttering temporality’ (2010: 7). This would appear to work
particularly well as a way of understanding and describing the transi-
tion to adolescence in these films as they waver between retreat (back
to childhood) and advance (towards adulthood). These protagonists are
frequently shown in close-up or medium shots staring in terror, incom-
prehension or indifference at the chaos around them. Forced to live
through nightmarish situations, their experiences highlight ‘how the
interweaving of history, memory, witness can be powerfully affective’
(Lury 2010: 7). In each case, their early adolescent mix of wilfulness and
defiance, of fear and naivety in the face of danger, as ultimately exem-
plified by Cayetana’s final act of disobedience (by winding down the car
window as she traverses Lima despite being told not to by the adults),
would appear to offer a moment of engagement with the real world.
Finally, then, I suggest that these films reveal a trope of ‘transition in
crisis’ which has served as a recurrent cinematic device that looks both
forward and back: back to a time of childhood and safety, and forward
to adulthood and uncertainty on a national, social and personal scale.7
The ambivalence of the closing images in each film transmits a senso-
rial charge that has to do with an intense interlinking of past (childhood
178 S. BARROW
memories and historical figures), present (transformative moment of

realisation of adolescent self as social subject) and future (the uncertainty
of adulthood). Both Juan and Cayetana, forced through the absence of
their parents to transition to adolescence painfully quickly, suffer torment
that is more to do with the loss of the innocence of their childhoods
than with the effect of the political and social violence that frames each
narrative. Nevertheless, their rite of passage into adolescence is marked
by the undeniable additional trauma of warfare and results in what
Kristeva refers to as a ‘shattering of psychic identit[ies]’ (1989: 222)—a
moment of rupture that leads each protagonist to new understandings
of their place in the world. I argue that we urgently need these cultural
mediations, and others like them, of childhood, family and society in cri-
sis, as works that invite us to appreciate the young person as both the
recipient and catalyst of the social and political violence, and as acts of
cultural memory that refuse to relegate specific conflicts and their after-
maths to oblivion.
Notes
1. A major shift in approach to cinema legislation, policy and funding
occurred in the mid-1990s in Peru under Fujimori when the protection-
ist system that had been introduced in 1972 with guaranteed funding and
screenings for Peruvian film-makers who met certain published criteria
was repealed. It was replaced by a market-oriented cinema law that forced
those film-makers to compete directly with Hollywood imports without
the kind of resources and political support that those productions enjoyed.
By the time Cinema Law 26270 was fully ratified, plans for US-financed
and US-programmed multiplex cinemas in affluent areas of Lima were
underway, audience demographics had shifted almost entirely to the mid-
dle and upper classes, and film-making by Peruvian citizens had all but
ground to a halt.
2. See, for example, this piece of commentary after the film’s TV airing on
Canal 7. See Quispe (2009).
3. I have also written about this film from the perspective of it as the product
of a female film-maker in the collection of essays edited by Deborah Shaw
and Deborah Martin, Latin American Women Filmmakers (2017).
4. The direct link between the film and the director’s own childhood mem-
ories was captured for the promotional material of Viva! The 18th Spanish
and Latin American Film Festival at Cornerhouse, Manchester, where the
film received its UK premiere in March 2012.
5. For example, one of Peru’s most notable cultural and political figures, the
Nobel prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa described how the film affected him
profoundly.
6. See, for example, El agua inmóvil (2011) for an extensive set of interviews
with film-maker and star.
7. For example, as seen in the acclaimed first two features by compatriot
Claudia Llosa. Madeinusa (2006) and Milk of Sorrow (2009) both feature
young protagonists whose suffering is marked through bodily abuse, which
is projected to the viewer through an inscrutable gaze. In each case, the
tragedy lies not only in that childhood innocence was lost long ago but
also in that the transition to adulthood has not been fully made.
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Bedoya, Ricardo. 2003. Un aprendizaje perverso: Paloma de Papel. El
Dominical, October 5.
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Press.
———. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg.
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Hardcastle, Anne, Roberta Morosini, and Kendall B. Tarte (eds.). 2009. Coming
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CHAPTER 9
Tragic Adolescence in Michel Franco’s Heli

and Amat Escalante’s Después de Lucía
Sophie Dufays
Internationally renowned for the prizes they were awarded in the Cannes
Film Festival, Mexican productions Después de Lucía/After Lucía (dir.
Michel Franco 2012) and Heli (dir. Amat Escalante 2013) are striking
in their crude and detached staging of acts of sadistic violence carried
out against (and partly by) adolescents.1 This violence is inscribed in
distinctly different filmic contexts: in the first film, a private school in
Mexico City becomes the site for a cruel act of bullying, while, in the
second, it is a deserted town in Guanajuato, where the military control
drug-trafficking networks in their own distinctive way. Nevertheless, each
case consists of physical and psychological acts of torture that are filmed
in a frank and open manner, culminating in a rape (or series of rapes)
that takes place off-screen. In Después de Lucía, the seventeen-year-old
protagonist Alejandra (nicknamed Ale) receives a barrage of insults from
her classmates, and is even sexually assaulted, without reacting in any
Translated by Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall
S. Dufays (*) 
Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium

184 S. DUFAYS
way; in Heli, the youngest and more minor character, twelve-year-old

Estela, is rendered mute and pregnant after repeatedly being raped.
It is interesting to note, as I will argue in this chapter, that these
instances of cinematic violence come to exceed the particular contexts
that the films so obviously denounce: Heli is not merely a film about
drug trafficking and institutional corruption, and Después de Lucia does
not only concern itself with school bullying. Both films, above and
beyond their cold realism (which has been compared to that of Michael
Haneke) offer tragic fables about the fatal character of a violence that
transcends social class. The roles of Alejandra and Estela (as voiceless vic-
tims of rape) constitute an essential ingredient in these tragedies.
In this chapter, I will first inscribe these adolescents within the broader
panorama of teenage protagonists in contemporary Mexican cinema, exam-
ining their potential allegorical value with respect to Mexican society. The
chapter will then compare the characteristics and fates of both characters
in a more detailed fashion, seeking to interpret their filmic treatment and
the significance of their sexual abuse in relation to other acts of violence
that are both shown and suggested in the films’ narratives. What does
the recurrence of such a distressing subject (which brings to mind other
Mexican films about adolescents, such as Perfume de violetas: nadie te oye
[dir. Maryse Sistach 2001] or Soba [dir. Alan Coton 2004]) mean for
Mexican society? Lastly, the chapter will focus on the mises-en-scène of two
key cinematic tropes connected with the tragedies of these adolescent char-
acters, namely, screens (i.e. televisions, videogames, iPhones) and cars, both
of which surface as decisive points of reference in each production.
Adolescence in Mexican Cinema

Among the many reasons that may explain the recent explosion of Latin
American films that focus on the feelings and emotions of adolescents,
such as the appearance of a new teenage viewing public or the relative
youth of the directors themselves, Ernesto Babino suggests that both
the period of violence in the 1970s and 1980s and the economic crises
caused by neoliberal politics and globalisation since the 1990s have
produced a deficit in future expectations […]. Over the past few years, this
has resulted in a questioning of the progress that Modernity has made,
which had promised a sure trajectory towards a [better] future. In this con-
text, the adolescent world may be understood as the fertile ground for sto-
ries that revolve around the uncertainties of the future. (Babino 2015: 11)
9 TRAGIC ADOLESCENCE IN MICHEL FRANCO’S HELI … 185
The disillusionment produced by the lack of prospects has sapped the

potentially revolutionary rebelliousness of (filmic) adolescents from pre-
vious decades (1960–1970), evacuating their significance and motiva-
tions or, indeed, substituting them with a sense of indifference, tedium
and apathy (Babino 2015: 14). Such feelings of disappointment and dis-
enchantment have been present in various minimalistic Latin American
films from the end of the 1990s, such as the Uruguayan 25 Watts
(dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella 2001), the Argentine Nadar
solo (dir. Ezequiel Acuña 2003) or the Mexican Temporada de patos
(dir. Fernando Eimbcke 2004).
The dislocations caused by neoliberalism and globalisation in Latin
American societies, and notably for this chapter in Mexico, are recur-
ringly and effectively expressed through the family unit, a fundamental
institution of such societies and an unavoidable reference point in the
construction of adolescent identities. In the Mexican films that have cho-
sen to take adolescents as their protagonists, dysfunctional or broken
families abound, with the notable absence of a father (Lake Tahoe 2008)
or mother (Familia Tortuga 2006), if not both.2 The adolescent charac-
ters in Después de Lucía and Heli have lost their mother, but this absence
is not portrayed explicitly in the films’ narratives. Escalante’s film makes
no reference whatsoever to Estela’s mother; Estela and her brother Heli
live with their father, along with Heli’s wife and baby. The murder of
Estela’s father by corrupt military officers happens before his son is tor-
tured and before his daughter is raped. In Franco’s film, the mother’s
death acts as the tacit premise for the entire narrative, mentioned only
once (some thirty minutes after the film starts) yet functioning as the
driving force behind the emotional and affective state of both Alejandra
and her father, as well as the difficulties they experience in communicat-
ing with one another. The title of the film, which symbolically expresses
an entrance into the darkness,3 insists that the death of ‘Lucía’ (who is
never named in the film) has provoked a rupture in these characters’
lives, a loss that appears insurmountable even as they attempt a new
beginning in Mexico City. The silence exhibited by Alejandra and Estela
as a result of the violence they experience bears no link with the con-
ventional apathetic tedium of certain middle-class adolescents, nor with
the rebellion of the inter-class couples of Voy a explotar (dir. Gerardo
Naranjo 2008), Besos de azúcar (dir. Carlos Cuarón 2013) o Amarte
duele (dir. Fernando Sariñana 2002), who appear openly hostile towards
their own families. However, similarly to these affective resonances,
Alejandra and Estela’s silence is indeed partly imbued with significance
186 S. DUFAYS
through the relationships it fosters—or, more precisely, the distance it

creates—between them and their parents.
These parental relationships, along with the adolescents’ search for
a voice (and identity) of their own, are notable thematic tropes in the
recurring allegorical value of adolescent narratives. Another key fac-
tor is that of sexual awakening, which represents an unstable threshold
between childish innocence and adult citizenship. Ignacio Sánchez Prado
focuses specifically on this aspect, doing so as a means of analysing how
contemporary Mexican coming-of-age films (for example, Soba and Año
uña [2009] by Jonás Cuarón) display (or rather, allegorise) new social
configurations. According to Sánchez Prado,
Mexican cinema turns youth into a forceful matrix of narratives and alle-
gories to express the instability underlying the path to citizenship. Insofar
as neoliberalism constitutes a narrative of modernization that breaks away
from the quadrants of identity formation designed under post-revolution-
ary narratives, Mexican cinema in the 2000s follows a trend analogous to
that established by the Bildungsroman at the outset of modernity, a focus
on youth as the site of a changed notion of citizenship. (Sánchez Prado
2012: 122)
Sánchez Prado observes that these allegories of an unstable society are

fundamentally constructed from conflicts of class and gender. The major-
ity of adolescent-related films focus on young male protagonists (such
as the classic productions Amores perros [2001] by Alejandro González
Iñárritu and Y tu mamá también [2001] by Alfonso Cuarón) and reduce
the role of female teenagers to objects of desire; they are, in the words
of Laura Podalsky, ‘organized around the patriarchal point of view, the
male heterosexual experience, and a fetishization of the female body’
(2008: 149). Sánchez Prado looks to the films Amar te duele and Voy a
explotar, as well as Drama/Mex (dir. Gerardo Naranjo 2006) and Soba,
as examples of how Mexican cinema has not yet learned to represent
the capacity of female adolescents to overcome these social norms. He
highlights ‘the inability of Mexican cinema (and perhaps Mexican cul-
ture) to grant a narrative of formation to young women outside of the
upper classes that is equivalent to that of their male counterparts’ (2012:
128). In the storylines of Después de Lucía and Heli, both upper- and
lower-class teens (Alejandra and Estela respectively) are used in this way
as ‘objects’ by other characters; however, the films do succeed in prob-
lematising and denouncing the sense of objectification that denies them
any agency, forcing us to perceive the intimate inaccessibility of their

subjectivity (particularly that of Alejandra). Their inaccessibility, marked
by their silence and underscored by the films’ detached mises-en-scène, is
thus rendered all the more forceful and shocking.
Podalsky also points to the criterion of social class in the treatment of the
inevitable sexuality of adolescents: when the youths on screen are from a
lower-class or working-class background, they usually function as protago-
nists of violent stories rather than narratives of coming-of-age.4 In Franco’s
and Escalante’s films, these two thematic dimensions (coming-of-age and
violence) become confused: violence is conceived as a form of initiation
into either a society of adolescents (Después de Lucía) or niños-hombres
(Heli), both functioning without regulations or moral codes. Heli focuses
on a lower-class family, exposed to precarity (Heli, who works in an auto-
mobile factory, is laid off for underperformance following the traumatic
episode of his abduction and torture), while Después de Lucía presents an
upper-class family (Ale attends a wealthy school and her father works as
the manager of a seafood restaurant). However, both social milieus are
traversed by equally sadistic acts of violence, as well as by the total indiffer-
ence and inefficacy of institutional authorities, namely, those in charge of
the school and the police. Estela tempers the desires of her boyfriend, argu-
ing that she does not wish to get pregnant, while Alejandra (who is older)
is not opposed to having sexual relations with the boy that she is attracted
to; both films, however, deviate quickly from any expectations placed on a
classic teenage sexual coming-of-age narrative.
As allegories of social integration and citizenship in Mexico,
Alejandra’s and Estela’s inverted or truncated ‘initiations’ are particularly
distressing, given that the violence that overwhelms them, far from being
casual or down to a few depraved individuals, stems from (Mexican) soci-
ety itself and is presented as an irremediable evil.5 In these films, this is
a violence founded, after all, on the previously mentioned ineffective-
ness and/or structural corruption of authority, on an atavistic streak of
machismo, and on the alienating power of screens and images, which
come to act as substitutes for an absent sense of morality.6
The Fates of Alejandra and Estela

