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 Convent and the Home ...... 113
Spectacular Wasted Bodies or Sacrificial Capitalism ...... 117
The Process of Self-Abjectifying the Feminine Body ...... 121
The Spectacle of Survival or Violence at the edges of the Void ...... 124
(Wasted) Bodies and Power ...... 131
Throwing it Away: Spectacular Wasting and Citizenship in Estamira (2002) and Backyard/El Traspatio (2009) ...... 136
Where Waste Goes ...... 137
Representations of the Political Value of Waste and the State ...... 142
The Aesthetics of Public-Waste-Sites in Latin American Film ...... 149
The Mise-en-Scène of Capitalism and Affective Cartographies ...... 156
Intersectional Spectacular Wasting and the Limits of the Nation ...... 166
Intermittent Being and Becoming Waste ...... 169
The Levinasean Face or Recognizing Abjection ...... 174
The Corporeality of Waste or The Materiality of Wasted Bodies ...... 179
It’s Not the State, or Abject Citizenship ...... 182
Beyond National Cinemas or Privatizing the Nation ...... 186 xi Abjection and the State or Endriago Subjectivity and Thanatopolitics ...... 191
Other Citizenships or “is it Femicide or Feminicide?” ...... 200
Conclusion or the Violence of the Market ...... 206
Tossing them Out: Vulnerability in the Interstitial Spaces of Waste in La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas (2012) and Baixio das Bestas (2006) ...... 211
The Interstitial Wastelands or Spectacular Wasting in Transit or Spaces In- between ...... 214
Three Spectacles of Waste or Ethnicity, Landscape and the Young Girl ...... 216
Ethnicities: Central America (in film) is to Mexico as the Northeast (in film) is to Brazil ...... 220
Affective Landscapes and the Social Construction of the Brazilian Sertão ...... 235
“El Otro Tijuana” and the Social construction of the Mexico/Guatemala Border 240
From Site of Transit to Inescapable Wastelands: The Sertão and the Road Movie ...... 245
From Site of Transit to Inescapable Wastelands: Crossing Mexico in Migration Film ...... 251
Transition Spaces of Disposability or The Spatial Conditions for New Slavery ... 256
Non-Space, Disgusting Neoliberal Subjects or The Conditions of the Wasteland 263
Age of Transit or Young Femininity as Vulnerability ...... 270
Girlhood, Spectacle and the Spectacle of Sexual Violence ...... 273
Conclusion or Some Remarks about the Spectacle of Waste ...... 277
In-Conclusion or The Product is Waste ...... 280
xii Mapping the Wastelands: Spectacles of Wasting in Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film
“Where there is design, there is waste” (Bauman 30)
In the field of cultural and literary studies, more specifically in the study of Latin
American literature and culture, film has steadily gained ground as an object of study. In fact, it is not uncommon to find academics who work on different media, be it literature, radio, performance, film, social-media, etc. Within film studies, a historical and contemporary focus on the study of film-space has become fertile ground for the analysis of geographies in instances of change and relationships of power. Simultaneously, debates on anthropocentricity and the anthropocene have thrived and begun acknowledging waste as central to understanding subject-object relations. As Spanish and
Portuguese scholars take notice, studies of waste in these languages begin to surface.
Take as an example, a call for papers by Sam Amago and Maite Zubiaurre for the MLA’s
2017 meeting titled “On Obsolence: Trash, Ecology and Aesthetics” where they hoped to explore the presence of waste and its resignification through art in turn of the century
Spain and Latin America. While more recently, Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes have begun editing a text on Humanity and Post-Humanity in Latin America that will look at post-humanity, ecology and the environment in Latin America. My project follows in the work of Jens Andermann (Brazil and Argentina), Isis Sadek (Brazil and Argentina),
Joanna Page (Brazil), Laura Podalsky (Argentina) and Lorraine Leu’s more contemporary work (Brazil) on the study of Latin American film-space and with a focus 1 on waste as the manifestation of neoliberal capital’s violent force of designing the abject.
I add to this conversation by focusing on spatial representations of waste in neoliberal
Brazilian and Mexican film and exploring how these point towards the empowering of beings considered wasted.
Taking from Fredrick Jameson, Slavoj Zizek notes that “The exploited are not only those who produce or ‘create;’ but also (and even more so) those who are condemned not to ‘create’” (Less than Nothing 1004). And it is these condemned beings on whom my project focuses. Titled, Mapping the Wastelands, Spectacles of Wasting in
Neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican Film, my dissertation focuses on the spaces and representations of waste and already-wasted beings in neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican cinema.
Mapping the Wastelands looks at how the Wasteland, Modernity, Abjection and
Spectacle simultaneously inform the notion of waste and the human body. Scholars
Kevin Bales and Melissa Wright focus on the disposability of human beings. The first keys in to the way in which people are churned from civil society into a new slavery while the latter focuses on the work conditions of women in high-production economies and feminicide. The work of Zygmunt Bauman on the fluidity of contemporary capitalism and the subsequent flows in undesired human bodies informs my work by introducing the word Wasted. My project expands upon this corpus by precisely by focusing on the process that takes a human being from being disposable to becoming wasted. By focusing on this process, I arrive at texts that outline the production of
2 spectacular violence that is exercised in order to enforce the transition. This process takes both, spatial and symbolic modes in which these beings are expulsed from the state.
The process that takes beings from disposable to wasted is reflected in a discursive temporal change. So we begin with the word waste and its many euphemisms– each with their own specific uses. For all the variety and plurality in the three languages with which this dissertation engages, the word waste itself is key in approaching the process at hand. Yes, one can “get wasted” or “waste time” but before the body and time engaged the word waste, that is, before the object was named waste, there was the wasteland. The etymology of the word waste in fact points towards the spatial component of waste. Waste derives from the Latin word “vastus”, used to describe a vast and desolate region. From vastus, the word wasteland came to mean the same thing– a space.
The setting of a Mad Max, for example, or T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The wastelands are voids, and what exists within them is waste, and the people wasted beings.
The wasteland, then, is not void of objects or beings– it is void of modernity and its ally, the state. It is a space symbolically created by modernity as the other side of the state and for the storage of wasted beings. While the borders or the peripheries are spaces where vulnerable beings exist, by existing within the margins, they exist within the state. The wasteland, however, is the space a wasted-being inhabits once it has been dejected from the state. They are, thus, prevented from participating in the state’s structures for subjectification and empowerment.
Their existence within these spaces is what turns makes these wasted beings share the discursive construction of waste as Abject. In Powers of Horror: And Essay on 3 Abjection (1980) Julia Kristeva focuses on the symbolic and historical exploration of the sources of the term abject. According to her, the Abject is the thing that lies in-between.
Neither the other nor the self, neither object nor subject, and pulling from Melanie
Klein’s psychological work on children, notes that the abject is the thing that recalls the self’s otherness. The result, Kristeva notes, is that the abject is ejected or discarded. This is most visible in the second chapter of my dissertation where the films Malos Hábitos and Cheiro do Râlo outline the way in which the characters engage with their bodily wastes. For example, Lourenço, in the Brazilian film, becomes obsessed with the smell of the drain in his office’s bathroom. Meanwhile, in the Mexican film, the female characters are forced to curtail their food habits as their expulsions are framed as dangerous by the films’ reference to the urban myth that vomit can rust tubing.
Bodily waste, then, is a problem with which modernity has been forced to deal.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, modernity mobilizes the idea of design to separate and designate what are desired products and undesired byproducts. Design is the enactment of modernity to separate and create difference. This is highly visible in the films of my third chapter: Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio. In Estamira the audience follows the life of a catadora – a picker in the landfill of Jardim Gramacho and who has suffered a series of violent acts that have pushed her into a state of social death. Meanwhile, in
Backyard/El Traspatio, the film points to the structures that designate certain women as disposable and the modes of violence that turns them into waste.
Film is a privileged medium for the representation and analysis of the spaces of waste because it is able to register and transmit “The very denial of place producing an 4 incessant estrangement and unsettlement” (Andermann 70). As such, it the ability to register and reproduce the spectacular through moving image that makes film key in reproducing spectacle. The spectacular aspect of the acts of wasting is most visible in the films La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas and Baixio das Bestas where teenage girls are placed in situations where their young bodies are considered spectacle. Both characters receive abusive sexual violence that turns them from disposable, beings at the periphery to fully existing in the illegal space of child prostitution.
Abjection, the result of interaction with the abject, produces dejection, expulsion.
The vulnerable and precarious inhabitants of the wasteland are thus subjected to acts of
Spectacular Wasting because of their condition as abject waste, and under the logic of modernity. It is from the wasteland that I engage the concepts of psychologic power, intersectionality, citizenship, neoliberalism, feminism, biopolitics, necropolitics and thanatopolitics (politics of death).
It is my perspective that, searching for an existence outside the state that is able to step away from the violent logic of spectacular wasting may engage with anti-capitalism, in anti-bourgeois terms and past de limiting relation between self, other and state-power.
Studying the presence of waste in these films enables us to read strategies of control and tactics of survival in the face of neoliberal policies in both Brazil and Mexico. Thus, I explore waste and the bodies that huddle through “spaces of waste” in films that cover
Latin America’s Neoliberal period, which expands from the end of the Cold War until the present.
5 Besides being the two Latin American countries with the largest increase in the number of films produced from 2000-2011, since the nineties both Brazil and Mexico developed these recent national cinemas under similar economic policies (Gonzalez for
UNESCO 15; Canclini 46). Since the Brazil of Pedro Alvares Cabral and the Mexico of
Hernán Cortez, Latin America has thematically been fertile ground for the imaginary of modernity. As such, it has been the land of lush, green and abundance, the tropics and as such, has become the place for extraction, destruction and a site for waste. As Ileana
Rodriguez reminds us, the American jungles: the Amazon and the Mesoamerican forests have served as sources for these myths; however, with neo-liberalism, this abundance becomes the excuse for the extraction of this richness through predatory practices
(“Transatlantic” 196, 199). Under an order where the state cedes control of its space to economic players, such lush is exchanged for waste. Uncontrolled economic exploitation implies not only the product but also the leftover, undesired or discarded, be it human or material. Along with increased production and consumption that characterizes the neoliberal system comes increased accumulation of waste. Fatalist and hyperrealist representations of Latin American metropolises as lands overcome by discard encompass the nation as a whole (MacLaird 116–26; 3). The wastelands are a cartography that appears through the delimitation of spaces outside the control of the state where waste, as abject, is used as a symbol to represent the limits of state-given citizenship. When these films engage with waste, they outline what is considered discard, how modernity produces it at the violent intersection of globalization, neoliberalism and culture, and even outline some forms of resistance. 6 Everyone is familiar with Waste. From children learning to recycle during grade school to anyone reading the major newspaper’s article that shows up every so often to make one feel guilty of the consumption and discarding in which they so willingly partake. Such a shift in focus serves as a discursive move to hide the fact that production is part of the equation of neoliberal capitalism. Putting this project together, I had to decide how to approach waste, a perspective that was clarified by exploring contemporary meanings of waste and looking at the discourses of cleanliness that modern hygienists mobilize. This limited and guided the project as to critique waste as a product of modernity, and not simply as a failure of capitalism. Such a perspective prompted me to a critical take based around the intersection of social and material space, body and waste, their imaginaries and the guiding principles of late capitalism. In sum, thinking of waste means dealing with the materiality of the object, the abject quality of waste, the space it delimits, and the repercussions of considering people within the wasteland (or the wastelands) as essential to the modern neoliberal capitalist reframing of the state and the social fabric.
