Copyright by Arno Jacob Argueta 2018
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Copyright by Arno Jacob Argueta 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Arno Jacob Argueta Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Mapping the Wastelands: Spectacles of Wasting in Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film Committee: Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Supervisor Jossianna Arroyo Jason Borge Lorraine Moore Laura Podalsky MAPPING THE WASTELANDS Spectacles of Wasting in Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film by Arno Jacob Argueta Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2018 Dedication To my Papá Jacob (1926-2017) for all the love and wisdom and to my father, Jacob, to my mother, Christa, and my sisters Christa Rachel and Ilse Rebeca, for all the love support and care. Acknowledgements To my advisor and dissertation committee for all the time and effort, from the inspiration they provided me in the classroom, through their work and their advice. Thank you Dr. Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba for helping me grow, always pushing me and providing guidance when needed. I also sincerely want to thank Dr. Lorraine Moore, Dr. Jason Borge, and Dr. Jossianna Arroyo for their presence, their willingness to hear me out and for providing the intellectual community from which this project emerged. To Dr. Laura Podalsky, for agreeing to be part of this committee and providing, through her work a high standard of critical engagement in Film and Latin American studies. I would also like to thank the rest of the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Texas at Austin for being a place of growth and providing me with experiences and spaces to become a better person. For their friendship and support, for always being there for me as friends, and colleagues I want to especially thank Dr. Carlos Amador, Dr. Isis Sadek, Dr. Lydia Huerta, Dr. Kevin Escudero, Dr. Francis Watlington, Dr. Pablo Durán, Dr. Brendan Reagan, Dr. Luis Sandoval, Dr. Alejandro Flores, and Dr. Pedro Morales. I also want to take Dr. Mariana Lacunza, Dr. Katia Morais and Dr. Claudia Arteaga, for their friendship, and for affecting my life so deeply. Very especially I want to thank Sandra Vanessa Bernal Heredia for her friendship and support. An incommensurable thank you to my friends in at the University, Joshua Frank, Adrian Ricelli, Daniela Meireles, Daniel Nourry, Aris Clemons, Lucia Aramayo, Valeria Rey de Castro, Ana Cecilia Calle, Adriano Trovato, and most especially to our Graduate Program Coordinator, Laura Rodriguez. v It would not have been possible to finish this period and text were it not for the help of my friends abroad and at home, at my many homes and in the different spaces that have allowed me to become my best self. In this light I want to thank those people who have been a part of my life these years, always extending a helping hand full of friendship and love: Dr. Katharine Hubbard, an inspiration, Rubi Maday Campuzano, for being home, Taynara Melo, for the strength, Isabel Paz, for the understanding, Carlos Rafael Orantes Cadena, the undying friendship, Mariana Gomes, for the learning, Rachel Wood, for the spiritual conversations, Yandira Corrales, for the will to push forward, Adriana Bezerra da Silva, for the care and being welcoming, Sara Salam, for the laughter, Julianna Neimann Ramos, for the fire, Keila Spencer, for the sisterhood, Cecilia Martinez-Gil for the poetry and Peter LaSalle for the short stories and Brenda Xum for the midnight milkshake runs to Denny’s. To Jesus Guevara Bolio, Joaquín Buenfil y Cristina Rodriguez Sosa, for the friendship and being welcoming in both Mexico and Merida. To the friends who have made Austin home for the last six years, Leo Vielman, Nelson Saga, to all of the Peligrosa Crew, Orion, Manny, Trey, Eddie, Louie and especially Jaime for teaching me, opening up spaces. And to the friends who produce, DJ, play and create events that are cultural and affective landscapes: Gerardo––Niño François, Isaiah––IsaiahfromTexas, Nancie Zacarías and the Global Based Fam, and Sarah––Riobamba. To my ex-coworkers at the various summer jobs, including everyone at Medici who also made the coffee shop a writing space. I want to thank those scholars whose life and work have inspired and paved the way for this work, especially Grandpa Ziggy (1925-2017). Lastly I want to thank my family to whom I dedicated this dissertation, including mi Abi, Tio Enio, Tia Mamá, Tia Yunis, Tia Ingrid, Tia Chiti, Tia Maya, their families, my cousins, and everyone in my vi group of support. Most importantly, I want to thank God, Jesus Crist my lord and savior because without his love and safety, his guiding hand and his power, a little Guatemalan kid reading The Little Prince would never have arrived here. vii Abstract MAPPING THE WASTELANDS Spectacles of Wasting in Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film Arno Jacob Argueta, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba Abstract: This project explores representations of waste in films created in Brazil and Mexico in their neoliberal period. By approaching waste as an object that redefines the space it occupies as a wasteland, this dissertation explores the effects of spectacular representations of waste upon the people that inhabit and transit these lands of waste. To analyze this, I explore how certain films frame, symbolically construct and reproduce often-violent acts of wasting on screen. The goal of this dissertation is to expose how the modern desire for cleanliness that discursively frames undesirable byproducts as waste, also denotes certain “wasted beings” as outside modernity and the state. This act subjects these beings to the power of market dynamics that enforce violence and a politics of death. I draw from the work of scholars like Julia Kristeva on abjection, Kevin Bales on disposable beings, Melissa Wright on disposable women, Zygmunt Bauman on wasted beings, and Sayak Valencia on gore capitalism. Specifically, I argue that modernity denotes certain beings as outside the state and its structures of control. As a type of non- viii state space, the wasteland is ruled by the violent acts of taking life, which are the last reductions of sovereignty, and empowerment. ix Table of Contents Mapping the Wastelands: Spectacles of Wasting in Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film ............................................................................................................................... 1 Wasted by Design, Others by Design ........................................................................ 7 Latin American Modernity and Neoliberalism ........................................................ 10 Neoliberal Latin American Cinema ......................................................................... 13 Utopian Aesthetics of Third Cinema and Affective Dystopias of Neoliberal Cinema ............................................................................................................... 16 Neoliberal Audiences and Latin American Film ..................................................... 20 Where there is Design, there is Waste ..................................................................... 25 Theorizing Waste: Byproducts, Beings, Badlands and the Imaginary of Modernity ....... 30 Oh Shit! .................................................................................................................... 33 The Language of the Wasteland .............................................................................. 33 Wasted or Disposable: Past, Present and Future ...................................................... 35 Science of Waste ...................................................................................................... 38 The Imaginary of Waste .......................................................................................... 41 The Nation and Waste .............................................................................................. 49 A Trialectics of Waste or the Wastelands as a Third Space .................................... 55 Abjection in the Wasteland or the Psychic Realm of Modernity ............................ 56 Family, Pigs, and Rotten Tomatoes or Spectacular Wasting ................................... 58 The State of Waste ................................................................................................... 67 Flushing it Down: Femininity, Waste and Private Space in O Cheiro do Ralo and Malos Hábitos ............................................................................................................. 75 Cinemas of human discard and the biopolitics of bodily waste .............................. 78 x Psychoanalysis, Socio-Pathologies and Schizoanalysis .......................................... 84 From Private to Privatized Wastelands .................................................................... 92 Restrooms in Latin American films, Modernity and Otherness .............................. 94 The Restroom as a Feminized Abject Space ........................................................... 97 Embodied Spectacular Waste, the Feminized as Wasted ...................................... 100 Masculinity, Consumption, Discarding ................................................................. 103 One Key Difference or What is lost in Adaptation ................................................ 111 Privatized Sites of Wasting, the Restroom, the