In Después de Lucía, Alejandra is the sole target of a spate of aggressive
acts directed intentionally towards her, while in Heli Estela is one of the
many victims of a violent episode that affects her entire family. However,
188 S. DUFAYS
both adolescents naïvely participate in triggering the acts that precipitate

such hostility: Alejandra, in a night of drunkenness, passively allows José
to film their sexual activity on his iPhone; Estela, for her part, accepts
that her boyfriend Beto (a reluctant military apprentice) has hidden sev-
eral packets of cocaine, stolen from the army, in the water-tank of her
house. These packets are later uncovered by accident and disposed of by
her brother Heli, leading to the repression that is enacted upon the fam-
ily by military officers as a means of punishment.
Despite the fact that Alejandra is older than Estela, both young
women still maintain childish tendencies at the beginning of each film.
This is particularly evident in Estela’s case, who various critics have
described as a ‘young girl’ [una niña]: her childlike appearance (nota-
bly obvious in her face) is not only reinforced by her checked school
skirt and white socks but also her actions (she carries out her household
chores obediently and diligently), her pet puppy called ‘Cookie’, and,
above all, her candour (represented through her naïve love for Beto).
Alejandra, conversely, has already passed through certain adolescent rites
of passage, having previously smoked marijuana and had sexual inter-
course before the film begins; however, the first image of her is a fore-
ground shot of her profile against the sea of Puerto Vallarta, a close-up
that reveals a pink hoop earring, an almost ridiculous knockoff piece of
jewellery that effectively signals her liminal state between childhood and
adulthood.
The fates of both young women gesture towards the traditional
pairing that has cast women within (classic) Mexican cinema into the
roles of either mothers or prostitutes. In Después de Lucía, Alejandra,
who behaves almost maternally towards her father,7 is denigrated as a
‘whore’ by her classmates after the online circulation of her sex tape
with José. This contempt reveals a moral hypocrisy and a total lack of
feminine solidarity, which are perpetuated within this new generation
and reinforced, in this case, by the omnipresence of technologies of
communication: the iPhone is the device responsible for recording the
maligned incident as well as a primary means of harassment (Alejandra
is having breakfast with her father when she receives a series of insulting
text messages). The contempt directed towards Ale for being a ‘slut’—
contempt that denies her any sexual freedom whatsoever and reduces
her to a body-object—at once provokes and legitimises her rape by two
male classmates in a night of unmonitored partying during a school trip
to Veracruz. The young woman does not try to defend herself against
the growing harassment that she suffers and, moreover, she also hides
it from her father, for reasons that the film only hints towards: partly, it
is suggested, because she does not want to worry her depressive father
(who says on one occasion: ‘The only thing I ask is that you’re happy
in school’ [Sólo te pido que estés bien en la escuela]), but also perhaps
because she feels guilty for the death of her mother (we know that they
were together when the accident happened) and sees such mistreatment
as a form of atonement.
Después de Lucía adheres to a certain blueprint of North American
teen movies that are set in high schools, which, as Marcia Speranza
notes, ‘usually rely upon the classic scene of a cafeteria, a tiresome joke
shared in the bathrooms, notes passed during class or stereotypical char-
acters like “the fat one”, who has issues but is a nice person’ (2015:
54). Franco’s film engages with these motifs if only to deviate systemat-
ically from their conventional significance. In a similar fashion, the film
inverts the rites of passage that traditional societies regard as markers of
the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which adolescents con-
tinue to use as tests of integration: here, these tests function in reverse,
as mechanisms of exclusion.8 The logic of the group of adolescents in the
film is reminiscent of the anthropological theory of René Girard, which
asserts that all society is constituted through the sacrifice of a ‘scape
goat’: that is, the persecution of a innocent person who is the object of
a group’s mimetic and jealous desires, which comes to enable the resolu-
tion of the tensions caused by the threat of this individual’s arrival into
that very group. In line with this perspective, the cruelty that Después de
Lucía displays transcends the depicted social class (as well as exceeding
the Mexican context) and acquires an anthropological significance. One
critic, along similar lines, reads the character of Alejandra as an ‘abstract
martyr, who allegorises the crystallisation of power relations of domina-
tion that exist in everyday life’ (Bisson 2013).
In Heli, Estela must leap from her position as a child to that of an
expectant mother, without passing through any (adolescent) stage of
transition: the fact that she was kidnapped, snatched from her boyfriend
and brother, and raped, forces her to brutally abandon infancy (i.e. the
period of her life) without leaving childhood (i.e. the state). The des-
tiny of Estela as a ‘mother-child’ reflects a worrying reality that did not
escape the attention of the director:
190 S. DUFAYS
I see girls of twelve and thirteen years old who are pregnant. In
Guanajuato, and in lots of other places in the country, it’s very common
to see girls having babies, which makes you think: what are these babies
going to be doing in fifteen or twenty years? I think that’s even more
shocking than the physical violence, this situation that you don’t realise
immediately but that will have repercussions in the future. (cit. A.P. 2014)
The sustained focus on Estela effectively leads us to think about these

very consequences, above all during the final part of the film that nar-
rates her return home, the discovery of her pregnancy, and the pun-
ishment that Heli inflicts on Estela’s rapist when he tracks him down.
In a certain manner, the violence that is consistently present on screen
emerges directly from this situation: that is, children are parents, and
parents are children, unable to educate their own offspring. From this
emerges the famous torture scene of the film, in which three children are
transformed into executioners, while their mother (or another woman) is
peacefully cooking in the adjacent room.9 As one critic writes, Heli dis-
plays ‘a world in which the divide between parents and children is all but
indistinguishable’ (Kermode 2014).
If Estela’s destiny is one of premature maternity, the young men in
the film have to decide between two equally alienating future paths:
working as labourers in the automotive factory (like Heli and his father)
or enlisting in the armed forces (like the seventeen-year-old Beto). The
escape route of emigration, envisioned both by Heli’s young wife and by
Estela’s boyfriend, fails to surface as a viable option in the course of the
film.
In one sense, Heli suggests a world that lacks a sufficient period (or,
at least, clear stages) of transition between childhood and the assump-
tion of adult responsibility, denying any period of adolescent exper-
imentation with respect to conventional societal norms. Beto and Heli
look like adolescents but they must act as adults, without being pre-
pared in any way to do so. Conversely, in Después de Lucía, the teen-
age protagonists (bourgeois characters who have a lot of free time) seem
to be free to exercise their own savage rules, without any interference
from adults that exceeds the merely superficial; but, at the same time,
these teenagers appear to be simply reproducing the ruthless workings
of a cruel society.10 In this way, the violence that is examined through
adolescence in Después de Lucía, taking the school as an anthropological
microcosm of society, emanates precisely, in the case of Heli, from a lack
of adolescence, which disturbs generational relationships and the moral

and social education of modern society. In more precise terms, what
Escalante presents is an archaic and savage world, on the edge of moder-
nity that has only afforded society a few instruments, namely, screens and
vehicles.
Rape, Silence and Melancholy

It is significant that the rape of both girls in these films occurs off-
camera. Escalante and Franco prefer to show other acts of violence that,
retrospectively, function as a metaphor for sexual abuse: on her birth-
day, for example, Alejandra is forced to eat a cake made of excrement;
in Heli, we see Estela’s dog’s twisted neck and her boyfriend’s burnt
genitals (both acts are undertaken by repressive military officers). These
brutal and abject acts symbolise the violation and abduction of the girls’
bodies. In Después de Lucía, Ale’s rape takes place behind a closed door
situated in the middle of a (long) static shot, which depicts the other
teenagers getting drunk. All we see are the young rapists opening the
bathroom door; the rest is largely implied, though we do witness the
first of them pulling down his shorts and beginning to rape her. The
fact that the attack cannot be seen and that it occurs amidst generalised
indifference exacerbates the impact of this violent act on the spectator;
it is an impact that takes the form of a profound sense of discomfort
(Bisson 2013). This scene reveals that what interests Franco, as well as
Escalante in Heli, is not the violent act itself, but rather its banality and
‘the amoral, compassionless existence of its perpetrators’, as Fernanda
Solórzano (2013) has said in relation to Heli. The normality of evil
contrasts terribly with the traumatic consequences that it has for its vic-
tims: consequences over which the films linger for much longer than the
scenes of physical violence.
Instead of presenting the initiatory process of a ‘coming to voice’,
which is common in narratives that focus on girls (Rocha and Seminet
2014: xiii),11 these films show how two adolescents lose the fragile voice
that they initially had and return to the mute state of infantia—the term
infans referring etymologically to s/he who still does not speak. In con-
trast to many women directors who are interested in showing the subjec-
tivities and desires of girls and female adolescents, even when they are in
a precarious position,12 Escalante and Franco emphasise the passivity of
their victimised characters. Since it leads to a (self-)deprivation of speech,
192 S. DUFAYS
rape signifies the apex of a process of, or an attempt at, dehumanisation;

it is a way of reducing the girls to a usable body-object, without freedom
or choice.
Estela and Ale’s return to an infantile state is also visible in the lethar-
gic posture of their bodies at the films’ conclusions. In the sequence that
shows the last moments in which Ale is assaulted in Veracruz, both in the
bathroom and on the beach where she is urinated on (before disappear-
ing into the sea), she is shown lying down in an almost foetal position; it
is a position that she maintains on the bus that she takes when she trav-
els in secret to Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Once she has
arrived at her former home, she lies down in her old bed, without telling
anyone that she is there, not even her father, who believes that she is
dead. In the last shot of her, we see her sitting down facing the sea, just
as she is shown at the start of the film, but this time in the semi-darkness
and with her eyes lowered, almost closed. In Heli’s final sequence,
Estela is shown lying down and hugging her baby nephew as the pair
sleeps on the sofa while Heli makes love to his wife in the next room.
Consequently, the sequence juxtaposes two forms of physical, non-verbal
communication: a sexual relationship and tender contact between two
infantile beings. It is an ending that leaves room for hope, although it
also evokes the idea of a cycle of girl-mothers and violent sons. The end-
ing of Después de Lucía focuses on the arbitrary revenge that Alejandra’s
father exerts when he kidnaps and kills José and later throws him into
the sea. Its conclusion thus persists with the spiral of unjustified violence,
characterised by a lack of communication, which the film has been trac-
ing since its opening.
The regression and lethargy that the adolescents experience reflect
their trauma and simultaneously reveal that they are suffering from
an even deeper sense of melancholy; in other words, their rapes have
inflicted an unmanageable mourning on them. The fundamental object
of this mourning, over and above their physical integrity, is their rela-
tionships to themselves and to their mothers. According to Freud, mel-
ancholy consists of a double mourning, which is provoked by the loss
of an ‘object’ and of a certain image of oneself. Through its very title,
Después de Lucía implies a link between Alejandra’s silence and the pro-
cess of mourning for her mother. One of the clearest indicators of this is
the immediate succession of a shot of Lucía’s car after a crash, mysteri-
ously taken by an amateur camera, by one of the only close-up shots of
Ale, during break-time at school, within the context where she is bullied.
In this way, the accident becomes associated with her thoughts and with
the bullying that she suffers. Estela’s rape, which leads to her pregnancy,
impels her towards premature mourning for the loss of her childhood
and, at the same time, reopens a sense of grief for her own mother, who
is utterly absent from the film. The melancholia that the adolescent pro-
tagonists suffer corresponds with the melancholic discourse present in
films about contemporary Mexican society: it is a discourse elaborated
in a markedly ‘cold’ style. Consequently, it is important to reflect on the
relationship of this style to the violence that it communicates, in order to
shed light on the senses of melancholy harboured by the adolescents.
Distance and Denunciation: The Power of Images