WASTED BY DESIGN, OTHERS BY DESIGN The project of modernity is central to the creation of the cultural object that is
Latin America, its nation-states and waste; as such, it is imperative to understand how modernity effectively delineated the geographies and ideology of nation in Brazil and
Mexico. Most discourses that deal with waste, bodily discard, and abjectivity do so repurposing materials produced without intention. These wastes are objects integrate the capitalist production, consumption and wasting into everyday life: materially and discursively. Social cleansing, and the nation’s desire for modernity are part of these
7 discourses. Therefore, waste is central to the creation of the modern-self and spaces of national waste key for the construction of the state. This can be traced back to Latin
America, which in itself was constructed as the barbarian-other to European civilized- modernity to the Spanish kingdom that had only recently defeated and expulsed its national others: Jews expulsed through the Alhambra decree and Moors in the
Reconquista. In The Invention of the Americas, Enrique Dussel reminds us, Latin
America provides the alterity, essential for the Eurocentric project of modernity to succeed (Dussel 26). It is through the violent dynamics of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas that “Modernization initiates an ambiguous course by touting a rationality opposed to primitive, mythic explanations, even as it concocts a myth to conceal its own sacrificial violence against the Other” (Dussel 48). These ambiguous discourses created the forceful adaptation of the logic of modernity are mostly uniform across Latin America first as colonies and later in the discourses of nation where each newly independent state created both intra and international others.
Thinking of modernity as “a condition of compulsive, and addictive designing” presents a departing point which in Latin American countries designed themselves around the exploitation of those whom modernity (re)codified as wasted or undesired products of the design of the national-self (Bauman 30). This perspective engenders
Dussel’s condition of a transmodern opposition to modernity (later to be synthesized with decoloniality). Within it he proposes to “transcend modern reason not by negating reason as such, but by negating violent, Eurocentric, developmentalist, hegemonic reason”
(Dussel 138). Understanding that the separation/invention of waste through the act of 8 design, points to that forced sacrificial violence upon the wasted-Other as part of the same process allows us to expand Dussel’s goal of facing a patriarchal logic, not by masculinizing the feminized, nor by cleansing the dirty or destroying design but by redefining the filthy past the terms of the enforcing of sacrificial violence.
Much like Dussel, and in fact citing him, in Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco motions to modernity as the logic that spurs the enactment of intersectional necropolitics in Latin America. Here, again the intersectional quality of patriarchy as coloniality,
Franco points out that indigenous and gendered bodies were marked as anti-modern and their “extermination or forced assimilation was deemed essential to the thorough overhaul of the state in the name of modernization” (Franco 8). We can understand this as the intra-national creation of the other that has been subdued and absorbed into the nation. As such, in the Brazilian case the Northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia, said to have the largest Afro-Brazilian population in the nation, provides the counter to the southern metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, in Mexico, it is the indigenous population in the Southern states from Oaxaca, to Campeche that serve that purpose. The modern imperative to separate through design haunts Latin America. In this haunting, we find Mexico and Brazil as unique sites to understand modern design and the spectacular wasting it produces.
As one of the largest and most impending cultural products of modernity, the city whether it be the metropolis of Mexico city, the megalopolis once called the most populated city the world or São Paulo, in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere. Least we forget or ignore Rio de Janeiro, Tijuana, Juarez, Fortaleza, 9 Salvador, Recife, Monterrey and Brasilia are all cities that have also been shaped by the same logic. From its time as Teotihuacan to its foundation as a Spanish colonial viceroyalty capital, Mexico City was established in a valley with little access to water and surrounded by volcanic mountains. The growth and maintenance of Mexico City’s large population is a product of modernity whose problems modernity designed and to which it also designs answers. But the control of modernity has limits. And it is past these limits that abjectivity takes us. Not only have natural physical factors affected how place is conceived through out Latin America, but as Zygmunt Bauman points out in his imperative “where there is design, there is waste”, to design means to mark the limits of modernity both in where it does not go, and where it cannot go. In this, the entire project of nation building becomes about designing the nation, its culture, its discourses, and idiosyncrasies through the constructing of space and public policies. But most importantly, in designing where the nation-state is, we also point out the spaces where the state is not present.
LATIN AMERICAN MODERNITY AND NEOLIBERALISM Classic liberalism was one of the key ideological currents that propelled the Latin
American revolutions of the early twentieth century. In a very simplified manner one could say that from the Guerra de Canudos in the end of the nineteenth century unto the
Guerra Cristera in the first couple decades of the twentieth century, Latin America experienced a push towards a society where democratic ideals of rights to land and
10 equality were exalted1. By the end of the century, two world wars, a cold war and a shift towards internationalization later by the 1990’s Latin America was very different.
Although at first influenced by Keynesian economic theories, eventually neoliberal policies pushed to ceding state control to private entities pushed under fears of a state too large and with too much control. Such process began in the United States with Ronald
Reagan’s administration and eventually trickled down south. In Chile, the Chicago Boys had instituted the world’s first neoliberal economy during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. Governments were indeed crumbling under massive foreign debts and extreme inflation was the infectious decease that arrested both small and large economies in the region. Neoliberalism provided the answer to the economic disaster. Not only were free- trade agreements a hallmark of this period, in Mexico the Nuevo Peso and the Plano Real in Brazil were monetary policies that responded quickly to inflation. Under the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in 1993, the new peso substituted the old peso by disappearing the last three zeroes of the original bill. One thousand pesos became one peso. In Brazil under Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1994, the Plano
Real substituted the Real for the Cruzeiro Real (Cruzado), which was a failed substitute currency introduced in the late eighties. Both these policies stabilized the national economies at the sacrifice of national products, that is, international products swarmed the national markets. Following neoliberal dictums, these policies forced market globalization.
1 I will explore this process in more detail further ahead and recurrently through out the text. 11 Not only was graphic design and marketing one of the hallmarks of this economic change2, but these two are, also, examples of economic and socio-cultural design that arrived along with an economy that became the accepted stand-in for democracy. It is at this time when the São Paulo financial complex expands and pushes for a renewed conquest of the Amazonian frontier symbolically designing a new Brazilian frontier3. In the following years, the Brazilian extractive economy and a shift towards a consumption economy will place Brazil among the BRICS economies, the “rising world economies.”
In his book Mexico City, Peter Ward reminds us that the profile of Mexico 1990s inhabitants resembled that of middle-income developing countries: high population growth, increasing life expectancy, high birth rates and a transition from rural to urban population. Similarly, in Brazil the 1990s also showed a change of political and a growth of income, although better income distribution wouldn’t come until the 2000s with
Ignacio “Lula” da Silva’s presidency. The design provided by the market, neoliberal wisdom preached would be better– more efficient, than any control by the state because the market will reward what is beneficial and preferred. Slowly market logics substituted for the democratic logics of the classic liberals. Still, the state planned cities and devised plans to inhabit them. A massive project of creating capital growth and divert the growing population from Mexico City to state capitals is enacted at the national level
(Aguilar). While in Brazil inland cities like Goias’ capital, Goiânia or Palmas in
2 For example, Pablo Larraín’s 2012 film No exemplified how the arrival of the Chicago Boys and marketing, sales and the market logic was central in shaping post-Pinochet Chile. 3 For a filmic response and representation of this developmentalist process and the establishment of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, look at Bye Bye Brasil (Carlos Diegues, 1980). 12 Tocantins (Brazil’s newest state) built up and adopted contemporary ideas of city planning. Not only was the country changing economically, it also was changing demographically. Almost paralleling each other, these two largest economic powers in
Latin America begin a rapid process of neo-liberalization. A series of changes in public cultural policy in both countries changed film production and their respective national cinemas.
NEOLIBERAL LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA Film is the medium that arises along with the contemporary city as it is born from the same industrialization that created the city and its bustling streets. The city gave film a setting and film gave the city a technologic mirror to recognize and see itself. As such, cinema has always reflected, from a privileged position, the modern impetus while remaining a platform for non-hegemonic discourses. However, following these population, policy and economic changes, both Brazil and Mexico instituted new cultural policies. Where film industries had been an inflection point of national concern, they were now left to fend for themselves as state funding disappeared in favor of private investment. The Lei Rouanet (8.313/91) and the Lei do Audiovisual (8.685/93) in Brazil, and Efcine 189 (Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta Art.189) in Mexico effectively provide tax-deductions for the contributing investors in national cinema. This inserted national cinematic industries into the newly neoliberal film markets while allowing them to compete for investment funds. Neoliberalism transmuted filmmaking thematically and aesthetically in both countries, liberalizing it, forcing it to turn publics to clients and mold
13 to cultural currents and expectations. Although Argentine film has been far more successful abroad as it has won the first two Oscars for foreign film in the history of
Latin American film, it could be said that through sheer quantity of production Mexican and Brazilian film industries have been central in creating and establishing a market for
Latin American films.
Ignacio Sanchez-Prado contends that Mexican filmmaking from 1988 until the present embodies a neoliberalism by shifting away from the revolutionary and Third cinemas that dominated Latin America in the 1960’s. This is the period of film that I analyze in Mapping the Wastelands and where we situate both Cheiro do Râlo and Malos
Hábitos. For Sanchez-Prado, the main characteristics of this cinema produced within neoliberal politics and economies are (1) a focus on re-defining the nation, (2) film for consumption through the language of advertisement, and (3) a focus on a national middle-class audience for its funds, although this last point is contentious (Sanchez
Prado, Screening Neoliberalism 106–07). During the 1990’s productions like Como Agua para Chocolate (1990) or Danzón (1991) indeed follow these descriptors and are central to Sanchez-Prado’s argument. Yet a transformation can be seen after the year 2000 with films like Amores Perros (Iñarritu, 2000) and Y Tu Mamá También (Cuarón, 2002) that point to a different mode of production and consumption by neoliberal film. These neoliberal relationships allow products to permeate frontiers while distancing themselves from folkloric self-representation to become Neo-Mexican subjects, as Sanchez-Prado puts it. In fact, as Robert McKee Irwin reminds us, Mexican cinema has always searched for audiences outside of Mexico (Ricarte). But this is not to leave Brazilian cinema 14 behind, since it is Cidade de Deus (Meirelles, 2002) that inaugurates a twenty-first Latin
American cinema that appeals to mass audiences locally and abroad.
With the opening of the national borders to merchandise that neoliberalism permits, it seems befitting that cultural productions would come to expand outside national borders, although with different characteristics than the cinema of previous decades. Although Brazilian Cinema was much more engaged with the paradigms of third cinema under the guise of Cinema Novo and Glauber Rocha’s Eztetyka da Fome
(1965)4, the Cinema da Retomada is produced under similar conditions to those in neoliberal Mexico and the results are astonishingly similar. For example, one of the most discussed films from this period, Central do Brasil (Salles, 1998), makes the same move away from an engagement with the aesthetic and political aims of the Cinema Novo. This move is, in fact, very similar to Como Agua para Chocolate’s (Arau, 1992) or Danzón’s
(Novaro, 1991) search to redefine the nation. In films like Central do Brasil, as Ivana
Bentes’ traces the re-defining of the foundational discourse of the Brazilian nation away from the Sertão towards the Favela (Bentes 248–53). Like Mexican film’s move towards the language of advertisement, the aesthetics of Brazilian Retomada texts take from advertising language their appeal to larger publics. Bentes also looks at this change and reads it as “a cosmetic” or the making pretty, painting over the painful and harsh reality and short of the socially engaged aesthetics of decades earlier (Bentes 245). Finally, the success of films produced in Brazil is, as in Mexico, seen in how the films that break into the international film scene. I consider this can best be seen in Iñarritu’s Amores Perros
4 Aesthetics of Hunger 15 in Mexico, it is Meirelles’ Cidade de Deus that best represents this in Brazil. These two films have become benchmarks and often are two of the most recognized films from these countries. Ahead, I will explore three qualities that Sanchez-Prado signals as characteristic of neoliberal films in Mexico after 1988 as also present in the films of the same time period in Brazil. More importantly, however, the installation of neoliberal processes to obtain funding from private industry and not directly by the state (as had been done before), in other words, the forced privatization of the film industry shapes as neoliberal those Brazilian and Mexican films produced within.