The simultaneously distant and direct realism with which both produc-
tions film these evil acts could be considered anti-melodramatic, given
the extent to which this rejects a strategy that might permit either the
spectator’s emotional identification with the characters or, more simply,
an appeal to the emotions.13 Indeed, both films are characterised by a
complete lack of extradiegetic music and very little diegetic music,14 a
slow rhythm, scarce, dry dialogues, and medium, fixed and relatively pro-
longed shots that create the impression that the characters are trapped
within them. Furthermore, the faces of the protagonists—who are played
by non-professional actors—are frequently impassive, both in the case
of the victims and their persecutors. However, this impassivity does not
hold the same significance. The adolescents in Después de Lucía behave
like ‘insensitive automatons’ (Bonfil 2012), and the children who have
been inculcated into the arts of torture in Heli display the same lack
of sensitivity. From this perspective, it is possible to consider that rape
functions as a form of initiation, in that it transforms the girls into inex-
pressive characters who are disconnected from the world. However,
their expressionlessness does not signal a lack of emotions, but rather an
excess (that is, a trauma), which translates into a melancholic regression.
Both films have generated debates surrounding the effects of repre-
senting violence, above all Heli, which contains the most horrifying
scene of torture: a military officer dressed as a civilian beats Beto (who is
hung from the ceiling) and uses gasoline to burn his genitals; the officer
is assisted by a child–adolescent and is observed by two other boys, as
well as by Heli. Both have been accused of complicity with the violence
that they show so directly, and of converting it into a ‘sensationalist’
194 S. DUFAYS
spectacle, in the case of Heli, or even a ‘fascist’ one in Después de Lucía.

These critics confuse what is shown with the perspective imposed on the
spectator.15 However, by framing the characters’ perspectives of the vio-
lence in which they participate, and by linking this with other screens,
the films propose an analysis of the possible causes of this violence and
of the reactions that its vision provokes. In other words, the presence
of screens and videos—i.e. the combat videogames and televisions that
are continually turned on in the lower-class homes that Heli portrays,
and the mobile phone videos that are shared on the internet amongst
the upper-middle-class youths in Después de Lucía—constitutes a criti-
cal strategy of mise-en-abyme. It is a technique through which cinema
measures the potential of other audio-visual devices. The use of mise-
en-abyme is explicit in the aforementioned sequence from Heli: after the
child hits Beto, a screen displaying a paused Wii videogame is shown,
depicting the figure of a gladiator wielding his sword as he is about to
go into combat. The continuity between the fictional conflict—which
is controlled via a handheld device that detects bodily movements—
and the actual torture reveals the disturbing psychological state in
which these children grow up. They are either directly encouraged by
adults, such as the military officer who acts as if he is offering them an
instructive experience, or they are subject to their utter indifference, for
example in the case of the cook who appears by the back door in this
sequence. In Heli’s home, on the other hand, the characters’ principal
activity consists of watching television, as was also the case of the pro-
tagonists in Sangre (2005), Escalante’s first feature-length film. By con-
trast, in Después de Lucía, we do not see the video that shows the sexual
relationship between the adolescents,16 but rather Ale’s and her father’s
consternation when they discover the images (which have been sent
anonymously) on their computers. This solitary vision of an intimate and
misappropriated recording provokes their respective tragic destinies: for
Ale, this moment, more than the act itself, marks the beginning of her
‘descent into hell’; the father’s viewing of the same film triggers a desire
for revenge that will prove to be fatal.
To a certain extent, these films’ aesthetics can be understood as
mounting a contrast to the invasive screens they represent, which pro-
voke the protagonists’ violence and confusion. In opposition to the
invasive nature of the diegetic telephones and televisions, Franco’s
and Escalante’s cameras choose distance; in contrast to the confu-
sion between reality and fiction created by the images their protagonist
consumes, they opt for hard realism. The adolescents’ hermetic inti-
macy and their final melancholia can also be opposed to the confusion
that exists between the body and its dehumanising objectification. This
confusion is reinforced both by the panoptical power of the images pro-
duced by new technologies and by the ludic nature of the videogames.
In contrast to the illusion of hypervisibility and omniscience that these
technologies, and to an extent television, have the potential to create, the
films’ visual portrayals of the adolescents do not permit the audience to
feel that they know them, even if their depiction does facilitate the possi-
bility of empathising and suffering with them; this is precisely a strength
of both works.
Vehicles of Tragedy
Rather than depicting characters that embody evil, as a melodrama
would, Escalante’s and Franco’s films focus on the devices and objects
that function as mechanisms, motives and vehicles of dehumanisation,
effectively trivialising violence and ‘evil’. While the child and adoles-
cent torturers behave like automatons, their supposedly intermediary
machines and devices transform into the secret agents of the narrative,
with destructive effects on the characters. Together with screens, cars—
which, as a means of transport, are a symbol of modernity and progress,
just as is the case with the aforementioned means of communication—
also take on a crucial role. It seems that they serve as an instrument of
tragic fatality, producing, and even coming to symbolise, the distanced,
mechanical violence with which the perpetrators act.
Indeed, it is not insignificant that both films begin with sequences
shot inside a car, and that these vehicles are given a central place in their
protagonists’ trajectories. Nor is it a coincidence that these objects,
which are key within imaginaries of mobility, feature in works that are
characterised by static shots, and that they are present in the directors’
debut feature-length films. To conclude, then, it is pertinent to shed
light on the visual and narrative relationship between adolescents and
cars in these films.
Después de Lucía opens with a long take, which is shot from the back
seat of a car. Out of the window, which is framed by the screen itself,
we see two men approach. One of them is listing the repairs that the
vehicle has received, the other (Roberto) gets into the car and drives off,
but he soon stops and abandons the car in the middle of a motorway.
196 S. DUFAYS
A subsequent scene will inform the spectator that this is the car in which
Roberto’s wife Lucía has died, an event witnessed by Alejandra who
was also present in the vehicle at the time. If we return to the open-
ing sequence with this information, we are able to understand that the
point of view that the camera provides inside the empty car corresponds
to that of Lucía’s ghost: she lingers as an absent presence, which, once
Roberto sits down, proves to be difficult for him to bear as he has not
accepted her death. This car is the object of the first dialogue that takes
place between father and daughter during their journey to Mexico in a
new vehicle. Ale asks what happened to the old car, to which Roberto
responds that ‘[he] sold it’, betraying his sense of unease and introduc-
ing the lie as a staple of his relationship with her. In the same way, and
seeing that he has been profoundly upset as he remains at home asleep
instead of going to work, Ale tells him lies in order to avoid admitting
what is happening to her at school. During the initial journey to Mexico,
the adolescent sits both in front (in her mother’s place) and behind, as
she searches for her position and, symbolically, her identity as daughter/
woman (Speranza 2015: 52). The car takes on an ambivalent function
in Después de Lucía: on the one hand, it is an intimate space in which
the majority of the exchanges between father and daughter take place
(Speranza 2015: 54); on the other, it is the instrument of Lucía’s violent
death and of José’s kidnapping by Roberto at the end of the film. The
car thus signifies a circular logic of arbitrary violence as the kidnapping
functions as a form of response to the accident.
The use of the car as an instrument of kidnapping and the perverse
employment of a camera to film a sexual relationship between adoles-
cents are two ingredients that can also be found in Daniel y Ana. In this
film, two upper-class brothers (like Alejandra) are kidnapped during a
journey that they are taking in their parents’ car and are forced to com-
mit an incestuous act in front of a camera, an event that deeply disturbs
the adolescent brother. The recurrent combination of the abusive cam-
era and the carceral vehicle in these adolescents’ tragedies signals both
these machines’ interdependence and their dynamic, decisive characters.
Indeed, these protagonists do not manage to control their own stories
(or drive their own narratives), and instead they undergo a process of
alienation in which objects substitute subjects and control the latter’s
movements, in the case of the car, as well as their relationships to oth-
ers—relationships which appear to be based on visibility.
Heli also opens with a long-take shot from the rear section of a vehi-
cle, but here the link between the car and violent death is made explicit:
the camera focuses first, through a high-angle shot, on a bloody head
(belonging to Heli), which has been crushed by a black boot, and, sub-
sequently, on some bare feet (belonging to Beto). Both of their bodies
are stretched out in the back of a pick-up truck. In contrast to Lucía’s
spectral presence in Roberto’s car, here the visibility of the almost-corpse
is underscored as the truck’s drivers hang one of them from a bridge
before continuing on their journey. The exhibition of Beto’s body in a
public place recalls the destiny of the adolescent in Sangre, whose pro-
tagonist throws his daughter’s corpse in the rubbish after she has com-
mitted suicide17 and subsequently trails the rubbish truck to the dump
in his own car. The adolescent body in Escalante’s films—which is trans-
ported by a vehicle designed to carry objects—is thus suspended between
its functions as a macabre trophy and discarded waste: it appears to rep-
resent the last vestiges of humanity in a society characterised by both its
inhumanity and its mechanical character. Alongside animality as a perma-
nent metaphor of the (post)human condition, the car repeatedly sheds
light on the operation of society.
Indeed, in Heli the car is associated not only with death, but also with
work and with a love that is (taken as) utopian. Heli works day and night
on a car assembly line; various scenes depict the factory, which he travels
to by bicycle, and they show the component parts of the cars made there.
However, the stereotypical values attached to the car—of wealth, free-
dom and eroticism—also convert it into a symbol of Estela and Beto’s
desire to escape Guanajuato to Zacatecas with a stolen fortune: a dream
that belongs in an impossible road movie. The first scene that depicts the
couple shows them kissing in the back seat of Beto’s yellow car, which is
parked in the middle of a deserted road. It is in this same vehicle that the
teens decide to get married, as they drive across a dusty track.
The black car that belongs to the corrupt military officers serves to
kidnap Heli, Beto and Estela and to take them to their respective places
of torture. It also functions as an alternative space of unofficial justice:
in the night scene in which Heli confesses to inspector Maribel, in her
car, the details of his kidnapping that he had not told her in her office,
she offers him her enormous breasts in response, thereby making it clear
that the car combines work and sexual spheres. The society depicted
in Heli is, therefore, divided between the poor workers who make the
198 S. DUFAYS
cars and the people who own them: military personnel and policemen.
Omnipresent, ambivalent and a synonym of power and alienation, where
love and dreams are inevitably damned, the car crystallises the dehumani-
sation and false modernity of this society, as if it were composed of pieces
of metal rather than men, or as if men—and especially adolescents—were
not worth more than a pile of junk.
Final Considerations
Throughout this comparative analysis of Después de Lucía and Heli—two
masterpieces by two renowned directors within the panorama of con-
temporary Mexican cinema—I have shown how adolescents are inno-
cent victims of a cruel, arbitrary and irreparable destiny. Although part of
the reason for this can be found in these characters’ social and narrative
contexts, it also exceeds them and takes on a tragic dimension. Alejandra
and Estela are key characters in these tragedies and their final traumatic
regression translates, in both cases, into silence and a return home. This
is very significant within the parabolic framework of human violence and
evil that both films construct. The rapes that they suffer either replace (in
Estela’s case) or punish (in Alejandra’s case) the sexual awakening of this
particularly stage of their lives. By refusing to talk, or losing the ability to
talk, as a result of these violent episodes, Alejandra and Estela crystallise
an anti-initiatory process of the loss of speech. It is as though their progress
through adolescence has been reversed: instead of continuing towards
adulthood (and the responsibilities of citizenship), they regress towards
a vulnerable and defenceless childhood, and in Heli towards the daily
spectacle of gratuitous violence. The sociopathic children in Heli and the
adolescent automatons in Después de Lucía thus reveal the repetition of a
simultaneously brutal and mechanical violence that appears to be intrin-
sic; the screens and cars shown in both films are privileged and significant
vehicles for this violence. The lack of dialogue between Alejandra and
her father, similar to the inability to distinguish between childhood and
adulthood in Heli, are suggestive of a society in which communication
between parents and children—for which the alienating usage of video-
games and mobile phones is a poor substitute—appears to be the object
of an impossible mourning. It is for this reason that the films adopt mel-
ancholic and pessimistic approaches (with the exception of Heli’s final
tender image); however, this does not undermine their reflexivity. The
relationships between the characters in both films serve as the framework
through which the narratives frame and foreground the visual and mate-
rial devices that contribute to the objectification of the adolescent body,
of which rape is the paradoxical apex.
Notes
1. Después de Lucía won the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at the 2012 Cannes
Film Festival, as well as a Special Mention in the ‘Horizontes Latinos’
cycle at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Heli was awarded
the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2013, along with the Best Picture
prize in the La Habana Film Festival and the Best Director award at the
Ariel Awards.
2. Podalsky mentions a series of examples in her 2008 article: ‘[The] nar-
ratives [of youth films] often lay the blame squarely at the feet of dys-
functional families. Indeed, parents often function as a key subplot in big
productions like La primera noche, Amores perros, La segunda noche, Por
la libre, and Piedras verdes as well as in independent ones like Aquí no
pasa nada, Lolo, Perfume de violetas, and De la calle. By frequently char-
acterizing the father as distanced, absent, authoritarian, or perverted,
these films comment on and, indeed, lament the patriarchal family loss’
(2008: 150).
3. Note that the name ‘Lucía’ comes from the Latin word ‘lux’, meaning
‘light’.
4. According to Podalsky, ‘while youth films about the middle-class often
revolve around a sexual coming-of-age, those featuring the working-class
tend to focus on violence and criminality’ (2008: 150).
5. Many critics have discussed this irremediable aspect of the films. For
example, Molina Foix writes that in Heli ‘the brutality, the base eroti-
cism, the misery and the bonding, are elements of a reality that appears to
have inscribed itself so inevitably that it already forms part of the fabric of
everyday life’ (2014); Bernasconi affirms that Franco ‘imprisons his char-
acters without allowing them […] the slightest chance of escape, incapa-
ble of choosing any other destiny but the one enforced upon them after
Lucía’s accident’ (2012).
6. Some critics have proposed similar interpretations of Después de Lucía.
For Isabelle Regnier, for example, ‘the frustrations of the adolescents are
those of society more generally, conceived of in this instance as a pressure
cooker on the point of explosion, which is caught between, on one hand,
a modernity imposed by globalisation and by new means of communica-
tion, and, on the other, the weight of patriarchal and authoritarian power
structures in this Catholic country’ (Regnier 2012).
200 S. DUFAYS
7. At the beginning of the film, in the hotel in which they stay during their
trip to Mexico, Alejandra gives her father his pyjamas and toothbrush; in
Mexico, she encourages him to continue with his new job. Her tendency
to adopt the role of her absent mother becomes more ambiguous in the
scene in which she wears one of her dresses during a dinner with her
father.
8. This exclusionary dynamic culminates when Javier and Manuel uri-
nate on Alejandra, who is laying curled up on the ground, in a sort of
reverse baptism that inverts a previous scene where Alejandra seemed
to be accepted by the group, an acceptance marked symbolically by her
entrance into the Jacuzzi in José’s house (Speranza 2015: 55).
9. Escalante expands on this idea in another interview: ‘The things that
happen after, like the torture and all of that, are consequences of chil-
dren who are born like that, almost like orphans, just in a different way.
They’re children who have children, they’re morally confused. It’s like
if you train a puppy in a certain way, it’s going to be the same when it
grows up, and it’s even worse with humans’ (quoted in López 2013).
10. Criticism has highlighted how, in the film, the school authorities attempt
to control the students by checking their drug use, but they remain una-
ware that Alejandra is being bullied.
11. Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet suggest in the introduction to
their second edited book about minors in Latin American cinema that:
‘Despite the harsh and often tragic situations underlying female subject
formation, there are nevertheless many films that document girls ‘com-
ing to voice’, defined by Lisa Cartwright as ‘a figure of speech in a range
of political movements connoting achievement of agency, usually belat-
edly or through political struggle before which the individual or collec-
tive subject who speaks is understood to have been ‘silent’ or ‘invisible’
(Rocha y Seminet 2014: xiii).
12. See for example Roberts-Camps’ article (2014) about Maryse Sistach’s
films, which condemn the adolescent protagonists’ lack of agency and
emphasise their subjectivity by adopting their point of view.
13. Together with frequent references to Haneke’s style, the critics also make
reference to Franco’s ‘almost clinical dryness’ (Bonfil 2012) as having
been influenced by Robert Bresson (some also mention as a model Saló
by Pasolini) and they relate Escalante’s transgressive style with that of the
filmmakers belonging to the ‘New French Extremism’ movement, in par-
ticular Bruno Dumont (Solórzano 2013).
14. When there is diegetic music, it either serves as an ironic counterpoint
to the rest of the film—for example, the romantic song ‘Esclavo y amo’
(Slave and master), which is played in Beto’s car before he proposes
to Estela—or it is deliberately ‘anempathic’ (Chion 1995: 229)—for
example the party song ‘Get On Me’, which is played during the night in
the hotel while Ale is raped.
15. For a criticism of Heli, see Macheret, who considers the film ‘abject’
(2014); for Después de Lucía, see Méranger, who criticises the film’s
‘self-satisfied darkness’ (2012). For a summary of the polemic surround-
ing the violence represented in Heli, and a well-argued defence of the
film, see the excellent texts by Solórzano (2013) and Thornton (2014).
16. We also do not see the filming of the incest in Daniel y Ana (2009),
Franco’s first feature-length film.
17. This destiny recalls Pedro’s fate in Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950), whose
body is dumped off a cliff into a landfill.
Bibliography
A.P. 2014. Escalante: Es un logro que el público se desmaye. El Heraldo, April 7.
Available here http://www.elheraldo.hn/mundo/605870-217/escalante-es-
un-logro-que-el-publico-se-desmaye. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
Babino, Ernesto. 2015. La adolescencia en el cine latinoamericano. Cinémas
d’Amérique Latine 23: 4–17.
Bernasconi, Carine. 2012. Après le drame. Critikat, October 2. Available here
http://www.critikat.com/actualite-cine/critique/despues-de-lucia. Accessed
10 Oct 2017.
Bisson, Frédéric. 2013. Después de Lucia. Une esthétique du malaise. Eclipses,
December 26. Available here http://www.revue-eclipses.com/despues-de-lu-
cia/revoir/une-esthetique-du-malaise-117.html. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
Bonfil, Carlos. 2012. Después de Lucía. La Jornada, October 21. Available
here http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/10/21/espectaculos/a08a1esp.
Chion, Michel. 1995. La Musique au cinéma. Paris: Fayard.
Freud, Sigmund. 1982 [1915]. Duelo y melancolía. In Obras Completas, vol. 14.
Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.
Girard, René. 1972. La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset.
Kermode, Mark. 2014. Heli Review. The Guardian, May 25. Available here
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/25/heli-review-mexi-
can-drugs-drama-ultraviolent. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
López, Sergio Raúl. 2013. Heli o la vida no vale nada en Guanajuato. Cine
Toma. Revista Mexicana de Cine, October 10. Available here https://
revistatoma.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/heli-amat-escalante-guanajuato/.
Macheret, Mathieu. 2014. L’égalisation de la violence. Critikat, April 8.
Available here http://www.critikat.com/actualite-cine/critique/heli.html.
202 S. DUFAYS
Méranger, Thierry. 2012. Después de Lucía. Les Cahiers du cinéma 682: 55.
Molina Foix, Vicente. 2014. Novísimos mexicanos. Letras libres, January 14.
Available here http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/cinetv/novisi-
mos-mexicanos. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
Podalsky, Laura. 2008. The Young, the Damned, and the Restless: Youth in
Contemporary Mexican Cinema. The Journal of Cinema and Media 49 (1):
144–160.
Regnier, Isabelle. 2012. Después de Lucía: les frustrations de la société mexic-
aine. Le Monde, October 2. Available here http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/
article/2012/10/02/despues-de-lucia-les-frustrations-de-la-societe-mexic-
aine_1768487_3246.html. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
Roberts-Camps, Traci. 2014. Adolescent Subjectivity and Gender-Based Sexual
Violence in Marisa Sistach’s Perfume de violetas: Nadie te oye and La niña en
la piedra: Nadie te ve. In Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, ed.
Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet, 147–160. Lanham: Lexington.
Rocha, Carolina, and Georgia Seminet (eds.). 2014. Introduction. In Screening
Minors in Latin American Cinema, xi–xx. Lanham: Lexington.
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2012. Innocence Interrupted: Neoliberalism and the
End of Childhood in Recent Mexican Cinema. In Representing History, Class,
and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film,
ed. Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet, 117–133. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Solórzano, Fernanda. 2013. Heli de Amat Escalante. Letras Libres, August 6.
Available here http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/cinetv/heli-amat-es-
calante. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
Speranza, Marcia. 2015. Después de Lucía. Cinémas d’Amérique Latine 23:
50–59.
Thornton, Niamh. 2014. Violence as Narrative Function or, Some Thoughts on
Why Heli Divides Critics. Mediático, June 30. Available here http://reframe.
sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2014/06/30. Accessed 10 Oct 2017.
CHAPTER 10
From Girlhood to Adulthood: Colombian