UTOPIAN AESTHETICS OF THIRD CINEMA AND AFFECTIVE DYSTOPIAS OF NEOLIBERAL CINEMA Although Latin America’s civil wars would extend until the late 1980’s, the 1960s are a time for revolution in the history of Latin American Cinema. Inspired by the French nouvelle vague and Italian Neo-realism their decision to break with established cinematic conventions, Latin American filmmakers began establishing their own paths. Some of these filmmakers took it to themselves to articulate these political and aesthetic goals through manifestos and artistic practices. Perhaps the most important of these is Fernando
Solanas’ and Octavio Getino’s manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema.” They proposed a departure from what they considered de-politicized cinema emphasizing the contrast with phrases like:
Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a
word, it was one more consumer good. At best, films succeeded in bearing
witness to the decay of bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice. As a
16 rule, films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification
or anti-historicism (MacKenzie 233).
Along with this, other groups and people also began taking stable political stances articulating their perspectives in: the Manifesto for a New Cinema (Grupo del Nuevo
Cine, Argentina), Cinema of Underdevelopment (Fernando Birri, Argentina), the
Manifesto for an Imperfect Cinema (Julio Garcia Espinoza, Cuba), the Eztetyka da Fome
[Aesthetics of Hunger](Glauber Rocha, Brazil) and the Ukamau group produced films that proposed to use “cinema as a weapon” (Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia). These texts decried the lack of political engagement of the audience, the limited resources available to Latin
American filmmakers and audiences, the neocolonial and unequal relationships of power between those earlier colonial powers and their previous colonies. Through these texts they articulated their political agendas and proposed aesthetic and thematic structures and frameworks from which to understand film and its production.
Nuevo Cine, Third Cinema or the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) became the names most often and interchangeably used to encapsulate this moment of the political and aesthetic articulation of cinema in the in Latin America. Although with large differences among each group, in general filmmakers in this period procured different methods to produce an engaged audience. One of the films most self-critical about this goal is Terra em Transe (Rocha, 1967) where journalist Paulo Martins must take a political stance between the populist Felipe Vieira, and the conservative revolutionary
Porfirio Diaz. At the end of the film Diaz takes power through a coup d’état while 17 Martins’ last words are that his death will prove the triumph of beauty. Because Rocha understood that cinematic beauty has traditionally been defined by the standards of
Hollywood film, he also pointed to it as a futile and alienating endeavor and that instead proposed that it was hunger, the hunger of the poor masses that should guide the aesthetics of Latin American film.
Neoliberal Latin American cinema, following from definition above, has been critiqued for accommodating to Hollywood’s standards of visual beauty and leaving behind the rough and “real” images of the Nuevo Cine period in favor of, so called, hyper-real images. Such real images where proposed by Rocha through his Aesthetics of
Hunger where to represent hunger his suggestion is that the images should also be
“hungry” or lacking aesthetic beauty. To understand this new neoliberal cinema with respect to its predecessors, Brazilian cinema scholar Ivana Bentes proposed the
Cosmetics of Hunger where representations of hunger are visually beautiful (Bentes 245).
The central question here is if these new images are indeed beautiful and easier to consume without repercussion. Bentes’ criticism zeroes in films that represent the favela, most famously Cidade de Deus (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) but other films and scholars have repeatedly critiqued what they understand as the gratuitous representations of violence in other well-known films like Amores Perros (Alejandro
Iñarritu, 2000), or Tropa de Elite (José Padilha, 2007). Beatriz Jaguaribe has dedicated many pages to the study of realism in the representation of the favela on film and beyond.
What Bentes understands as the misrepresentation of the favela space, Jaguaribe looks to
Georg Simmels to understand “the shock of the new and the culture of hyperstimulation 18 that were formerly perceived as part of the metropolitan experience [but now] have surpassed the boundaries of the urban environment” (Jaguaribe 328). This description can easily be applied to Amores Perros. It is here in the relationship between “shock” and
“the new” that I believe we find the thought process for the representation of violence in these films. After all, when is cinema not about shock and spectacle? Neoliberal film, unlike its 1960s predecessor, does not explicitly state itself in search of a specific aesthetics. It, instead, shares a renewed pursuit for a specific type of audience response.
While Brazilian and Mexican cinema seem to coalesce in aesthetic and economic terms in the 1990s, the history of revolutionary or leftist filmmaking in Mexico differs much from Brazil. This difference can be further traced back to the beginning of cinema in both countries. While in the 1930s and 40s Brazil’s most popular genre was the
Chanchada, Mexico was experiencing what would come to be called the Golden Age of
Mexican Cinema. Since then, Mexican cinema has been the center of cinema production in Latin America. Even if Hollywood would grow to overshadow it during the age of the studio, Mexican Cinema’s history includes the arrival and influence of foreign filmmakers like the Russian Sergei Eisenstein, and most importantly the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel whose Los Olvidados (1950) could be seen as one of the first films to openly criticize Mexican identity and the social structures behind it through what could be, now, read as a dystopian outlook. In a way, Buñuel’s film signaled a change in
Mexican productions. In fact, as Andrew Paxman notes, it would be short after Buñuel’s arrival when the end of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age was caused through economic, state and foreign policies (Paxman 26–27). These policies gave way almost as the same 19 time as Third Cinema appeared elsewhere in Latin America (mostly Cuba, Argentina,
Bolivia, and Brazil). However Mexico’s Arturo Ripstein must also be mentioned as one of the most important figures in Mexican leftist cinema. His El Lugar Sin Limites (1978) although not directly associated to one of the manifesto-driven moments previously mentioned, provided a critical voice to the sexist-gendered standards of Mexican genre film such as the fichera-films (Mora 107). Thus one may trace a series of critical and engaged films that diverge from the dictated messages of large-industry Mexican cinema and yet were integral to such a structure. This process, nevertheless, managed to retain audience engagement and even in the times of low cinematic-production during the 1970s and 1980s.
NEOLIBERAL AUDIENCES AND LATIN AMERICAN FILM To understand what kind response is expected of the audience after the arrival of neoliberalism in Latin America, it is important to note who are these audiences. More important it is to understand the modes of consumption brought about by neoliberal policies to Latin American cinema from the late 1980s and early 1990s onwards. The first, and most direct answer lies in the circuits in which these films move. While a large number of Latin American films are still produced by studies connected with large television conglomerates, the largely successful path-breaking Cidade de Deus and
Amores Perros were first screened as independent films and moved through independent cinema festival circuit. A second audience-group is made up of those that see the films in the Latin American box office. Still largely dominated by Hollywood productions,
20 Brazilian (Ancine) and Mexican (Imcine) national institutions produce a yearly statistical analysis that records the numbers of tickets sold, numbers and names of national productions. The general trends point large differences between national and Hollywood films. However, the national films that are successful produce “subjetividades cuyos derroteros […] generalmente consisten o en su integración efectiva en la élite que administra el poder de clase o en su fracaso en el intento de trascender las invisibles fronteras del orden social” [subjectivities whose transits generally consist either of their affective integration into the elite that administrates class power or their failure to transcend the invisible frontiers of the social order5] (Sanchez Prado, “Cine
Latinoamericano Y Neoliberalismo” 121). Sanchez Prado also notes that in these films the state is often absent and as such, it is the characters’ choices and moral perspectives, which cause their raise or fall. This discourse of individuality (individual fault or individually achieved progress) are central to the (neo)liberal cred and part of the didactic endeavors of this cinema (Sanchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism 105–10). The subtext of class dynamics, Sanchez Prado suggests, underscores that these films are created for the consumption and construction of a middle class enmeshed in the global flows of capital and culture.
This middle class, Sanchez Prado also notes is particularly interested in certain discourses of affect (Sanchez Prado, “Regimes of Affect”). However, Laura Podalsky has noted that affect is central to filmmaking during the New Latin American Cinema period explaining that “have emphasized the passionate commitment of the filmmakers
5 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 21 themselves as well as the films’ galvanizing effect on contemporaneous audiences”
(Podalsky 40). Indeed the purpose of mobilizing affect by the Nuevo Cine filmmakers was the political mobilization of its audience. The NLAC tended towards shocking their audience and mobilizing them politically because the political structures were present and visible. Podalsky cites Thomas Elsaesser’s explanation of Cinema’s recurrent desire to affect, to reflect the other an connect with the audience through the term “Betroffenheit, which roughly translates as the affect of concern but in its root-meaning includes recognizing oneself to be emotionally called upon to respond, act, react” (Podalsky 84).
The difference between the Latin American films of the 1960s and now days, is in the numbers. The Nuevo Cine attempted to affectively move the audience in unison– the references to “the people” in Terra em Transe make that clear enough. This neoliberal cinema, however, does not look to communal action by “the masses” instead, these films appeal to the individual. In fact, this change can be attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and the defeat of the left’s utopian liberatory projects, a moment that Jorge Castañeda congealed in his La Utopía Desarmada (1994, The Unarmed Utopia 2012).
Castañeda argues that the discursive disarmament of the Latin American Left can be seen in the loss of the liberatory Latin American utopias, which lead to the disarmament of the leftist guerrillas and the left-political project. This coincides with the arrival and enacting of neoliberal policies as that arrived in all of Latin American after the enactment of these policies in the United States. Even if one of the first countries to jump on this economic and ideological project was Pinochet’s Chile, Mexico and Brazil would admit these policies in the late 1980s and their full adoption by the 1990s. The 22 arrival of neoliberalism in Latin America can be seen through the types of governmental engagement with its own duties. David Harvey notes that key to neoliberalism is a turn towards “Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (Harvey 3). In its adaptation, however, neoliberalism proposes that the state regulate only in favor of the market. In this case, Mexican and Brazilian cinemas differ as the former has a history of strong industry and establishing national and international markets. The latter, meanwhile, has by the 1990s established a national market. Misha MacLaird explores precisely the way in which neoliberal policies have affected Mexican Cinema thematically and in terms of production and consumption.
MacLaird argues precisely that it is neoliberalism and its policies that enabled the rise of filmmakers like Iñarritu, Cuarón and Del Toro (MacLaird 45–55).
If in the 1960s the mode of social action was defined as collective and social
(protests, civil wars, etc.) with the adoption of neoliberalism, the government structures that once were the object of protest have been hidden, disappeared or more often, privatized. A clear example in the United States can be the substitution of manual war for drones and other technology, the privatization of the defense industry and the hiring of mercenaries and the secrecy of government espionage practices for national security.
Even if collective action were still the most effective mode of protest, in neoliberal capitalism action against social inadequacies happens through spectacle. This is what
Zizek, in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) understands in his example of
Starbucks discourse of helping the poor abroad by buying coffee bean at fair prices.
Starbucks’s end-goal is to help the poor abroad; it’s to sell coffee. If to sell coffee they 23 must also sell the customers the feeling of having helped someone, they will. This is what
Guy Debord terms Spectacle.
Debord defines spectacle as “not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord Thesis 4). An awareness of spectacle is at the core of neoliberal cinema differs from the political cinema of the 1960s. Contemporary neoliberal cinema knows that its images are inherently alienated. Because it knows that its only possibility for social action is through the market, it recognizes that even political action is alienating. In other words, the question at play in the change from pre-neoliberal political engagement and the neoliberal kind is that the first procures a sense of joint pursuit of change, while the latter, through the shock of alienation produces the appearance of political engagement as individual consumption. The neoliberal spectacular consumer of these films is meant to engage with the film and even be shocked but the goal or purpose of such shock is the appearance of political engagement for the individual, as Zizek points out on his example about
Starbucks. The consumer and audience, is left with both an alienation from political processes and a desire to affect political change. This makes it so the spectacle central to each of the films produces extreme shock and extreme alienation. I will explore this concept of spectacle further in the first and second chapters. One may, however, read this acknowledgement of the spectacle as the loss of that Utopia to be substituted by cynicism a cynicism that becomes apparent in the chosen subjects of these films: waste, death, loss of hope, etc. We are left with dystopian films where affecting change will not actually change anything. 24 WHERE THERE IS DESIGN, THERE IS WASTE This dissertation looks at six neoliberal films that expose the spectacle of neoliberal relations and the dystopian space of the Wasteland. The text is divided in four chapters: a first theory chapter and three chapters that look at a Brazilian and a Mexican film in each chapter. While the first chapter focuses on a general theory of the wasteland, the following three chapters look at different types of spaces and a particular way in which these spaces interact with the human body. Mapping the Wastelands proposes a cartography that centers on the instances when the wasteland exists in private space, in public space and in spaces of transit. These spaces have clear distinctions yet share the absence of the state, the logic of market-exchange, the enactment of the spectacular violence of becoming-waste, the human body and abjection. Thus, the wasteland emerges when these conditions interact.