Adolescence in María, llena eres de gracia
and La sirga
Carolina Rocha
There is no place like home.

The Wizard of Oz
María, llena eres de gracia/María Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston

2004) and La sirga/The Towrope (dir. William Vega 2012) both explore
Colombian female adolescence and the coming-of-age of an at-risk female
protagonist. The first film was Joshua Marston’s debut feature-length
film, which immediately garnered public attention all over the world,
receiving awards at the Berlin and Cartagena film festivals—among sev-
eral others—and being nominated for more than thirty in total. Of par-
ticular importance is the fact that Colombian actress Catalina Moreno
Sandino, who plays the leading female role, was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Actress. La sirga was also William Vega’s first
feature-length film. Although on a smaller scale, it was also hailed by
C. Rocha (*) 
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, USA

204 C. ROCHA
critics and nominated for several awards at various film festivals, includ-
ing Cannes and Toronto International Film Festival. Both films center on
girlhood, which scholar Nancy Lesko defines as ‘a space for worries about
unknown futures, about the ability to succeed and dominate in chang-
ing circumstances, about maintenance of […] hierarchies in changing
social and cultural landscapes’ (2001: 2). These are the precise challenges
faced by the female adolescents in María, llena eres de gracias (hence-
forth María) and La sirga, with both girls growing up in a society riddled
by economic inequality and insecurity. For scholar Stacey Skar, Rosario
Tijeras (dir. Emilio Maillé 2005) and María—both directed by male film-
makers—present transgressive female protagonists while at the same time
upholding traditional gender roles and generic social divisions within and
outside of Colombia (2007).1 My interpretation differs from this analy-
sis. In this article, I argue that, despite the markedly different aesthetics,
María and La sirga both chart a female adolescent’s coming-of-age as
well as her efforts to simultaneously reject traditional gender roles and
shape her future life, overcoming poverty and displacement. The films’
focus on female adolescent agency frames Colombian female adolescents
as the nation’s hope for an optimistic future, albeit one that may not be
contained within the country’s borders. As icons of Colombia’s future,
the female adolescents in María and La sirga are endowed with resilience,
stamina, and the capacity to navigate new territories.
Before analysing María and La sirga, it is necessary to describe
Colombia’s political and socio-economic situation. A leading coffee
producer, this Andean country is also an exporter of flowers, oil, and
bananas as well as illegal drugs, namely cocaine, marijuana, and hero-
ine (Berquist 2001: xii). Since the 1960s, Colombia has been the stage
of a bloody conflict between left-leaning guerrilla groups—FARC and
ELN—and right-wing paramilitary groups. For Gonzalo Sánchez,
political violence is a prominent feature in Colombia’s politics that
has irreparably weakened the state at the expense of groups that have
asserted their power thanks to their military strength (2001: 2). Even
though there are political actors who believe in a pluralistic democracy
and the legitimacy of the State, and the 1991 constitution, decades
of warfare have undoubtedly impacted each and every aspect of life in
Colombia.2 Political instability and the lack of basic human rights have
particularly affected young people. Sánchez eloquently traces the emer-
gence and proliferation of sicarios (young hired killers), who come
from single-parent homes, have no education or legal job prospects,
10 FROM GIRLHOOD TO ADULTHOOD: COLOMBIAN ADOLESCENCE … 205
and embrace criminality as a way of life, and young women who join
gangs with the hopes of finding protection, but more often than not,
fall into further degradation (2001: 8). Thus, Colombia appears as a
highly unstable society where young people are predominantly prone to
exert and/or become victims of violence and early death. Some of the
socio-economic phenomena experienced by Colombia are consequences
of late capitalism. Reflecting on its effects, Anita Harris suggests that
these are times that ‘are characterised by dislocation, flux, and globaliza-
tion, and demand citizens who are flexible and self-realizing’ (2004: 2).
Although Harris is critical of the pressure that female adolescents face
to be self-realizing during late-capitalism, her insights complement
Catherine Driscoll’s argument that ‘adolescence also functions as an
explanation of the indispensable difficulty of becoming a subject, agent,
or independent or self-aware person’ (2002: 6). In this chapter, I con-
tend that the predominantly dire conditions in Colombia that serve as
the background for María and La sirga propel the female adolescents
towards journeys of self-discovery that reveal their pliability, strength,
and determination, all qualities necessary for Colombia’s viability as a
nation.
María, llena eres de gracia