Titled “Theorizing Waste: Byproducts, Beings, Badlands and the Imaginary of
Modernity,” this first chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the two central concepts that I will advance throughout the rest of the text: the wasteland and spectacular wasting.
Starting from the language differences and similarities, the naming of waste, the lands of waste, and the difference between disposable and wasted beings. After exploring the concept of waste in terms of its scientific contemporary applications. I proceed to trace nodes of the wasteland as a cultural construct. Among the chosen literary texts, I mainly refer to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I also reference literature in Spanish and in
Portuguese with a shared imaginary. Following that I look at the value that the wasteland has played in the construction of the Brazilian and Mexican nations and their constant
25 search for modernity. After quickly looking at some of the spatial qualities of the wasteland through Edward Soja’s notion of Third Space and Henri Lefevre’s socially constructed space. Recalling the short film Ilha das Flores (1989) by Jorge Furtado, I underscore the Debordian concept of spectacle and Deleuze and Guatari’s schizology (as a critique of modern or psychological reason). I end the chapter by exploring some of the key terms and recurrent modes of vulnerability and precariousness that are important to understand the bodies that inhabit the wasteland, and undergo the spectacle of waste to become wasted-beings.
In the second chapter, titled “Flushing it Down: Femininity, Waste and Private
Space in O Cheiro do Râlo (2007) and Malos Hábitos (2006),” I look at the films Malos
Hábitos (Simón Bross, Mexico, 2007) and Cheiro do Râlo (Heitor Dhalia, Brazil, 2006).
Here the space I analyze is the private space of wasting– the restroom and the politics of disposal over the feminized body. The Brazilian film outlines the corporeal effects of femininity on the protagonist’s male body, and the loss of power represented in the spectacle of wasting. The Mexican film, meanwhile, explores the market-regulation of the female body and the effects of bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Most importantly, I look at the intersection of abjection and these sociopathologies in the representations of the female and feminized body within the private space of wasting. Julia Kristeva’s exploration of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) helps me explore the psychic ways in which desire and dejection expose a body politics that I will explore better in the next chapter. Lastly, I draw from Eva Illouz’s analysis of the entrance of the market into the private space, in Cold Intimacies (2007) to explore limits of psychology and outline how 26 the two films analyzed point towards the necessity of an schizology (Deleuze and
Guattari). Proposing an schizology, I point towards the need for a psychic engagement free from forms of state and market violence that seek to regulate the wasted bodies in the wasteland (Deleuze and Guattari).
In the next chapter, I focus on the films Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio. In
“Throwing it Away: Spectacular Wasting and Citizenship in Estamira (2002) and
Backyard/El Traspatio (2009)” I focused on the space of the landfill, the dump and the relationships that construct a space as one of these. In this chapter I begin to focus on the act of spectacular wasting as the mode of representation of the politics of death on the wasteland. This requires that we understand the wasteland as referring to a space outside the state. Such a concept might seem foreign in some perspectives, but this very disappearance of the state from certain public (meaning non-private) spaces. This very fact complicates a subject survival and limits the tools that it may mobilize for empowerment. Thus I explore the concept of citizenship and the wasteland. In looking at the spectacles of waste and the acts of wasting in these two films, I contrast these films from others that explore these same spaces. While other films look at the establishment of citizenship at the limits of the state and the processes of empowerment through identification and subjectification to the state, the two I analyze refuse to sanitize their characters and describe the spaces outside, what some have called, the shadows of the state. Most importantly, perhaps, this chapter explores the body-politics of death in the wasteland and how these are applied to the female and racialized body.
27 The fourth and last chapter is titled, “Tossing them Out: Vulnerability in the
Interstitial Spaces of Waste in La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas (2012) and Baixio das Bestas (2006).” Here, I focus on the intersectional modes of vulnerability to which the main characters are subjected: ethnicity, youth and gender. Moreover, the very spaces the teenage protagonists transit are abject spaces where they become vulnerable and from which, at the end of the day, neither can escape. First I look to the cultural construction of the Mexico-Guatemala border as a site of transit and the sertão and agreste as the source of northeastern migration. Following I note the socio-historical construction of Central
American ethnicity in Mexico and Nordestino ethnicity in Brazil. To explore the simultaneity of race and ethnicity I refer to Ramon Grosfoguel’s conceptualization of racialized-ethnicities to explain how the main characters: Sabina Rivas and Auxiliadora are made vulnerable. Later I explore the construction of abjection through the visualization and sexualizing of these young characters. Here, I refer to the concept of the
Young Girl to expose how both protagonists embody spectacle. Through bleak representations of the Baixio and the border, these texts we see enacted the culture of fear that engulfs these characters, the threat of necropolitical, patriarchal, capitalist violence.
This dissertation looks at the filmic representations of three different spaces and people who inhabit them under the lens of the wasteland, vulnerability and the politics of death.
There are, however, still spaces that are represented in Latin American film to be analyzed, the transit-spaces between the Global South and North, the everyday spaces of the migrant within the Global North and the autonomous communities in Latin America come to mind. The text is, then, an exploration into the theoretical and representational 28 worlds of the wasteland. As I map the private, public and transit spaces where the wastelands may be enacted, one thing becomes clear: the absence of the state enables the enactment of violence in spaces that make it difficult and nearly impossible to point to a single violent actor. In other words, the wasteland appears to be an integral part of the structures that enable the maintenance of the state and modernity at the cost of human life.
29 Theorizing Waste: Byproducts, Beings, Badlands and the Imaginary of Modernity
For about a year, between my first and second year at community college, as the sun came up I would walk, sometimes bicycle and other times take the bus to work. I was in charge of a building with close to twelve doctor’s offices. The common areas of the small two-floor building had to be cleansed every day, from Monday to Friday, between five thirty p.m. and seven a.m. I swept the floor, mopped it, arranged the planters, cleaned the glass doors and windows, took out the trash, and sanitized the public restrooms, one for the ladies, one for the gentlemen. The first thing that caught my attention was that the men’s restroom was constantly clogged, while the women’s nicer newer toilet flushed without trouble, like a wonder of human creation. After about a month of cleaning the building, the men’s restroom turned out to be a recurrent problem. The foul smell of the men’s plugged toiled eventually forced the building managers to exchange it for a more efficient suction toilet. Although the suction toilet was invented first, the wash or flush toilet is the more common in residences in the United States even though it uses more water and removes residue with less force. At the time, I kept working because I needed the money. The place might have stunk but the money certainly did not. Ok, its not like I smell money so I wouldn’t know if the money smelled or not. As Roman Emperor Vesputian, in refraining his son Titus from commenting negatively on a Urine Tax (Urine was utilized as a tanning ingredient and thus bought and sold) once said: Pecunia Non Olet. That is, Money does not smell. In The Big Necessity (2008), George Rose explores how the toilet, a marvel of human creation, impulsed entire economies from its invention until now. Toyo Toki, founder of international Japanese toilet brand TOTO would likely agree with Vesputian. After introducing the toilet in Japan, and finding advanced solutions to its cultural and 30 physical use and adherence, TOTO now takes the largest percentage of the Japanese toilet industry. With over six million toilet seat warmer units sold in 20156 an increase of two million since 2012, we can be sure that Toyo Toki’s money does not smell. But moving Japanese fecal culture from the outhouse to inside the home, requires a series of technologies that began with the horseshoe seat and the “primitive” technology of putting a sock around it for warmth, and is now an industry of over six hundred million dollars a year, just in Japan. Certainly the market is in charge of the technologies of the restroom. As in most of the Western world, sewage has become a marker of national modernization. In many places, toilet culture is still pushed towards the limits and into the outhouse. Although to keep with the times, often there will be a toilet on top of a septic tank. Growing urban populations, however, requite plumbing, pipelines and sewage, not to mention a necessary although much newer privilege: water treatment. But all this happens after bodily discard has already been secreted. The state is concerned, in most cases with the waste itself, the mechanics of waste: where discard begins and where it ends. The action of wasting or the dynamics of waste are, meanwhile often subject to the market and human ingenuity. Although within the restroom, the toilet suggests we sit, like The Stinker (the parody of Rodin’s famous The Poet) to think– scantly do conversations around bodily discard is able to defeat the visceral reactions of our bodily waste. Although one may think these are filthy objects, urine is a fairly sterile liquid and fecal matter is a great producer of methane gas and nitrous solids. Shit along with manure, may be used to light a stove and later plant a garden. Although these modes of re-use might be more common in the environmentally conscious era of composting and recycling, to think of consumption and waste circularly guides us to the limits of
6 https://www.statista.com/statistics/565844/electric-razors-sales-in-japan/ 31 modernity’s ability to cleanse, order and contend with waste Could we, if required, handle our own feces? Would we vomit at the sight and smell of collected discard? How do we later remove bodily waste? As with the arrival of the toilet to Japan and the market-created Japanese toilet- culture, Latin American cultures have adopted and adapted their own toilet culture. In fact one of the interesting things is that we have not only technologies but also an entire spatial culture of the restroom. This is what Edward Soja citing Henri Lefebvre addresses through his idea of social space or the cultural construction of space. To construct the restroom as a social space, from the outhouse to the water closet, the space of the toilet encompasses interactions, ideologies and modes of relating with one’s own physicality. Just as we have dedicated the restroom as the space of waste, so are other spaces of waste key in understanding our relationship with the idea of modernity. In contemporary Brazil and Mexico, bodily discard and its space (the restroom) is constructed thanks neoliberal capital, post-industrial modes of production, the globalization of flows and the affective and aesthetic reaction to it. To understand how these affect the restroom, I approach the idea of waste from a cultural studies perspective. In the broadest sense bodily waste is only a small part within the larger context of waste, which includes the market’s ideology, the body of the other, and space. What is unique to bodily waste is its relationship with the body. As I said before, Modernity is key in understanding the experience of interacting both with consumption and discard. In this chapter, however, I will limit myself to exploring theoretical perspectives that I believe are central to understanding hegemonic ideas around feces. While I start by looking at the language of waste and its euphemistic qualities, I will, then, focus on the spatial construction of the spaces of waste, the act of spectacle as central in understanding the psychological and material effects of discard and lastly propose the term spectacular wasting, in order to 32 understand the wasteland as a potential site to articulate responses against the violence that wasting produces.
OH SHIT!