The title, María, alludes to the fact that the protagonist is blessed by
a special trait. The film’s opening scenes center on María’s routine and
her personality. She bids farewell to her mother as she goes to work at
dawn. After her mother leaves, María also takes a bus to her own work.
Hence, these first takes show a parallel between mother and daughter, as
both depart from their humble neighbourhood early in the day for work.
They also demonstrate what type of life María can expect in her future:
the same early hours to start a low-paying job. Nonetheless, when she is
seen among her co-workers, she immediately stands out. While the oth-
ers take advantage of the bus ride to nap or doze, she alertly scans the
horizon, as if assessing the limits of her modest universe. Once at the
factory, her height also singles her out as different from the rest, but her
distinctiveness is quickly erased as she dons the blue coat to stand in the
production line. Moreover, break time allows a glimpse of the adoles-
cent’s concern about her friend who was stood up by a young man but
quickly overcame the event and is now flirting with another co-worker.
In the following scene, María is kissing her boyfriend Juan (Wilson
206 C. ROCHA
Guerrero), but once again she is presented in an unusual light. Instead

of being absorbed by the affectionate moment, she is distracted, look-
ing literally beyond and above him. The camera briefly aligns with her
as she gazes up and looks at the sky, as she surveys the upper limit of her
life. The final feature of her presentation as a special female adolescent
is her daring personality, which surfaces when she decides to climb to a
rooftop. Rejecting her risky endeavour, Juan advises her to come down.
When she challenges his courage, he walks away, abandoning her to her
own luck.
María offers views of the conflicting spaces that the female adoles-
cent inhabits. From the rooftop, she can feel the liberating effect of con-
templating a picture-perfect valley, but once at home, the atmosphere
becomes claustrophobic. The unfinished interior of her house is full of
boxes and objects, in addition to three generations of single women and
a colicky baby boy. While María has opinions—she opposes her mother’s
cure for the baby in an effort to establish her own identity—she is easily
outnumbered by her mother, sister, and grandmother who represent a
traditional side. In a different scene, she is forced to pay for her neph-
ew’s medicine, highlighting that her contribution to her family’s upkeep
comes at the expense of her own needs. It is not surprising, then, that
she experiences her family as limiting. Work is also constraining for her.
Handling roses constitutes a stark reminder of what María cannot have:
neither access to consumer goods nor a romantic relationship.3 In the
rose processing plant, she is seen in a production line that strips her of
her identity. Furthermore, she is made aware that roses are more valu-
able than she is. When she feels sick, her manager shows more concern
for the flowers that María has soiled than for her well-being, illustrat-
ing that she is an insignificant part in the business of exporting flowers.4
Her manager’s lack of sympathy, along with her own realization of her
lowly place lead her to resign from her job, an event that is celebrated by
her friends as a heroic sign of independence. Her rejection of a dead-end
job trimming roses as a form of subsistence foregrounds her rejection
of conformity; she will not settle for the typical female path of prioritiz-
ing romantic love, and thus, will dismiss it as a traditional narrative of
submission.
Complementing her unusual status at home and work, the scenes of
leisure further present María as an unusual adolescent. At a party, she
is endowed with the power of the gaze as she spots her friend Blanca’s
admirer and resolutely encourages her to invite him to dance. When
Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega) hesitates, María grabs her and invites the
young man on her behalf. In addition to this bold action, she also
observes her own boyfriend having a fantastic time getting drunk with
his friends and ignoring her. She tries to disregard his immature behav-
iour and asks him to dance, but he soon proves reluctant to participate.
Annoyed, María agrees to dance with Franklyn (Jhon Álex Toro). Her
disparaging feelings towards Juan and his lack of prospects are exposed
again when she tells him that she is pregnant. Instead of behaving duti-
fully and accepting her role as a mother-to-be, she lashes out against
Juan and his passive acceptance of a destiny of poverty and a loveless
marriage.5 This fundamental scene shows that in rejecting the traditional
wedding option, María sets out on an unorthodox path, particularly as
a female adolescent of poor origins. Nonetheless, it is worthy to con-
sider Harris’ insights about motherhood in teen years, when she asserts:
‘Especially when the woman is single or partnered but unmarried, (preg-
nancy) is marked as inherently fraught, the cause of lifelong social prob-
lems and the end of opportunity’ (2004: 30). Her decisions trigger and
affect her coming-of-age. Bonnie Friedman states that ‘the boy’s com-
ing-of-age story is about leaving home to save the world. The girl’s com-
ing-of-age story is about relinquishing the world beyond home’ (cit.
Hark 2002: 28). María’s coming-of-age does not follow the outdated
female narrative of choosing home over the world.6 Quite the contrary,
her coming-of-age implies exploring the world, but from the vulnera-
ble position of being pregnant, having broken up with the father of her
baby, being unemployed, and even being estranged from her own family.
María’s journey of self-discovery starts with her decision to leave her
town and tailor a new identity for herself, which better suits her own
needs and desires. Harris holds that ‘young people are newly obliged to
make good choices for themselves and set themselves on a path toward
success with little support or security outside the private sphere’ (2004:
5). Her determination to overcome the failure of her pregnancy—her
sister is the clear example of what she would like to avoid becoming—
gives her the impetus to move geographically in search of wider hori-
zons.7 On one hand, her desire for a job in Bogotá represents a means to
leave behind a way of life that she perceives as oppressive. On the other,
as an at-risk girl, María exhibits ‘misaligned ambitions’ which Barbara
Schneider and David Stevenson assign to rebel girls who ‘do not know
either what job they would like to do or how much education would be
required to be qualified for their job of choice’ (cit. Harris 2004: 26).
208 C. ROCHA
Further displaying her independence, María accepts Franklin’s offer

to take her to Bogotá. The ride on the motorbike—different from the
usual trek on foot or by bus that corresponds to working-class charac-
ters—gives her both a rare sense of freedom, stressed by the catchy
soundtrack and the expansiveness of the landscape, and the opportu-
nity to discuss job prospects with her new friend. Her daring attitude
encourages him to field her willingness to become a drug mule. First, he
praises her as ‘bacana’ (awesome), and then refers to the role of a drug
mule also as ‘bacano,’ indirectly pointing out that she is the right person
for such a risky endeavor. María, however, is only persuaded when she
finds out about the substantial pay that she will receive as a drug mule.
Her acceptance, then, speaks of her determination to build a future for
herself, even in the face of considerable perils. In the interview with the
mule recruiter, he asks her several questions, but one is particularly tell-
ing about her personality: ‘¿Te asustas fácil?’ (Do you get frightened eas-
ily?). She answers no, but viewers know that she is apprehensive about
the risk of being detained and that she lies about her age and the exist-
ence of a boyfriend.
In María, sisterhood is simultaneously challenged and reaffirmed as
an important aspect of female adolescence. The young female protago-
nist quickly assesses the dangers of her new métier in which men, dupli-
cating the gender division seen at the flower plant, are prominently in
charge of managerial and recruiting positions while women are mostly
used as drug carriers. For Skar, ‘María Álvarez, aunque entra en el
mundo del narcotráfico, siempre respeta los límites de su género sexual.
Por ende, no representa ningún peligro para el control masculino’ (Even
though María Álvarez goes into the world of drug trafficking, she always
respects the limits of her gender. Therefore, she does not represent any
danger to masculine control) (2007). Nonetheless, an observant María,
who perceives the gender division, discovers Lucy (Guilied López) as a
role model and ally, or an ‘adopted sister’. Well-groomed and confident,
Lucy, through her participation in the illegal drug trafficking system,
appears to have benefitted from the tenets of feminism which ‘enabled
the current generation of young women to see themselves, and to be
seen, as enjoying new freedoms and opportunities. They are far more
at liberty to make choices and pursue lifestyles independently of their
families, the state, and men in general’ (Harris 2004: 8). Despite her
experience and financial independence, however, Lucy still longs for her
immigrant sister. Her account of her timid approach towards her sister’s
house speaks of a domesticity and affection that María does not feel for
her own sister Diana (Johanna Andrea Mora). Diana displays a sense of
entitlement and desire to control María, demanding that she provide for
and support the family unit. Nevertheless, María acts as an older sister
for her friend Blanca when she tries to dissuade her from becoming a
mule. In that scene, María displays her desire to protect her friend’s vir-
tuousness and childhood, foregrounding her future leadership.
María’s journey as a drug mule puts an end to her adolescence, with
the help of other females. From the moment she climbs on to Frank’s
motorbike, she starts on a path of no return, especially because Juan is
watching her depart with another man. Frank’s role as a middle man
ends when he delivers María to those who prepare her for the trip.
Differently from their friendliness during the recruiting meeting, María
now encounters an eminently business-like atmosphere in which she has
to keep her part of the deal: swallowing the drug pellets. She is relent-
lessly given pellet after pellet and warned that she has to deliver them
all unless she wants harm to come to her family members. The prepara-
tion stage resembles an assembly-line purgatory in which each mule is
individually charged with the excruciating task of ingesting the sizable
pellets. Finally, the film also presents María’s departure from Bogotá as
a fundamental passage in which she appears somewhat overwhelmed by
the various stages of airport security and pre-boarding which, for her,
signify a profound change in her life. The transition is, in part, counter-
balanced by the presence of her ‘sisters’ who now act as María’s men-
tors in her new job. Here, it is important to note film scholar Mary
Celeste Kearney’s assertion that ‘some women-power films depict two or
more females who gain confidence through and find support in same-
sex friendships’ (2002: 131). This applies to María: Blanca’s company
helps ease María into her role, diminishing her feelings of loneliness and
insecurity. The fact that Lucy is on the same flight further helps assuage
María’s reservations. Both Blanca and Lucy provide her with crucial sup-
port during the passage, stressing the importance of sisterhood. Blanca
points out another mule to María and Lucy gives her the address of her
sister when María loses the hotel address. In turn, María promises Lucy
that she will get medical help when Lucy feels unwell.
In María, the female adolescent protagonist quickly leaves her child-
hood behind. It is not a coincidence that the final experiences of María’s
adolescence take place in Colombia and the first of her adulthood over-
lap with her entrance into the United States. Just as Colombia is left
210 C. ROCHA
behind, so is her adolescence as soon as she lands in a foreign country

and is intercepted by two immigration police officers who suspect her
of being a mule. Their questioning places María in an unknown terri-
tory in which she has to figure out her way out by herself as she weaves
together different stories to justify her ‘legal’ reasons to visit the coun-
try. Her vulnerability is, however, overcome when news of her preg-
nancy shields her from the X-rays that would reveal the drug pellets in
her stomach. Nevertheless, several other steps punctuate María’s transi-
tion to adulthood. True to her word, she becomes an advocate for Lucy
in front of the men who meet them to claim the pellets. When María
discovers her friend’s absence and finds a bloodied bathroom, she aptly
perceives Blanca’s and her own vulnerability and, by deciding to flee, acts
as her friend’s protector. Contrary to Blanca’s misunderstanding of the
peril they face and her lack of clear solutions, María proceeds as a leader,
devising a plan to reach the only person whose address she has: Lucy’s
sister, Carla (Patricia Rae).
In the final part of the film, María portrays María’s entrance into
adulthood as an individual experience. To stress her coming-of-age, she
is contrasted with Blanca, who initially refuses to seek help from Lucy’s
sister but ends up accepting it a day later. Moreover, Blanca shows lack
of judgement when she takes the pellets out of her purse in front of Don
Fernando (Orlando Tobón) and appears unreasonable when María trusts
him with her concern about Lucy’s fate. Blanca’s childish demeanor ends
with Don Fernando’s intervention as the well-meaning man addresses
her as ‘niña’ (girl). In her final tantrum, Blanca declares María unfit to be
a mother due to her profession as a mule. Different from her immature
friend, María shows self-control and initiative when she demands the com-
pensation owed to Lucy from the male handlers. Even though she is ulti-
mately unsuccessful in securing it, her valiant stance distinguishes her from
Blanca’s indifference. She also displays generosity and loyalty when she not
only reimburses Carla for the repatriation of Lucy’s remains, but also and
more importantly, pays her respects to the deceased friend who was instru-
mental in her coming-of-age. Therefore, María’s concern and affection for
Lucy redeems her from her poor choice of accepting to be a mule. Her
worry for others becomes even more noticeable when she seeks a health
clinic to ascertain her baby’s welfare. Even though one of the final scenes
shows both friends sitting together at the airport, placing them in the
same plight, viewers know of María’s coming-of-age. Her decision to stay
in the United States is based as much on her present as it is on her future.
María’s migration corresponds with her entrance into adulthood.