Fecal matter is the empowering physical presence of waste. He who wastes, he who shits has power. In contemporary thought, we are led to believe that consuming and producing are the central ways in which capitalist power moves. But in neoliberalism, as the actors of power become evermore hidden, as Hart and Negri propose in their text Empire. The breadcrumbs they leave behind are their waste. Shit, is the closest type of waste to the body and as such, it unravels what it means to waste in a contemporary context. When a corporation decides to build a dam, what is left behind in the lower banks, is waste. When a corporation decides to mine and extract any precious our non- precious metal from a mountain, what they leave behind is waste. The difference between contemporary extractive policies and colonial are both in the means and the modes of production and consumption, which now follow the mandates of neoliberalism. Yet it is through its historic construction through the simultaneous forces of modernity, barbarism, coloniality, and neoliberalism that Latin America has established an exceptional relationship with waste. When the conquerors came and built their colonies, their societies, they extracted gold, took away energy, and in a show of power massacred millions, leaving behind their bodies– wasted. When they left, others came and went. Yet again, their culture came, and left, and came and left, and it comes yet… leaving behind our hybrid cultures, our global citizens.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE WASTELAND In English, the noun waste has many synonyms: junk, garbage, trash, discard, rubbish, litter, shit; in Spanish, desecho, basura, suciedad, desperdicio, residuo, resto, 33 sobra, escoria, bazofia, detrito and in Portuguese dejeção, lixo, desperdício, escória, detrito, entulho, restolho, sujeira, porcaria. When beginning research, it is important to know the lexicon, not only of theory but also of the object of analysis. Working in
English, Spanish, and Portuguese, this led me to endless lists of words that called forth the strange beauty and the potential to transpose and connect waste across these languages. The subtle rhyme in the words crap and scrap, for example, or the use of the word shit, mierda and merda as a common curse in each of these languages. The words detritus, detrito, detrito have changed little in each language, simply because of their uncommon use. The language of waste is as specific as it is varied.
For all the variety and euphemistic value of such synonyms, the word waste has a physical, sensorial etymological source. The word waste itself comes from vastus, large, vast, and monstrous and its relationship to space is embedded in the first uses of the word, a wild and “desolate region” (Viney 18-19, Scanlan 22). The more commonplace
“trash” further highlights the physical qualities, the materiality of waste, junk as well.
And each of these terms has been used to explore different iterations of waste: Greg
Kennedy’s Ontology of Trash (2007), a study of nature and waste; Thierry Bardini’s
Junkware (2011) a study in post-humanism and wasting; William Rathje and Cullen
Murphy’s Rubbish (2001), an archeology of garbage; John Scanlan’s On Garbage, a study of the material and spectral concept through the world of art and language. The vocabulary of waste is variable and large, after all “it is when something means nothing to you that it becomes ‘filth,’ ‘shit,’ ‘rubbish,’ ‘garbage,’ and so on” (Scanlan 10). Even with all these, the lexicon of bodily discard can be categorized as few as four groups: 34 taboo (shit), medical (stool), and formal (feces, excrement), or when referenced in jest
(George 10-11). Yet, likely the most famous reference to waste is in T.S. Elliot’s The
Waste Land. First translated as El Páramo, and La Tierra Baldía, Elliot’s poem inspired the modern in the Hispanic-American world from Octavio Paz to Federico Garcia Lorca.
In these works we find the residues of the imagery, style and type of Elliot’s poem but most importantly, we find the similitudes and differences the wasteland, the páramo, the tierra yerma, or baldía. Nevertheless, through this influence and shared language we can point to common European religious and cultural history and cultural genealogy, even if
Spanish and Portuguese as Romance languages differ from English.
WASTED OR DISPOSABLE: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE Waste is not only a noun; it is also a verb and its adjective form (wasted) appears commonly in popular culture. “To be wasted”, for example, is to be drunk. In “wasted time”, a central concept behind Viney’s project of explaining temporality in waste, or in
Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives (2006), “wasted” can both be understood as either adjective or the simple past of to waste. In both forms however, wasted life, is life that has been wasted. However there are other adjectives connected to waste and these highlight the possibility of something being wasted, in the future. This difference in time distances Bauman’s from other texts like Melissa Wright’s Disposable Women (2006), or
Kevin Bales’ Disposable People (1999), sociological research on the possibility of human bodies being discarded, something they share with Achille Mbembe’s notion of
Necropolitics. This is a difference that I hope will enlighten the importance of
35 understanding the wastelands as wasted spaces. The wastelands contain that which has already been wasted, not the “to be wasted” in the future.
Disposability, the possibility of being wasted after extracting surplus-value from such bodies is in line with the Marxist critique Wright cites in the introduction: “all things of value under capital originate with those energies we call ‘human labor’”
(Wright 12). The idea of disposability is connected to reserve labor, then, and also to
Michel Foucault’s biopower, Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Wasted lives, however, is closer to social death. In other words, it is past the phantasmagoric livelihood Mbembe describes, “as an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity” (Mbembe 21). This state of hurt, the value of the slave, points to the power that exists in the possibility of being discarded. There is energy and power in necropolitics and biopolitics. This stands in sharp contrast to what Slavoj Zizek cites from Frederic Jameson as the lost cases or the exploited. “The exploited are not only those who produce or ‘create;’ but also (and even more so) those who are condemned not to ‘create’” (Less than Nothing 1004). After pointing this difference out, however, Zizek prefers to understand these unemployed bodies as disposable, as Marxian reserve labor.
However, I side with Bauman who points out that wasting is the act of getting rid of the disposable. Forcefully migrating Europe’s surplus population, he reminds us, has historically answered the problem of having large reserves of labor. “’Surplus population’ is one more variety of human waste” (Bauman 39). As Bauman points out later, it is not 36 that these bodies have life that can be used in the future; their life is completely unnecessary. Wasted people have already been discarded, and the state does not need to concern itself with them; they will eventually vanish. If at some point there was strength in numbers, there is also a limit between population and profitability and under capitalism, excess bodies must be trimmed.
As I explore the relationship between the physical presence of waste and the space it delineates around itself, one thing becomes clear: the better we understand the properties of waste, the easier it is to point to wastelands. To understand how waste is represented in cultural products provides a methodology to analyze spaces where things and people are designated as discarded. Location (the wasteland) and state (being waste) are complimentary variables. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that the more you know about the momentum (its mass, velocity, etc.) of an object, the less you can know about its position. By clarifying the difference between something wasted and something disposable, then, permits me to be clearer on the state of the bodies as wasted, but it also makes the wasteland less of a demarcated space. Take as an example the wasted bodies of years of deaths in southern Mexico, be it due to political struggle, drug trafficking or migration. On September 26th 2014, forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural
School disappeared in the city of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero after a confrontation with the local police7. In search for the students, mass graves were dug out, one after another; these desolate landscapes full of wasted bodies began popping up as a result of the search for the forty-tree disappeared. The multiplication of these sites prompted poet
7 (“Ayotzinapa”) 37 Javier Sicilia, leader of the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD,
Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity) to announce “Mexico es una gran fosa común” (XHEPL, XEPL). Mbembe reminds us that subjectification in Marxian modernity, is permitted only to “a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death” (Mbembe 20). In other words, the struggle of becoming modern and subjectifying depends on wasting lives. Soon we will address modernity’s violent impulse to separate product from by-product. It should suffice presently to not conflate reserve labor and disposable lives from lives that have realized their purpose and are, thus, unnecessary excess, by-product discarded unto the wastelands.
SCIENCE OF WASTE First, it is simply impossible to overstate the physicality of such an object. Waste studies, not surprisingly, usually deal with how to fix “the problem of waste.” In the world of technocracy and neoliberalism the ideological solution comes through waste- management, and policy-making, recycling and leaving the consumer to deal with the problem created by the market itself. The tone of these texts is often alarmist: Waste is everywhere! Recycle! But this perspective has yet to produce any questioning of the capitalist system that so empowers it. From this perspective the question of waste materials “can be answered on the basis of indisputable physical evidence or by referring to the most likely course of realistic technical advances” (Smil 158).
38 The first law of thermodynamics says that in all isolated systems energy and mass are conserved. This meant that, while there might be a small expenditure of energy through friction, heat, overcoming a chemical reaction’s activation energy (energy necessary to begin and take the reaction to completion), in any and all reactions, energy and mass must be conserved. At the quantum level energy and mass are intimately related and exchangeable, as Einstein well explained in his famous equation. The second law of thermodynamics, meanwhile, explains that all processes move towards the increase in entropy– disorder, degradation, or decomposition. In other words, there is no such thing as waste in these exchanges, only increases in entropy and unaccounted friction, heat and other energies we consider byproducts. In an isolated system (and the universe is one large system), you always get out what you put in. In any process, a chemical reaction for example, reactants and products must total each other. However, to understand these processes science has created an order where things are defined according to their use.
One has, then, products – desired and undesired, product and byproduct. In using this language, engineering avoids dealing with the conceptual complexity of understanding and working-through the discursive problem of waste. In this positivist perspective, byproduct could be a reactant for any reaction happening thereafter. In the conclusion to his Making the Modern World, Materials and Dematerialization (2014), Vaclav Smil,
Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Environment, University of Manitoba, assures his reader page after page that there’s enough aluminum, zinc and many other materials in the world to continue “expanding” the economy and using them. In this perspective, efficiency of use, the creation of substitute materials, and new or better 39 extractive methods means that one should not concern oneself with production or waste
(Smil 157–58).
Video and documentary, which are traditionally regarded as critically engaged media because of their politics of representation and predisposition to present reality to the audience, often deal with waste in its material form. Every growing heaps of waste and our necessity to deal with them is at the heart of videos and documentaries like Snag
Films’ Trashed (2007), Candida Brady’s Trashed (2012), or Wang Jiu liang’s Beijing
Besieged by Waste (2012). In fact, Jiu Jian’s film was such a success in independent film circles that it prompted cleaning up and action towards better sanitation by Beijing’s local government. This almost, pre-programed expected critique of waste demanding change regarding the represented waste also appears in the film about Vik Muniz’s work, the
2012 film by Lucy Walker Waste Land. The necessity to close the open landfill of Jardim
Gramacho, and save by sanitizing the few chosen trash-pickers through fine art, appears as a trope that helps carry along the action of the film8. Thus, these films don’t step too far from the modernist impulse to clean and organize the space of waste and make it into a consumable-good through its spectacular filmic representation. It does so, appealing to ethics and morals and not the “indisputable physical evidence” of engineering discourse; still, these texts prompt us to deal with waste as physical rubbish.
So what do we make of immaterial waste? Non-physical waste is what doesn’t bother us as much and a more recent phenomenon, which we tend to consider only
8 This does not imply that Muniz’s art also engages waste in the same way. In fact, Muniz is represented as trying to be as critical as possible of the effects of the film and trying not to give fake hopes on the possibility these characters might escape poverty through artistic fame. 40 because of its material implications. Consider trash-software, pointless or outdated software and programs, games and applications. When AOL comes to mind is because of the free CDs they gave and how these became trash or recyclable material. Information on social networks and elsewhere is but millions of gigabytes of data that only matter because they’re difficult to store and analyze. Junkware is malware, undesired and preloaded software in a piece of hardware or software that is inadvertently installed along with some desired software. LiveJournal, Xanga, and even MySpace are old websites that still hang around reminding us of disposed stories, blogs, and personal profiles. Others like Hi5 or Orkut might never have achieved prestige in the United States but, in Brazil,
Orkut outlasted MySpace into the Facebook years until Google Plus ousted it. Google
Plus itself never achieved the fame and glory of its search engine big brother
Google.com. So what do we make of this type of waste? This points to the popularity of
Snapchat, an application where messages disappear after a few seconds, or Spotify and other music-streaming apps where members don’t need to waste disc-space in old and forgotten songs they will never hear. This privatization of the modes of re-production of messages and data in general, points towards a waste that is no longer composed of information but of meta-data, analyzed information. Thankfully, the material is not the only way to approach these objects.