Once she has made up her mind about migrating, a close-up focuses
on her resolute face. The camera also captures an advertisement sign:
‘It’s what is inside that counts’.8 This mantra alludes to her grace. Her
unassuming appearance is compensated by her qualities: ability to prob-
lem-solve, independence, and caring for others. In this scene, she joins
other female characters that display girl-power: ‘they are deemed to
embody girl power because they are outspoken, not afraid to take power,
believe in themselves, and run their own lives’ (Harris 2004: 17). The
film’s soundtrack also stresses her entrance into adulthood: ‘aquí queda
todo lo que fui/aquí empieza lo que soy […] Y lo que venga después sí
será y no le temo/no me falta nada más/está aquí lo único que tengo’
(here is everything I was/here begins what I am […] And what comes
afterward, it will be and I am not afraid/nothing else is needed/here is
the only thing I have). The incidents of María’s journey as a mule have
irremediably changed her and, more importantly, opened opportunities
to fashion a new self and start anew. Such a resolution of the coming-
of-age process is coincidental with the American coming-of-age which,
according to Erik Erikson, amounts to ‘choosing from an array of con-
flicting possibilities’ (cit. Dalsimer 1986: 9).9 María, who has successfully
fled the exploitation of a low-paying job and survived a gruesome trip as
a drug mule, is now fully equipped to make the most of the new prom-
ises that the United States represents. As an independent, fast-thinking,
and resilient young woman, she will be able to realise her potential in her
new country of residence. While some film critics have decried the mes-
sage that in María the United States appears as the quintessential land of
opportunity, a message that unfortunately contrasts this nation with its
Latin American neighbours, the adolescent protagonist’s skills of initia-
tive, courage, and independence would not necessarily ensure her auton-
omy and survival in the problematic economy of twenty-first-century
Colombia. As my analysis of the following film will show, the develop-
ment of a Colombian female adolescent is further complicated by politi-
cal instability.
La sirga
Unlike María, the adolescent female protagonist of La sirga is introduced
as a lonely and despondent character that film critics have recognised
as representing a youth displaced by violence in Colombian cinema.10
212 C. ROCHA
The film’s first scenes present a frontal shot of a scarecrow—strangely

shaped as an impaled human—surrounded by mist. The next scene is a pan
of La Cocha Lagoon, a body of water disturbed by the wind, located in
Southern Colombia, closed to the Ecuadorian border. The inhospitable
landscape is traversed by a girl named Alicia (Joghis Seudin Arias) who,
without any possessions, wanders adrift until she passes out.11 For Ana
María López, the area crossed by Alicia ‘es un espacio en el cual se con-
jugan el pasado y el presente del país. Es un lugar sagrado, reserva natu-
ral y al mismo tiempo el lugar del miedo y el olvido estatal’ (is a space in
which past and present meld. It is a sacred place, natural reserve and at
the same time, the place of fear and the state’s oblivion) (2015: 241). The
past-present dialectic is also inscribed in Alicia as she moves from a home
that was burned down in search of another place of shelter and affec-
tion. At first, she is represented as a helpless girl. Gabriel Mirichis (David
Fernando Guacas), a local boat owner, finds her in a fetal position and
takes her to Don Óscar (Julio César Roble), the girl’s paternal uncle. Once
placed inside his house, Alicia is also seen in a fetal position, a posture
that indicates psychological trauma and search for comfort. Referring to
this, Amanda Rueda and Paola García note that Alicia is in a ‘posición que
evoca la necesidad de una protección materna’ (a position that evokes the
need for maternal protection) (2015). The young female protagonist, who
needs maternal nurturing, displays the effects of violence in her silence and
reticence to go back to the past. As she introduces herself, she barely pro-
vides information about her family or the fact that Siberia, her home, has
been burned down by unidentified guerrillas.12 Rueda and García explain
that in La sirga, ‘La violencia se sugiere abordando los territorios de la
subjetividad y la memoria que funciona con golpes de flash. La violencia
tiene una presencia metafórica, indirecta y sugestiva’ (Violence is suggested
through the territories of subjectivity and memory, and is represented by
flashbacks. Violence has a metaphorical, indirect, and suggestive presence)
(2015). Even though Alicia’s uncle expresses outrage at what happened to
her father, he does not offer sympathy or affection to the adolescent. She
has to beg to be allowed to stay, and when he replies that ‘las cosas están
jodidas,’ (times are tough), she even negotiates ‘por unos pocos días’ (only
for a few days).13 Reluctantly, the uncle accepts her and imposes the condi-
tion that she must avoid his son Freddy’s room.
La sirga provides a detailed survey of the harsh new space inhab-
ited by Alicia. Her uncle’s house, named La sirga, is located closed to
a lagoon, surrounded by snow-covered mountains; yet, it is far from a
comfortable home. The house’s interior is as dark and unwelcoming as

the surrounding landscape. At night, candles have to be used to make do
without electricity, emphasizing its primitiveness.14 The decrepit building
made of wooden boards not only offers scant protection from the wind,
but also constitutes a safety hazard given its state of decay. As Alicia
quickly learns when she steps on a rotten board and hurts her knee, it
is a space that she has to navigate with caution. The uneven boards that
also separate rooms do little for the girl’s privacy, as she becomes the
object of her uncle’s curiosity when undressing. Adding to the sense of
isolation, no neighbours are close by. Only Mirichis visits to inquire after
Alicia’s health.
As a displaced child, Alicia quickly bonds with her only relative despite
his initial cool reception, displaying her dependency. At first, a grief-
stricken Óscar—his only son Freddy has left the area in search of more
opportunities—is unable to provide the adolescent with comforts and
integrate her into her new environs, but when he witnesses her vulner-
ability as she sleepwalks, he intervenes by taking her back to bed as a
father would do. He tells Alicia about her nocturnal wanderings and she
confesses that it used to happen when she was younger. Whereas Alicia
tries to distance herself from her childhood, mentioning a period marked
by her mother and goat’s milk, what becomes evident is that in her pres-
ent adolescence, she has to survive with her own resources. Hence, she
not only feels her parents’ absence, but also and more importantly, she
grieves for her past child self. For Dalsimer ‘[O]ften the pleasures of
childhood become tinged, in retrospect, with an idealizing aura. As in
mourning, there is a yearning for the past and, ultimately, an acceptance
of the irrevocability of its loss’ (1986: 7). But Alicia is still represented
in a liminal state—reflected by La Sirga’s location next to the water—
without fully letting go of her girlhood. She welcomes, for instance, her
uncle’s attention when he sees that she has injured her knee. She also
looks for his protection when they have male visitors and she fears for her
safety.
Alicia’s stay at La sirga allows her coming-of-age. If Óscar
slowly comes to fulfil a paternal role in Alicia’s life, Flora (Floralba
Achicanoy), Óscar’s housekeeper, introduces the girl into domesticity.
Complementing the adolescent’s uncle, Flora occupies a double posi-
tion. On one hand, she is the owner of a hammer—a tool associated with
masculinity—and gives orders to the orphaned girl. On the other, she
teaches her the ropes of housekeeping. Far from being a warm maternal
214 C. ROCHA
character—she imitates and mirrors Óscar’s aloofness—Flora acclimates

Alicia into home life, training her to carry out traditional women’s roles
such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for the house’s maintenance.
Working side by side with Flora, Alicia comes to forge a tenuous friend-
ship with her. Later, Flora adopts a more motherly role with the adoles-
cent girl when she gets a cold. Curiously, the film also shows the blurring
of gender roles in an area with few resources. Thus, Flora and Alicia
repair the roof, a typical masculine chore, while Óscar sews the fishing
nets. This reversal of gender roles speaks to the way in which these char-
acters adapt to scarcity by problem-solving. More importantly, Flora
teaches Alicia to be self-sustainable. Because of the domestic bliss and
Alicia’s integration into a new family, the time the adolescent spends
with Flora and Óscar institutes her transformation from a wounded girl
to a more confident adolescent.
Alicia’s engagement with the home repairs gives her a sense of pur-
pose that is a crucial step towards her coming-of-age. Helping with
home repairs is an opportunity to keep busy, literally and metaphorically
building a new life for herself. She is taught to hammer nails and sand
boards, but she also learns to be entrepreneurial when she improvises in
the absence of tools and is seen finding solutions for fighting against the
wind and rain. Alicia proves to be a hard worker as she cooks and takes
care of the roof and garden. Alicia’s and Flora’s efforts help revitalise the
rundown inn with their feminine touch. On one hand, the adolescent’s
work is a way to pay for her room and board. On the other, it implies her
subaltern status in the precarious economy of the household she inhab-
its. Harris warns of ‘[y]oung women’s sexual and economic exploitation
and the socioeconomic benefits delivered by them’ (2004: 9). For her
part, María Ospina holds that the daily activities in which all characters
engage are part of communal and collectivist production (2017: 255).
Despite her initiative, Flora cautions that ‘aquí no podemos quedarnos
solas, Alicia,’ (we cannot stay alone here, Alicia), a comment that rein-
forces women’s vulnerability and dependent status. In Alicia’s case, her
labor sprucing up the property does not yield any monetary compensa-
tion, for the tourists mentioned several times who could bring another
source of income never arrive. The realization that the place is forsaken
slowly dawns on the female adolescent.
As Alicia proves her worth, successfully reproducing the tasks taught by
Flora, she appears to broaden her life options. Dalsimer explains that ‘ado-
lescence is a period of widened possibilities and of experimentation with
alternatives, before the individual narrows the range of what is possible