THE IMAGINARY OF WASTE As I mentioned earlier, the English “waste,” derives from the word vastus, which is connected to images of a vast unproductive land and empty spaces. These common
41 meanings relate waste to its spatial precedent. From the vastus, to the wasteland, to the wasted land, to the land of waste thus relating the material presence of waste (before or after the absence of production) to a certain space. In Making Waste (2010), Sophie Gee studies the literary construction of waste through eighteenth century literary texts. Gee argues that it is “the meanings of eighteenth-century waste matter are to be found in the narratives, explicit or suppressed, that surround literary leftovers” (Gee 10). Gee recalls
Suzanne Raitt’s argument that waste is discursively constructed. Each different word that refers to waste recalls different meanings, perspectives and most importantly, different processes and histories. In other words, for Raitt, waste is socially and discursively constructed, and for Gee such a discursive construct appears both in explicit and suppressed discourses of waste. As I highlighted previously, the study of waste usually cares for the explicit presence of waste. But it is in the suppressed appearance of the discourses of waste, both spatially and symbolically, that the analysis of the imaginary of waste is most fruitful.
According to Gee, the destruction caused by the arrival of the black death plague in 1665 London, and the Great Fire one year later prompted the use of apocalyptic imagery to refer to the city: London, vast, exhausted, simultaneously desolate and filled with abundant waste (Gee 25). “The image of wasteland,” she reminds us, becomes “a rich, symbolically complicated terrain – as it turns out, a terrain that will be a central feature of urban writing for the next three hundred years” (Gee 22–23). Yet the wasteland is still highly contemporary. What Zizek calls The Desert of the Real in reference to
Morpheus’ line to Neo in the Wachowsky brothers’ The Matrix (1999) is a wasteland, a 42 world destroyed by humans. Zizek uses this metaphor to illustrate encroachment of the imaginary of destruction into first world reality (Žižek 15). But this desert of the real recalls the wasteland, the imaginary of waste, of vast nothingness that has taken over civilization because it is barren but also because waste, the undesired product has overtaken desired product9.
Likely the most impactful literary reference to the wasteland is T.S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land. This seminal poem takes the reader through an overview of Western-
European references and while addressing this history, revolutionizes English-language poetry through its many analyzed qualities (Bagchee; Brooker and University of London;
Davidson; Hargrove; Davies and Wood; Eliot and Rainey; Eliot and North). Most importantly, the reach of this poem into both Spanish and Portuguese localized it as a site for configuring the language of the wasteland and, now, a place to explore the similarity and differences between the British-American and the Latin American imaginary of the vastus. As Howard Young reminds points out in his introduction to T.S. Eliot and
Hispanic Modernity (1924-1993), the first full translation of the poem was prepared in the United States seven years after its release by Enrique Mungía in Mexico and Angel
Flores in Spain simultaneously and published in 1930. In translating the title, Mungía decided for the word El páramo while Flores chose La tierra baldía. Although Octavio
Paz referenced Mungía’s translation as an influence in his thinking and poetry, when editing an anthology, Paz decided for Flores’ Tierra Baldía, which included a translation
9 Later, I will analyze precisely the bothersome constant presence of waste in the scene as a contemporary impossibility of modernity to control its discard. This means that waste must be introduced as a motive for the production, consumption and even the spectacle of capital; its discard, which I will explore further down in this introduction, has overtaken the classical imperatives of capitalism. 43 of all of Eliot’s endnotes to the poem, a modernist quality of meta-textuality uncommon for the time (Sibbald and Young). The affects of the poem’s arrival to Spanish-language literature do not stop with Paz. Howard Young’s and Kay Sibbald’s edited collection of essays reminds us that in Spain other poets would come to be influenced (and find receptive audiences, as did Lorca in 1930) when speaking of the vast somber effects of modern life: “…lo sabe T.S. Eliot que la estruja en su poema como un limon, para sacar vates, heridas, sombreros mojados y sombras fluviales”10 [what T.S. Eliot knows and squeezes like a lemon in his poem to get out fortunes, injuries, wet hats and fluvial shadows] (García Lorca and Hernández, 259).
In his analysis of likely the most disjointed part of The Waste Land, “The Fire
Sermon,” Etienne Terblanche shows how fragmentation and the search for an earthly yet mystical connection proves the sense of ‘Dislocation’ that titles her first chapter. In short,
… the fragments therefore hauntingly signify dis-location. Nothing is as disorienting to the speaker of the passage under examination than modern ‘orientation’: The automated ‘finding’ of one’s abode, one’s door, one’s key, and one’s promising but meaningless toothbrush. (Terblanche 56).
Terblanche understands the dryness that has been forced upon the waste-scape as the troublesome relationship between rationality and objectivity with nature presented as the dryness forced upon that space. The force of modernity on nature is visible in the
10 “T.S. Eliot knows and he squeezes it like a lemon in his poem, to get bards, wounds, wet hats and fluvial shadows.” My translation. 44 existence of the wasteland11. The forcing upon nature of a masculine-codified task while regarding nature itself as female, speaks to a real raping of nature within the extended metaphor (Terblanche 77). Enforcing the male-modern as taming of the unruliness of nature-as-female, also is present in the work of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico
García Lorca whose Yerma (barren) embodies the metaphor of an unfruitful land into a woman unable to bear children. This is a reoccurring trope. More than a metaphor, this feminization of Nature serves as an example of the internalization of patriarchal- modernity-as-violence on nature that can be expanded to include queerness, race and melanin/coloration as markers of disposability– the possibility of being disposed of. Even if at the time, Lorca’s text challenged patriarchal notions of control over the female body, there is still a metaphorical connection that Lorca exploits. The wasteland is, thus, a feminized, racialized, queered, colored, space where the violence of patriarchy may be enacted and where subjects marked by these qualities are disposed. Not to be confused with the border of the acceptable within modernity, the wasteland is where those intersectional-others have become abject; they have already been discarded.
In his text “Eliot’s Waste Paper,” Tim Armstrong, points out Eliot’s own paradoxical relationship with cleaning and needing waste to imprint the cleaning up as text. More specifically, after Ezra Pound’s chirurgical cleanse of “waste language”, The
Waste Land still maintains the space of the wasteland intact. Or in Armstrong’s words:
“both the abject and a valuable surplus which enables culture to continue, creating its own moment as it orders its abjection” (Eliot and North 288–89). It is the ability to
11 Yet again, the concept of the anthropocene could be recalled to further explore this dynamic. 45 cement the cultural moment by noting the impendence of waste that frames the wasteland as a methodology to writing. Eliot and Lorca are not the only ones to take advantage of this, as this space is also prominent to the Mexican cultural moment that Juan Rulfo is able to capture in both El Llano en Llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955). In both these books, the wasteland appears as a coarse setting whose dryness is embodied in the characters. A quick look at the short story “Es que somos muy pobres” points us to a
Mexico where even the often life-giving power of water is a catastrophe that prompts wasting. As Kevin Bales points out and we will see in chapter three, the young female,
Tacha is the most vulnerable here and her inhabitation of this space marks her as disposable for consumption. The relationship between the female body and the land as exploitable, in Rulfo’s short story, but also as a space of waste when barren, as in Yerma, is not a new development.
Since the Brazil of Pedro Alvares Cabral and the Mexico of Hernán Cortez, Latin
America has thematically been the land of lush, green and abundance, the tropics. As
Ileana Rodriguez reminds us, the American jungles: the Amazon and the Mesoamerican forests have served as sources for these myths. In neo-liberalism, however, this abundance becomes the excuse for the extraction of this richness through predatory practices (“Transatlantic” 196, 199). Under such an economic order, such lush is exchanged for the waste that is left over, after the richness is extracted from it. These lush lands Ileana Rodriguez well describes in her Transatlantic Topographies, are also signaled out as “void” of humanity, of modernity. “The representation of Amazonia as a humongous ungovernable void, or that which rends empirical vision and subjective 46 understanding or imagination apart, is a colonial legacy” (Rodríguez 166). In this space, the jungle comes to signify “barriers to development” and as such, it is the perfect candidate for “’penetration design,’ to take possession, to administer” (Rodríguez 167, and 197). As Rodriguez points out, the land and the indigenous people inhabiting it, are given the same unruly and barbarous qualities, both discursively created as in need of modernity with all its patriarchal, racial, gendered qualities. By conceptualizing the jungle as an impenetrable void, a space filled with disorder and in need of the intervention of the modern man to design it, it is created as the other side of the void and vast wasteland. It is closer even to T.S. Eliot’s unreal city filled with death, dead people and their bodies. These are but objects to be removed for the modernizing of such a space to take place. More than a dead land, the wasteland is symbolic and discursive spatial and imaginary construct of modernity that excuses the violence upon a space, people and things now coded as a blank canvas.
This propensity to relate the people who inhabit the American landscape as reflecting the qualities of that space is central to the discursive construction of the largest
Brazilian wasteland: the Brazilian sertão. Nísia Trindade Lima, points out that while the
Brazilian coast, or litoral, was thought as embassy to European culture and people; the sertão was inhabited by fronteiros. However, unlike the United States western frontier, this space was not understood as a physical moving frontier but rather as a symbolic boundary between the civilized and uncivilized. In line with the larger Latin American context, the sertão became the site of encounter between civilization and barbarism following the imaginaries present in the Argentine author Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo 47 (Lima 41–43). As a space with an ambiguous cartography, the imaginary of the sertão allows it to “estar em todo lugar em que se anuncie o desconhecido, o espaço social a conquistar” (be everywhere where the unknown is announced, the social space to be conquered) (Lima 44). As a symbolic space, the sertão shares its topographic imaginary with The Waste Land, Pedro Páramo, and Yerma, where the wasteland as a socially constructed and shared imaginary locate discourses of authenticity and nationality. In her study, Lima highlights how from José de Alencar’s O Sertanejo (1952), to Euclides da
Cunha’s Os sertões (1902) this desert-space in northeastern Brazil was configured as lawless, abandoned but also anti-modern and against civilization. With the foundation of the first republic in 1889 the Litoral’s European symbolic came to be seen as unauthentic, foreign and the process of nation building found in the Sertão, the antithesis of the
Litoral, the perfect response. In Ariel (1900) José Enrique Rodó turns around Alexis de
Tocqueville’s devaluing of Latin America as the domain of “sensual delight.” Rodó produces a positive assessment of Latin American qualities believing them superior to the
Anglo-Saxon alleged “inability-to-feel.” In the nation-building efforts of the first republic, the Sertão’s authenticity became a site for the creation of the Brazilian
Republic. The romantic valorization of the “folk” of the Sertão is still today embodied in films where the catinga, cangaçeiros, the folheto or literatura de cordel, the music of the
Sertão: baião, pé de serra, forró, and perhaps most importantly, its religiosity are referenced as local Brazilian values opposite to the globalized, sensualized images of the
Brazilian Litoral (even if both remain strictly Brazilian). Although the largest symbolic wasteland in Brazil is the Sertão, other landscapes have been marked as lands of waste 48 and alike the Sertão, they are the preferred sites where “culture” can be extracted to be cleansed from its anti-modern qualities.
The cycle of cleansing by extracting and discarding, leaving behind a wasteland, an exhausted space, only to return to it, recodify it and again extract both material and symbolic richness (such as a national culture) from it does not only appear in turn-of-the- century Brazil and post-revolutionary Mexico. It is also prominent in 1990’s Mexican and Brazilian film, after the institution of neoliberal reforms and policies in both national industries. In accordance with the history of the Sertão, the páramo, the tierra-yerma and the Waste-Land of the literary examples previously seen, are spaces that reappear as the nation-state enters the highly globalized 1990’s. In the face of impending globalization and trans-nationalization, local pursuits of self-representation recalled these places and returned to them in search of a national identity. In Brazilian film this would take the
(quite proper) name of the “retomada”: the re-taking or return.
THE NATION AND WASTE These foundational turn-of-the-century national discourses appeared not only in revolutionary Mexico and the Brazilian first republic, but the reappear when there is a need to (re)define the national project and the search for modernity. Changes in governance and transformations in population have historically required such engagements. After these revolutionary periods, the discourses of cleansing and the search for a national culture reappear sporadically usually engaging the “void/vastus” or the wasteland – spaces like the jungle or the desert in search for the “truly national.” In
49 this sense, the nation can be framed the ideological set of discourses created to retain and expand the power of the state, while the state is focused on the governmental and structural modes of control. To engage the wasteland is to recall notions of neo- colonialism when exploring relations between nations, and coloniality as the psychic form or the thought process of colonialism. The colony and the colonizer reappear, as the type of relationship that defined initial contact between modernity and barbarism.
Pointing out instances when these discourses reappear, Richard Gordon explores films that deal with the colonial period. In approaching these texts, Gordon shows that Mexican and Brazilian “colonial” films show a discursive cannibalism, as proposed by Oswald de
Andrade is his “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928). Following the ritualistic cannibalization of the fallen enemy by the Tupinamba tribes in Brazil, Andrade proposes to symbolically consume all “Others” in order to create truly Brazilian art and consciousness. This historical moment is taken by Latin American directors who treat the period of colonization in their films, “as a mirror for self-examination and as an allegorical lamp to illuminate present-day oppression analogous to that caused by colonialism” (R. A.
Gordon 7). This operation, looking back to codify the present through older discourses, is, necessary in moments of transition, as Gordon points out, Latin American film did this
“in the 1930s and 1940s [when] government in both Mexico and Brazil capitalized on the currency of historical films”, and again during the Nuevo Cine/Cinema Novo period, which “consistently confronted notions of national identity” and drove a brand of socially conscious filmmaking unto the 1970s and 80s (R. A. Gordon 3). Not only are these periods of governmental/state change, but also periods of transition for the general 50 population. The rise and growth of the urban landscape, which is where Gee and Eliot place the wasteland, converges with the rural wasteland present in Rulfo, Lorca and
Cunha as sites of the national12.
Since the symbolism of the wasteland is blind to the urban-and-rural dialectic it promotes itself as an alternative geography critical to understanding the power of capital in the production of space and landscape. What one has to follow is the cycle of cleansing by extracting and discarding. Although, wasting is implicit in the anthropophagic consumption of the filmmakers who themselves “take in the colonial sources and their centuries-long cadre of association, discard or expel much and digest the rest,” there are, nonetheless, other(ed) expelled in the forgotten histories of those expulsed from the national project (R. A. Gordon 3). The exercise of the extraction from nature and leaving behind a wasteland, only to return to it, recodify it and again extract both material and symbolic richness (such as a national culture) from it is similar to what Jens Andermann understands as the “exhausted landscape.” Andermann’s engagement with nature in his
Optic of the State (2007) and his “Exhausted Landscapes“ (2014) occurs through the state’s intervention and reconstitution of its geographic representation. By analyzing cinematic, cartographic and photographic engagements with these spaces, Andermann notes that, in film, landscape works both as a diegetic space and a historical place, which permits cinema to mold how space is understood. Similarly, Laura Podalsky engages with
Buenos Aires in her Spectacular City (2004) through the concept of “spectacle” which I
12 I will explore this further in the third and fourth chapters when looking at the films that focus on representations of the wasteland and citizenship in the first and the wasteland and the nation in the latter. 51 explore and expand later ahead. Secondly, Andermann shows that in Latin America, the interior of the country, the hinterlands, and rural space has been taken both as a diegetic space where the idealized epic of the construction of the national can be represented, and as a historically predetermined space where the modern will undoubtedly overrule the uncivilized, as I have already pointed out. Most importantly, however, Andermann points to representations of exhausted landscapes, as “the very denial of place,” by citing an
“incessant estrangement and unsettlement” (Andermann 70). This, he notes, is especially true of the films of the Brazilian retomada, but also of the neo-mexicanist films of the same 1990’s decade to which Ignacio Sanchez Prado refers in Screening Neoliberalism
(2014). These films are created under similar, recently de-funded, neoliberal national filmic industries. It is almost logical to redefine the nation through exploring the spaces that have historically been outside the state, as the state’s control experiences neoliberal reforms. This means that exploring the wasteland, the “unreal city” of Eliot’s poem, the
“incessant estrangement and unsettlement”, is to understand a space outside the control of the state.
This neoliberal moment, however, is not the result of a singular change in public policy. It is the result of a globalizing effort that began in the 1980s through international institutions such as the IMF, the WTO, and The World Bank. In other words, through global economic control these institutions have caused the de-scaling of government even of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal where “austerity” measures are eerily similar to debt-repayment plans forced upon Global South countries since the 1980s (Sassen 87–
88). Weakening the national-governments through these policies and promoting “free- 52 trade” are “aimed at shaping a political economy and a repositioning of these counties as sites for extraction, ranging from natural resources to the consumption power of their populations” (Sassen 90). In other words, Neoliberalism has caused the expulsion of farmers from their lands (which in turn has created a Global land-grab for capitalist mass production of crops), and of citizens as immigrants to Global North countries. Here,
Sassen’s focus is on what she calls “the systemic edge”, or the “switch from dynamics that brought people in to dynamics that push people out” (Sassen 211). The sociological approach to “the moment of expulsion” is central in understanding who crosses this border and how both the space “inside” and “outside” contemporary neoliberal capitalism is created. However, it is in its very ability to count and measure that this approach is limited to “within” and where a cultural analysis of representations of the space “outside” can be fruitful. The Wasteland as both metaphor and encompassing a set of cultural studies methodologies that explore the space outside the state and modernity.
It is this act of separation provoked by the expulsion that creates the inside- outside binary, which is at the center of the violent act of cleaning and the clean-dirty binary. Furthermore, cleaning up space for modernity requires the abjection of the waste- others and the creation of the wasteland. From Bataille’s work on the sacred-and-profane antithesis, and Mary Douglas’ seminal Purity and Danger both explore similar discourses that construct the subject-object relation, it is Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror where we find a difference made between those acceptable-others and the unacceptable-others.
In Kristeva, the abject occupies a third possibility between these apparent binaries. It opens up a space for a critical outlook on the relationships between desirable and 53 undesirable product. By this, I mean, that there is waste that can be and should be recycled, that can be touched, and even re-used, but there is also waste so repugnant and at times dangerous that cannot be touched, and is discursively enveloped in taboo. In
Kristeva, the abject is a place of questioning the subject-object, I-Other relation. Unlike the border or the periphery, which are spaces where power places the Other, the wasteland is where the abject is dejected from this play. Similar to Douglass’ exploration of cleansing, as part of the project of modernity, as that moment of separation, the wasteland reads cleansing as a moment of discarding. Zygmunt Bauman, recalls this moment when speaking of Michelangelo’s perspective on the moment of sculptural artistry as “separation and destruction of waste was the trade secret of modern creation”
(Bauman 21). The human hand designs, separates, cuts, and discards. “It is human design that conjures up disorder together with the vision of order, dirt together with the project of purity” (Bauman 19). Unlike the Other, who coexists with the subject, the abject is without value to this process. Bauman recalls the human action of codifying and de- codifying nature as the act of design, which produces a series of dyads. However, this also opens up the possibility to explore the actual space of “trimming” (as Bauman calls it), as an abject-third-space, as a place of productive critical methodological approach to the act of creating waste. In intersection with Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the wasteland is understood as a site for a critical perspective on space and production, both of which are central to understanding our contemporary understandings of modernity, economy and state-subject relations.
54 A TRIALECTICS OF WASTE OR THE WASTELANDS AS A THIRD SPACE In Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined spaces,
Edward Soja dissects Henry Lefebvre’s approach to the social production of social space.
He does so by recalling Lefebvre’s rejection of oppositional binaries and the introduction of thirding-as-othering, as Soja calls it: a trialectic. The product of this emphasis on the space produced past the oppositional dyads so common in traditional philosophy, geography, and other disciplines “might best be called a cumulative trialects that is radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge”
(Soja 61). Soja’s trialectics are, then, both a method for approaching social space, and a theory of spatial critique. Understanding the abjectivity of waste as a capacity for thirding, not subject-nor-object, not self-nor-other, not here-nor-there, is built around the supposedly oppositional character of the, previously described, science and imaginary of waste. I understand the wastelands as social spaces of discard: a collection of spatial practices of wasting, representations of space of waste, and spaces of representation of waste.
To explain the third space, Soja recurs to Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story El Aleph (1949). One of Borges’ best known short stories, it tells of a “point in space that contains all points in space”, and as such, is impossible to describe in words.
The coalescence of space, simultaneity of space and time in a single point, and the impossibility to turn visuality into language because of the very limit of language as words, successive, dependent upon previous agreement of meaning, situate the Aleph as impossible to describe. Above all, however, the Aleph points to the finiteness of
55 humanity. Soja, however, makes the Aleph manageable by condensing it into the
Thirdspace. A discursive construct where definitions of space-time coalesce, as in the
Aleph, the Thirdspace steps away from the mystical by constituting metaphoric spatial- temporal and discursive symbol. More than everything, as the Aleph, the Thirdspace is the erasure of the separation between things. The wasteland constantly points to that moment of everything-ness, a possibility of existence, a “how things would be.” As
Kristeva points out, such is the abject. As a Thirdspace, The Wasteland is both the jungle, before it is turned into a desert, and the desert that recalls the jungle. Mapping it discursively is, as Soja points out of Lefebvre’s Production of Space (1991), “a ‘reading’ rather than an ‘inhabiting’, a ‘discourse’ rather than a practical knowledge of space”
(Soja 58). As such, the wasteland is both an explanatory and descriptive metaphor and a methodology, or a conjunction of cultural studies methodologies to approach spaces dominated and created by the logic of waste. Wasting, implicit in modernity enunciates and divides. The wasteland is where spaces of production and consumption appear and point to the capitalist creation of space.
ABJECTION IN THE WASTELAND OR THE PSYCHIC REALM OF MODERNITY In Mapping the Wastelands, I explore how waste points to an abject lived space, but one that is originally constructed symbolically. It is through these cultural products that I approach an otherwise epistemological, ontological, historical, geographical, and symbolic space like an aleph, everywhere simultaneously and as such, indescribable13.
13 As I said before the more one attempts to describe, the less possible and more ambiguous the description of the outline of such a space becomes. 56 The process of design, as Bauman reminds us, requires the separation between the desired and the undesired. But as Kristeva explains, the process of designing, the cut, the separating, forces one to carry the scalpel within oneself. The scalpel exiles the abject, cuts from within, standing as a reminder of the triple existence as designer, desired and dejected. “A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject— constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh” (Kristeva 8). That is why the psychological subject, although attracted to and rejecting the abject, responds through disgust or laughter. But some inhabit that space, abject lived space is designing, cutting, dejecting and desiring happens (for Bauman, this is the heart of the project of modernity), and its product: the cut, the border (that third space both contains and separates the two spaces it produces) serves as reminder to the abjector/abjected/abject of the possibility of its own rejection.
For Kristeva, “the land of oblivion that is constantly remembered” is abject, and what land can be more filled with oblivion than the wasteland? Like an aleph it erupts14.
Abject waste, “if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two
(seemingly) opposite terms [that make it and from which it was formed] but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder” (Kristeva 9). It is this instant of abjectivity, which produces a catharsis that Kristeva explores in authors like Joyce or Borges and that
I will explore in the instances were the logic of waste rears its head and appears depicted
14 This is why the wastelands are also the singular wasteland. Aleph-like, simultaneous, different and alike the two spaces that make it, encompassing and requesting to go into the lived, symbolic and physical experience of a space. 57 in specific neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican films. In the films to be analyzed ahead, dejecting the abject and coding people and spaces as wasted appears to be formative to subject formation. By enabling and becoming the subject to power and enforcing the rule of modernity, in these films, those with power separate themselves from those without by dejecting, symbolically or physically, as lived experience or discursive act.