by making those commitments which will define adulthood’ (1986: 5).
As an adolescent, Alicia is seen—albeit differently—by the two young
men. Her cousin Freddy (Heraldo Romero), who arrives unexpectedly
and observes the changes introduced by the adolescent with admiration,
sees her as a young adult. For Mirichis, she is half girl, half adolescent.
Spectators see his conflicting views of her when he invites her for a canoe
ride to explore her willingness to become his life partner, and, at the
same time, offers her a wooden doll. For his part, Freddy considers Alicia
restricted by domesticity and her loyalty to La sirga, a place he despises
and which he constantly leaves, having given it up as completely hopeless.
As an adult male, his behaviour mirrors his father’s. Both peek at Alicia
while she undresses; a fact that speaks to her sexual worth for both father
and son. Even though Freddy also learns about her sleepwalking, he too
invites her to join him in the city. In the end, Alicia appears to be on the
path to becoming her uncle’s lover. This appears evident when Óscar is
jealous of the fact that Flora spends time with her husband, suggesting
that in the latter’s absence, they have an understanding. In that dialogue,
it also surfaces that Óscar is equally jealous of Alicia spending time with
Mirichis, marking a parallel between both women. Despite Óscar’s jeal-
ousy, he thanks Flora for having made Alicia into ‘una mujercita’ (a lit-
tle woman), which could mean training her in household chores and/or
introducing her to adult femininity. Scenes later, as Flora quietly leaves
Óscar’s room, viewers perceive that she has appeased the man’s jealousy
by having sexual relations with him. Like her mentor and as a now-devel-
oped young woman, Alicia may become Óscar’s lover in the near future.
Consequently, La sirga portends that the adolescent’s fate will be decided
in relation to one or more of these men.
Alicia’s entrance into adulthood comes with the realization of immi-
nent violence. The film presents it as an inner process in which she feels
and perceives more than she sees. Of particular importance is the canoe
ride with Mirichis to Santa Lucía, where they climb the wooden tow-
ers built by the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces).15 The
silence, desolation, and traces of violence—glass with a bullet hole—
convey the state’s relinquishment of the area to the guerrillas as well as
its emptiness as a result of the displacement of the civilian population.
Aware of this background, Mirichis challenges Alicia’s domesticity and
loyalty to her uncle’s house, urging her to consider a life somewhere else.
Innocently, Alicia asks him ‘¿Adónde debo ir?’ (Where should I go?),
216 C. ROCHA
showing also perhaps her inability to make life choices on her own—
as she is still dependent on a man. Her lack of romantic feelings for
Mirichis is illustrated on two occasions: first, at the top of the tower,
she is oblivious to his desire for an intimate moment and second, when
he attempts to give her the male figurine that he had made, she appears
unaffected. These missed opportunities foretell the young man’s retreat
from her life: he disappears shortly after long shots show him being fol-
lowed by Freddy’s boat. Freddy also leaves, but not without exerting
some violence over Alicia. His off-screen harassment is a warning that
she should leave La sirga along with her uncle. While Alicia does not
see the impaled man—possibly Mirichis attacked by Freddy—she finds
his doll in Freddy’s room, a discovery that impels her to go away, per-
haps guessing her cousin’s involvement in her friend’s murder. Referring
to this plot development, López states that ‘en medio de la situación
Alicia ocupa un lugar de víctima, pero también es quien hace evidente
la vulnerabilidad del lugar y sus habitantes frente a nuevas incursiones
violentas’ (in the middle of the situation in which Alicia finds herself,
she embodies the victim, but also makes evident the vulnerability of the
place and its inhabitants as they face new violent attacks) (2015: 244). I
agree that Alicia initially appears as a victim, but not in the final scenes
when she reaches an autonomous decision to leave.16 Just like María’s
coming-of-age in María, Alicia’s coming-of-age entails leaving home in
search of a more stable present and future. In contrast to the first images
that showed her in a fetal position amid the fog, in the final scenes Alicia
stands straight as she silently steals some glances at the wooden structure
that was her refuge. Emphasizing the dispelling of her doubts and fears,
the day is clear and even some sunrays are seen in the distant hills.
Alicia’s departure highlights her status as an independent adult.
Despite Flora’s promise that the tourists will soon arrive, the adolescent
is no longer hopeful about their coming. Instead, she assesses her own
qualities and finds herself ready to start again. As Harris mentions, ‘In
today’s risk society, individuals are expected to be flexible, adaptable,
resilient, and ultimately responsible for their own abilities to manage
their lives successfully’ (2004: 8). The rural area where she has sought
shelter represents an environment threatened by bloodshed that has
forced her to grow up, to quickly adapt, and to trust herself to look for
safer surroundings. Alicia is conscious of her losses and traumas—in one
of the final scenes, Flora reminds her that she hides candles when she
sleepwalks—but she has also learned to work for her upkeep, believe
in her instincts, and venture out in search of more peaceful surround-

ings. By setting off on a journey, she refuses the traditional path of being
defined in relation to a man, either as his protégée or his companion. She
also rejects the social and geographical isolation that Donny Meertens
has identified as a feature of female peasant refugees’ childhood and ado-
lescence (2001: 161). Her movement toward socialization and life leaves
behind her girlhood, which has been marked by the carnage of civil war.
As a survivor of violence, she has been uprooted and displaced, but she
embraces geographical mobility as a way of looking for better living con-
ditions, showing her endurance. If, as Meertens explains, ‘women appear
to be better equipped to continue the routines of domestic labor in pur-
suit of family survival’ (2001: 167), Alicia’s daring decision to explore
beyond the area contrasts with her uncle’s staunch refusal to leave. More
importantly, it demonstrates her entrance into womanhood which, in the
Colombian context, signifies displaying the strength to go on. Here, it is
relevant to consider that for Meertens, the role of victim begins to meld
with that of the new citizen (2001: 167). Thus, as a survivor, Alicia’s
adulthood coincides with Colombia’s opportunity to be a viable nation
after the destruction brought about by decades of infighting.
Conclusion
To conclude, the representation of female adolescence in María and
La sirga equates the coming-of-age of two disenfranchised Colombian
girls with a process of empowerment and self-growth despite the dire
socio-economic conditions that they have experienced. As a result,
entering into adulthood signifies, for these characters, leaving the dys-
functional home in search of new territories. Both María and Alicia
emerge from girlhood as survivors of traumatic situations in which they
have exhibited stamina, courage, and strength of mind, all characteris-
tics of the adaptable and resilient citizens of at-risk societies. While their
non-traditional coming-of-age may point to the influence of feminism
that endows both adolescents with the capacity to adapt and thus sur-
vive, both films also demonstrate that for these female adolescents the
passage to adulthood is achieved through the preservation of their femi-
ninity: María as a mother-to-be and Alicia as someone who has mastered
household chores. This type of representation significantly differs from
the depictions of adolescence in contemporary American mainstream
cinema in which adolescent heroines show their stamina and courage in
218 C. ROCHA
mostly action-packed films.17 Consequently, María and La sirga show

the female adolescents’ development as a result of their improvisation,
ability to adapt to quickly-changing situations and their embodiment of
Colombian values, having been affected by the country’s violence and
status as a leading cocaine exporter. In this context, the female adoles-
cents respectively depart from a problematic past and present, each mov-
ing forward in search of different options. As such, they embody the
viability of Colombia as a nation in which female citizens are imbued
with strength, determination, and the ability to adapt to new situations.
Notes
1. Even though she notes that director Marston is not Colombian, scholar
Juana Suárez refers to La virgen de los sicarios (dir. Barbet Schroeder
2000) and María, llena eres de gracia as illustrative of Colombian film-
making (2012: 10).
2. At the time of writing this piece, President Juan Manuel Santos (1951–)
is determinedly working toward the signing of a peace agreement and has
been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
3. Roses are the topic of a song that is heard in the film, attesting to their
importance to romantic love.
4. Francisca González Flores explains that roses also have a lyric meaning as
symbols of love and hope for the future (2010: 289).
5. In her study of The Wizard of Oz, Friedman characterises the Wicked
Witch ‘as a woman who wants’ (cit. Hark 2002: 33), while Dorothy
accepts the lack of desire (2002: 33). Though on a quest like Dorothy’s,
María’s subjectivity is constructed around her desire for a better future.
6. Critics, such as the Washington Post’s writer Desson Thomson, have noted
the religious connotations of María’s name, her cutting thorns, and car-
rying a baby (2004). María Elena Domínguez has also pointed out the
film’s Marianism (2016).
7. María’s representation has some characteristics of the bad girl. Germaine
Greer suggests that ‘the career of the individual bad girl is likely to be a
brief succession of episodes of chaotic drinking, casual sex, venereal infec-
tion and unwanted pregnancy, with consequences she will have to strug-
gle all her life’ (cit. Harris 2004: 29).
8. Suárez, referring to Emily Davis’ article notes ‘the use of young wom-
en’s bodies to transport illegal substances serves to illustrate the intricate
system of merchandise mobility in transnational and global economies’
(2012: 11).
9. José Luis Ortega Torres decries the fact that the second part film turns
into ‘un loa al american way of life’ (praise for the American way of life)
(2016). However, the abundance of opportunities for an uneducated
female is not possible in Colombia.
10. See, for instance, Zuloaga, Rueda and García, and López.
11. Catherine Driscoll mentions that Deleuze considers Alice as negotiating
multiple identities (2002: 197).
12. Ana María López observes that ‘esta producción forma parte de un corpus
de películas colombianas contemporáneas en las cuales el argumento se
desarrolla lejos de las urbes, en zonas apartadas e inhóspitas en las cuales
se evidencia la ausencia del Estado’ (this production forms part of a cor-
pus of contemporary Colombian films in which the plot is developed far
away from the cities, in isolated and inhospitable regions in which the
State’s absence is evident) (2015: 240).
13. Rueda and García interpret the uncle’s silence and short dialogues as signs
of ‘despoblamiento’ (depopulation) brought about by the violence of war
(2015).
14. For Eylin Rojas Hernández (2015), the lack of services (running water,
electricity) alludes to the State’s disappearance in the area.
15. Néstor Julián Peña Suárez explains that in December 1997, the FARC
took over a military outpost in the Patascoy Hill, killing eleven military
men and kidnapping eighteen. The FARC also built two twin towers in
Santa Lucía that served as strategic control posts for the lagoon and the
hills, where they were barricaded (2014).
16. Donny Meertens states, ‘[A]another symbol is that of the female victim
who represents the rights of a civil population that is not involved in
armed conflict’ (2001: 155).
17. Eva Lupold lists Kick Ass (dir. Matthew Vaughn 2010), Hannah (dir.
Joe Wright 2011), and Violet and Daisy (dir. Geoffrey Fletcher 2013) as
examples of this.
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Index
A adulthood, 1, 17, 23, 28, 29, 63, 81,

À deriva, 18, 21, 56, 123 106, 115, 137, 177, 179, 188,
adolescence 189, 198, 209–211, 215, 217
and class. See class affect, 15, 25, 81, 89, 93, 94, 102,
and fluidity. See fluidity; swimming 105, 136, 139
pool Agamben, Giorgio, 83
and gender. See gender; girlhood; agency, 1, 6, 15, 20, 25, 26, 52, 61,
boyhood 70, 74, 77, 83, 85, 89, 93, 95,
and marginality, 12, 14, 63 119, 150, 187, 200, 204
and privilege, 2, 3, 24, 61, 106, Aguilar, Fabrizio, 27, 166
107, 122. See also class Aguilar, Gonzalo, 11, 81, 95
and sexuality. See sexuality A invenção da infância, 2
adolescent, 4, 6–8, 10–29, 38, 39, allegory, 93
41, 42, 46, 47, 50–52, 54, 55, Amores perros, 14, 186, 199
60–62, 65–67, 69, 70, 72, 73, animation, 27, 145, 146, 152, 154,
75, 77, 83, 95, 102–106, 108, 156–158
116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 131, Ariès, Phillipe, 2
145, 147, 154, 156–158, 175, Armas, Ramiro, 4, 24, 25, 123
177, 183–200, 204–207, 209, Arnaiz, Ricardo, 27, 147, 149, 152,
211–217 153
character, 15, 21, 24, 71, 184, 185 Ausente, 17, 24, 37–39, 41–43,
46–48, 51–56
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 223

under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG,
part of Springer Nature 2018
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89381-5
224 Index
B ‘coming of age’, 20, 140, 165, 167,

Babenco, Héctor, 12 171, 172, 175, 176
Barbosa, Fellipe, 17–18, 25, 101, rituals of, 172, 175
103–106, 108, 110, 112, 120, Connell, Raewyn, 10, 112, 129, 136
121
Barrow, Sarah, 21, 27, 28
Beira-Mar, 18, 24, 29, 56, 60, 73 D
Benjamin, Walter, 91, 96 de Grandis, Rita, 9
Bentes, Ivana, 8, 14, 64, 66, 105 Deleuze, Giles, 78, 84, 86, 92, 219
Berger, Marco, 17, 24, 37, 38, 40–42, Después de Lucía, 28, 183, 185–196,
44, 49, 51–54, 56 198, 199, 201
boyhood, 23, 27, 145, 151, 157 Dhalia, Heitor, 18, 56, 123
Bruhm, Steven, 1, 16, 106 dictatorship, 8. See also military rule
Buñuel, Luis, 13, 201 domestic space, 25, 109
Butler, Judith, 91, 129 Driscoll, Catherine, 3, 9, 10, 19, 20,
28, 29, 115, 147, 154, 173, 205,
219
C drugs, 13, 20, 204
Carri, Albertina, 61, 94
Casa grande, 17, 22, 25, 101–111,
113, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122 E
Castañeda, Claudia, 6, 7 Edelman, Lee, 11, 76
child, 5–8, 10–12, 15, 16, 21, 28, 29, education, 3, 11, 12, 103, 136, 156,
59, 62, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 109, 191, 204, 207
112, 135, 150, 166, 168, 169, Eimbcke, Fernando, 26, 127, 133,
171–173, 189, 194, 195, 213 140, 185
character, 6, 8, 15–17 El laberinto del fauno, 8, 9
childhood El niño pez, 19, 55, 122
and cinema, 5–7, 9, 177 El último verano de la Boyita, 19, 55
and dictatorship, 8 Escalante, Amat, 28, 183, 185, 187,
and marginality, 12 191, 194, 195, 197, 200
and play, 6, 146 experimentation, 11, 17–19, 21, 106,
children’s rights, 12 190, 214
Cidade de Deus, 13, 14, 20
Cinema Novo, 59
citizenship, 11, 186, 187, 198 F
class, 1, 2, 6, 10, 18, 21, 23, 25–27, family, 10, 25, 60, 67, 73, 81, 82, 86,
60, 61, 69, 72, 75, 83, 101, 102, 89, 102–105, 107, 109, 110, 112,
104, 107, 110, 112, 113, 116, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121, 130,
117, 121, 128, 129, 131–134, 131, 140, 148, 152, 168, 172–
136–142, 145, 148–152, 155– 175, 178, 185, 187, 188, 199,
158, 170, 178, 184, 186, 189 206, 207, 209, 212, 214, 217
Index 225
breakdown, 81 Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho, 18, 24,

fluidity, 24, 25, 29, 43, 54, 106 56, 60
Foucault, Michel, 6, 63, 65, 66, 78, homoerotic desires. See queer desires
112 Hurley, Natasha, 1, 16, 106
Franco, Michel, 8, 9, 28, 183, 185,
187, 189, 191, 194, 195,
199–201 I
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 86, 168, 192 identification, 7, 24, 39, 44, 48, 54,
Freyre, Gilberto, 101, 102, 107, 108, 55, 170, 171, 193
110, 111, 113, 114, 120–123 cinematic, 24, 44, 54
incest, 18, 196, 201
Infancia clandestina, 8
G innocence, 1, 2, 11, 17, 106, 116,
García-Montero, Rosario, 27, 166, 171, 178, 179, 186
172, 176
Gateward, Frances, 127, 128, 137
Gaviria, Víctor, 13 J
Géminis, 61 Jenkins, Henry, 1, 106
gender, 2, 6, 10, 21, 23–26, 60, 61, Joven y alocada, 21
64, 68, 69, 82, 88, 112, 116, Julio comienza en Julio, 61, 112
117, 128, 129, 131, 134, 136,
137, 145, 148–151, 157, 158,
186, 204, 208, 214 K
girlhood, 19, 23, 27, 28, 59, 61, Kamchatka, 8, 9
115, 123, 145, 147, 151, 157, Kantaris, Geoffrey, 13
204, 213, 217. See also Driscoll,
Catherine
globalisation, 11, 13, 23, 134, 184, L
185, 199, 205 La ciénaga, 18, 22, 61, 83, 94, 105,
Güeros, 26, 127, 129–134, 137, 139 122
Gutmann, Matthew, 116, 128 La leyenda de la Nahuala, 27, 147,
150, 152
La leyenda del Chupacabras, 27, 147,
H 151
Harris, Anita, 9, 10, 28, 115, 205, La nana, 104–106, 108, 122
207, 208, 211, 214, 216, 218 La niña santa, 21, 83, 94
Hecht, Tobias, 1, 21 La sirga, 17, 20, 28, 203–205, 211,
Heli, 28, 183–187, 189–194, 197– 212, 215, 217, 218
199, 201 Las malas intenciones, 27, 28, 166,
heterotopia, 7. See also Foucault, 172
Michel La teta asustada, 20, 122, 171
226 Index
La vendedora de rosas, 13 Navidad, 5

Lebeau, Vicky, 5 neoliberal society, 63
Lelio, Sebastián, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88
Levinas, Emmanuel, 85
liminality. See fluidity
Llosa, Claudia, 20, 122, 171, 179 O
Los olvidados, 13, 201 O ano em que meus pais saíram de
Lund, Kátia, 13, 14 férias, 8, 9
Lury, Karen, 5, 8, 20, 27, 166, 177
P
M Page, Joanna, 95
Machuca, 8, 9 Paloma de papel, 27, 28, 166
Madeinusa, 20, 21, 171, 179 parents, 2, 5, 22, 62, 65, 66, 70, 88,
Maguire, Geoffrey, 4, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19, 101, 103, 111, 114, 118, 130,
23–25, 123, 183 137, 139, 154, 172, 178, 186,
María, llena eres de gracia, 28, 203, 190, 196, 198, 199, 213
205, 218 Parker, Richard, 10, 116, 119
Marks, Laura, 16, 24, 38, 39, 41, 44, Pateman, Carole, 61, 109, 113, 114,
47, 50, 52–55, 95 123
Marston, Joshua, 20, 28, 203, 218 patriarchy, 10, 61, 109, 112
Martel, Lucrecia, 16, 18, 22, 25, 61, peers, 66, 68–70, 117
81–85, 87–90, 92–96, 122 Perfume de violetas–nadie te oye, 184
Martin, Deborah, 6, 7, 16, 18, 21, 46, Pino-Ojeda, Walescka, 24, 61, 112,
60, 67–69, 71, 82, 83, 88, 89, 113
94, 95, 178 Pixote, 12, 13, 59
masculinity, 19, 24, 26, 48, 53, 60, Podalsky, Laura, 3, 4, 15, 23, 26, 28,
61, 68, 74, 76, 87, 96, 102, 81, 93–95, 105, 111, 118, 128,
113, 117, 120, 128, 129, 131, 139, 141, 173, 174, 186, 199.
133–140, 151, 213 See also affect
Massumi, Brian, 89, 93 polymorphous perversion, 17
Matzembacher, Filipe, 18, 24, 56, 60 Pomerance, Murray, 127, 128, 137
Meirelles, Fernando, 13, 14 Postman, Neil, 2
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 95, 96 Powrie, Phil, 7
military rule, 8 puberty, 1, 10, 11, 17, 106, 116, 135,
minor, 2, 13, 45, 50, 89, 94, 149, 156
184, 200 Puenzo, Lucía, 19, 55,
Mulvey, Laura, 47, 48, 52 94, 122
N Q
‘natural’ actors, 13, 103 queer desires, 24, 45, 53–55
Index 227
Que horas ela volta?, 22, 104–106, Shaw, Deborah, 22, 104, 105, 118,
108, 115, 119, 123 178
skin, 18, 41, 52, 55, 77, 116, 123,
140
R Sobchack, Vivian, 85
race, 1, 21, 27, 102, 114, 147, 158 Solomonoff, Julia, 19, 55
Rancière, Jacques, 82 Sonhos roubados, 20, 59
Randall, Rachel, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 16, Stam, Robert, 65, 171
19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 183 ‘street children’. See adolescence, and
rebellion, 64, 106, 185 marginality
Reolon, Marcio, 18, 24, 56, 60 subjectivity, 6, 17, 25, 51, 52, 60, 61,
Retomada, 59, 77 66, 69, 70, 75, 76, 88, 90, 92,
Rey muerto, 25, 81–84, 88–91, 93, 93, 106, 115, 129–131, 134,
94, 96 138, 140, 187, 200, 212, 218
Ribeiro, Daniel, 18, 24, 56, 60, 76 swimming pool, 15, 17, 19, 24, 38,
Rocha, Carolina, 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, 20, 39, 41–43, 48, 49, 54–56, 72,
25, 27, 28, 93, 95, 128, 166, 77, 110, 116, 123, 130, 212,
191, 200 213, 219
Rodrigo D–no futuro, 13 Symbolic order, 7
Rodriguez, Alberto, 27, 147
Rodríguez-González, Milton
Fernando, 10 T
Ruizpalacios, Alonso, 26, 127, 133, teenagers, 2, 5, 10, 17, 24, 39, 43, 45,
137, 140, 142 48, 50, 52, 53, 62, 63, 66, 68,
75, 76, 103, 136, 148, 156, 186,
190, 191
S Temporada de patos, 26, 127, 130,
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 28, 128, 132, 133, 134, 141, 185
141, 186 the haptic, 4, 21, 41, 44, 50, 52, 54,
school, 41, 43, 55, 60, 62–64, 68, 72, 55
93, 94, 102, 103, 114–117, 131, transgression, 45, 82, 84
136, 183, 184, 187–190, 192, transition, 1, 9, 27, 29, 63, 66, 73,
196, 200 175, 177–179, 189, 190, 209,
Selimović, Inela, 4, 17, 25, 94 210. See also ‘coming of age’
Seminet, Georgia, 5, 9–11, 15, 20, 21,
25–27, 93, 95, 128, 166, 191,
200 U
sexuality, 16, 17, 20, 23–26, 39, 41, urban space, 11, 13, 133
44, 48, 54, 68, 74, 76, 130, 135,
140, 187
Shary, Timothy, 5, 10, 17 V
Vega, William, 17, 28, 203
228 Index
Vieira, João Luiz, 13, 14 X

violence, 2, 8, 11, 14, 20, 27, 28, 47, XXY, 19, 55
64, 81, 82, 86–88, 90, 96, 116,
165–169, 172, 173, 175, 176,
178, 183–185, 187, 190–196, Y
198, 199, 201, 204, 205, 211, youth culture, 4
212, 215–219 Y tu mamá también, 18, 22, 186
virginity, 17, 20, 111, 113, 117
Z
W Žižek, Slavoj, 82
water. See swimming pool
Wilson, Emma, 5, 7, 8, 16, 171
Wright, Sarah, 6, 8

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NEW VISIONS

[NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES]

More information about this series at

New Directions in Latino American Cultures

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943273

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

“Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall have assembled a striking collection

1 Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary

Part I Gender and Sexuality

2 Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the Erotics

3 (Re)pairing Adolescent Masculinities:

4 Sensorial Youths: Gender, Eroticism and Agency

Part II Gender and Class

5 “Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy

6 Young, Male and Middle Class: Representations

7 Beyond Pink or Blue: Portrayals of Adolescence

Part III Gender and Politics

8 Growing Pains: Young People and Violence

9 Tragic Adolescence in Michel Franco’s Heli

10 From Girlhood to Adulthood: Colombian Adolescence

Ramiro Armas University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Fig. 1.1 Cidade de Deus, dir. by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia

Introduction: Visualising Adolescence

Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall

The term ‘adolescence’, which refers to the stage of life characterised by

© The Author(s) 2018 1

As Kristen Drybread has observed, impoverished minors, who are unable

The Emergence of Adolescence

an increasing number of families disposed of incomes that enabled their

looking back on the failures or limitations of their own youthful projects’

Approaches to Childhood and Youth on Film

2014), Sarah Wright (2013), Sophie Dufays (2014), Deborah Martin

Similarly to Castañeda, Sheldon observes that ‘the child reminds us of the

Interestingly, as Rocha and Seminet (2012) have pointed out,

It is clear, then, that our understanding of childhood and ado-

Youth, Globalisation and Urban Space in Latin America

The situation has, in turn, been explored in a variety of well-known

Given the financial challenges of film-making and securing international

Adolescent Sensuality, Transgressive Desires

destination of fixed sexuality (Bond Stockton 2004: 238). This notion

Barbosa 2014), Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho/The Way He Looks (dir.

Fig. 1.2 Y tu mamá también, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (2001)

Indeed, water is ubiquitous in Argentine films that focus on the

Fig. 1.3 XXY, dir. by Lucía Puenzo (2007)

There has, nonetheless, been a clear turn toward the representation

not, mark feminine adolescence as embodying an object of contempla-

Fig. 1.4 La niña santa, dir. by Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Structure and Scope of New Visions of Adolescence

the formal and aesthetic implications of cinematically constructing ado-

desire—within spaces marked by fluidity and fantasy—that they are able

Blue: Portrayals of Adolescence in Latin American Animated Film’,

these adolescents’ coming-of-age narratives, invoking the safety and sta-

Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life.

Randall, Rachel. 2017. Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin

Gender and Sexuality

Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the

© The Author(s) 2018 37

development—the swimming pool, the locker room and Sebastián’s

image. If, as Vinodh Venkatesh writes in relation to contemporary queer

Visual Hapticity: The Swimming Pool

Fig. 2.1 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)

Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things

Fig. 1.1 Cidade de Deus, dir. by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia

The Emergence of Adolescence

Approaches to Childhood and Youth on Film

Youth, Globalisation and Urban Space in Latin America

Fig. 1.2 Y tu mamá también, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (2001)

Fig. 1.3 XXY, dir. by Lucía Puenzo (2007)

Fig. 1.4 La niña santa, dir. by Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Structure and Scope of New Visions of Adolescence

Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the

Fig. 2.1 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)

Fig. 2.2 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)

Fig. 2.3 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)

Fig. 2.4 Ausente, dir. by Marco Berger (2011)

4. On numerous occasions, Berger has discussed how Ausente is strongly

The Vicarious Youth: Affective Mediations of Tactility

Cacophonic Sensoria and Materiality of Voice

Adolescent–Maid Relationships on Film