Thus, the analytical creation of waste, automatically separates what has become deject from the accepted. It is in art that the abject pushes for a result, becomes codified, demarcated, “any signifying or human phenomenon, insofar as it is, appears in its being as abjection” (Kristeva 27). This is the process of lacanian jouissance to which Kristeva refers, a codification of the world through which the “I” subjectifies. The spectacle of wasting appears as a poetics, in the sense that poesis is the act of creation. “It is there, in the thoroughly poetic mimesis that runs through the architecture of speech and extends from coenesthetic image to logical and phantasmatic articulations”(Kristeva 31). The act very existence of modernity in aesthetic and discursive descriptions simultaneously creates waste, desired product that pushes us away signaling, like pins, a cartography of the wasteland. By looking at precisely at dejecting, and consuming, looking at the places, objects and characters considered abject, we can outline the limits of the wasteland.
FAMILY, PIGS, AND ROTTEN TOMATOES OR SPECTACULAR WASTING In Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), Deleuze and
Guattari, explain a singularity using the example of wood. A wood whose qualities are still to be determined and are dependent upon its cultural creation; “it is a question of
58 surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter” (Deleuze and Guattari, EPZ
Thousand Plateaus 408). But this wood, as it is followed through its veins, it describes its surroundings. Through it we can enter its historicity, place and time. Such a singularity is afforded to us in Jorge Furtado’s 1989 short mockumentary Ilha das Flores in the shape of a tomato. This tomato guides us through its engagement as a product of capital. From surplus production exchanged for profit to a supermarket, to product bought by Dona
Anette, an independent perfume seller, who decides to make pork in tomato sauce for dinner. Most tomatoes bought are consumed at home. However, noticing that one is rotten and “not good,” she throws it away. The tomato, discarded, becomes either pig- food, or again is separated as waste given for free to people who scavenge trash for a meal. From surplus product to consumable good, to dejected trash the spectacle of the tomato in Ilha brilliantly captures the way in which it, as a singularity, allows a critique of capital and the violence implicit in it.
The instances when the tomato is exchanged, serve as inflection points which point toward multiple critiques of capital. First, the red fruit recalls Marxist critiques of surplus in globalization. A product of Mr. Zuzuki’s farm, the carmine crop provokes the narrator’s telling of the history of profit as a sin in the European-Christian tradition. Soon after, we are introduced to this plump red delicacy as a consumable good when Dona
Anette, a door-to-door perfume re-seller, buys it in a supermarket. At home, Dona Anette throws away one of the tomatoes because it is rotten. Unsuitable for consumption, it introduces the concept of waste. Donna Anette’s interaction with the rotten tomato points 59 towards different engagements with capital –buying and selling but also wasting. After all, “Waste is the dark, shameful secret of all production“ (Bauman 27). Production, consumption and wasting are connected as forms of capitalism, coded within the commodity and the relations it establishes.
Because the tomato was bought although thrown out, it was consumed but it was not consumed. In other words, the rotten pome was consumed only in appearance then wasted. The appearance of consumption, or consumption of the appearance is what Guy
Debord calls the spectacle of the commodity (Debord, Thesis 18). The presence of waste makes it necessary to engage with the commodity in this way because it exposes the commodity as spectacular. While in Marx the fetishism of the commodity drives its surplus production and consumption, for Debord, “spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life” (Debord, Thesis 41). This colonization takes the shape of the process of separation, an object of critique shared by both Debord and Bauman. Separating is the crack, the third space that produces the dichotomy that supposes to make up how we see ourselves: the subject-object. It is the action of designing us and seeing our selves reflected as subjects in the commodity.
However, the spectacular commodity creates waste and it is in this trialectics where the abject exists. This is why the rotten tomato, waste, realizes the full spectacle of the commodity and highlights Dona Anette’s subjectification as buyer, objectification as worker and separates her from those at the end of the tomato’s life: the ones who have nothing.
60 As Ilha das Flores continues, waste reappears in the story of the radioactive
Cesium incident in Goiás in the 1980’s. Unlike the fictionalized story of the tomato, this segment is very real. Found in an abandoned medical facility, a glowing blue stick of cesium that might have, in another moment, helped save lives was taken into the state capital of Goiânia by waste collectors where its radioactivity poisoned people and space.
Brazil’s own “Chernobyl” points how waste can demarcate the wasteland and those within it as wasted. This resonates with Debord’s thirty-fourth thesis that “spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” because no accumulation of the leftovers of capital is more representative than the wasteland. It is the image of the wasteland that recalls the spectacle of capital. Inverting Debord’s thesis, if the spectacle of the commodity that is wasting directs us to the image of capital, the image of waste redirects us back to capital. The spectacularization of the everyday life of the wasted, be it those who survive in wastelands (the final consumers of the tomato) or those who are wasted because the wasteland envelops them by the spawning of waste (those killed by cesium poisoning), both are the result of the casting out produced by the separation
Bauman outlines through his concept of design and Debord through spectacle. In fact, the abjectivity of the spectacle and the design of the dejected relate spectacle with Kristeva’s invocation of Lacanian joussance. The spectacle of waste is precisely this. It is the articulation of capital implied in the aesthetic representation of visible waste. In this case this is apparent in genre choice in Ilha das Flores, a mockumentary. The in-between-ness of the mockumentary: between documentary’s expectations of objectivity and fiction’s acceptance of subjectivity, reflects the separation of reality and image that produces the 61 spectacle. This genre mixes the two styles, not by attempting to erase the separation but by highlighting it, recalling the trialectics quality of the wasteland. As we proceed through each chapter, it will become apparent that the films analyzed concern themselves with emphasizing the bounds of the fiction/documentary binomial, thus (as I explain below) they differ from films that try to blur that separation or remain sternly within the set bounds. Instead of erasing this boundary, the chosen films acknowledge both their realness and their fiction, and by lying in-between they achieve the spectacular representation of the wasteland.
Building from The Society of Spectacle, Kevin Hetherington’s Capitalism’s Eye relates Debord’s criticism of spectacle to Walter Benjamin’s comments on the commodity in the Museum, which Benjamin understands as a space that re-codifies the wasted with new value. Hetherington summarizes the latter’s points by identifying “the key argument in Benjamin’s analysis of the museum as a space associated with death and decay […]”(Hetherington, Capitalism’s Eye 160). Because the museum is a bourgeois space of recycling, within it, waste is resignified to reference the spectacular value of the commodity15. So the museum is not a wasteland per-se, it is a place of recycling where the abjectivity of waste is missing. Hetherington understands that in Benjamin’s mind tombs and sewers share with the museum a connection with disposal and waste (that which is already discarded). In sum, the museum is “not a conduit of waste and human bodies, nor even of artifacts as such, but of the commodity status of artifacts”
15 This perspective is different from Foucault’s and Bordeiu’s who focus on the museum as the site for the creation of history and memorialization of the past by the bourgeoisie. (Hetherington 158) 62 (Hetherington, Capitalism’s Eye 161). What Hetherington emphasizes here, is the
Marxist separation between the object and its status as commodity. If the re-casting of artifacts as official historicized memory in the museum casts the museum as a wasteland, it does only when it unveils the museum-object as not-commodity. In other words, the artifact is only a commodity when the audience of the museum accepts it as such. In the bourgeois space of the museum, the object reveals that the commodity as a bourgeois idea. The insertion of a non-bourgeois audience in the museum changes the relationship to the commodity and the conceptualization of that space. Consider coming from a place in the Global South and seeing an object that is still used everyday in the Global South, in a museum in the global north. The Global South as wasteland of the Global North becomes more apparent. The object looses its value as museum-commodity and stands as a symbol of the difference between the two spaces. It encapsulates a symbolic space containing the artifact and the Global South citizen who finds themselves and their migration a product of the South-North dynamic. In chapter one of this dissertation I will address wasting by the modern subject as the action that alters the status of the object by casting it off as spectacularly. I will explore the bodily dynamics of wasting and the spaces where it takes place. Meanwhile, it should suffice us to consider the wasteland as produced by and producer of waste and precarious bodies.
The language that relates the vulnerable or precarious body to physical waste and the wasteland is that of the spectacle of separation. As central to modernity, separating is coded within capitalist mediated relations of design, which through the language of spectacle turn visible otherwise hidden spectacular representations of capital. In her text 63 The Spectacular City, Laura Podalsky reminds us that during 1970’s Argentina, cinema produced within the country often focused in the city and as such depended upon the city for filming locations. “The city itself,” she points out “provided a mise-en-scène replete with landmarks recognizable to Buenos Aires” (The Spectacular City 21). I’d like to consider that similar to how the city became the mise-en-scène in these films, the spectacularization of society acts as a fictionalization of the violence of wasting. To demarcate the cartographies of the wastelands, then, we must highlight the production of the spectacular mise-en-scène of waste. To do this, I’d like to follow up on Benjamin’s direction in the Arcades project and in section L [Dream House, Museum, Spa]. First at the Arcades Project, there is an understanding that like the Arcades, many objects, architectures and even performances are codified and re-codified within the order of modernity. But in the specified section, what Benjamin explores are the dead, gone or found spaces of waste. The Dream House, understands the Museum through the spectral, the ajar door, a reminder of the haunting of commodity value in rescued artifacts whose use has changed. The Spa as the place that connects getting rid of the impurities, which in a modern sense recall Mary Douglass’ Purity and Danger. The presence of waste and the processes of wasting are implied in the spaces with which Benjamin engages.
I would like to point out two of these spaces to understand what is necessary to create the mise-en-scène of the wastelands and how this filmic term relates to the spectacle present in the fictionalization of reality that I’ve previously introduced through
Debord. One of the best examples cited by Benjamin is Edouard Foucaud’s Paris
Inventeur, which speaks of the morgue and dead bodies as the mise-en-scène provided to 64 the visitors who “laugh there, smoke there, and chatter loudly” (Benjamin 411). Another example is his citation of Victor Hugo’s depiction of Parisian sewers in L’intestine de
Léviathan where the human body is ill equipped to submerge (Benjamin 412). The great city is leviathan, the space of its waste the sewers. Both are products of modernity, and both are essential to each other. Capturing the city drainage-system does more than provide a background. It turns the city itself into the abject mise-en-scène of modernity as it recalls the byproducts of the city. Paris is the landscape, but also the main protagonist.
Like Podalsky’s take on Buenos Aires, the city and its images have become the embodying of modernity.
Both the morgue and the sewers in Benjamin’s example point to the intersection of wasted bodies, and spaces of waste as parcel to that modernity. In the first, the body and the waste are one and the same, and the banality with which the onlookers approach the morgue is contrasted to the author’s abjecting response to the sequence. Foucault refers to those who take the situations lightly as owing to morality, as participating in smut, as workers, the opposite of the learned, educated and clearly modern author. In the second example, it is the space that is waste, and the waste that is the space described.
The sewer has only this purpose, to contain and control waste, in essence becoming waste itself. The bodies that dare disturb this purpose, as Victor Hugo points out, faint or are swollen by the waste that eventually overpower the very structure of the sewers. The spectacular consumption that gives place to waste, in this case, is closer to that spectacular city Podalsky explores, a spectacular shock. However, these depictions can also be understood within Debord’s conception of the spectacular as a form of 65 fictionalization of everyday life where instead of participating in it through consumption and production, the subject spectates.
Discourses of cleanliness that the modern being employs to explain the ability to dispose of something or someone not only produces waste and the wasteland, they create the modern being as subject of ideology of modernity. I propose that Spectacular Wasting exposes the uncontrolled nature of neoliberal dynamics of discarding because it is a response, the othered-side of neoliberal production. Waste is the result of all production and consumption, but if, according to Bauman, the category of waste is also the result of the modern concept of design, in neoliberalism waste must respond to the spectacle of production (Debord) and become spectacular itself (Bauman 30). If, as Gramsci proposes through his notion of power, all forms of hegemony create along with themselves the possibility of a counter-hegemony, then production and consumption, as material conditions of capitalism, produce counter-hegemonic vulnerable non-productive, non- consuming spaces that we encapsulate under the term wasted. In this sense, body, space and waste coalesce and interact through their spectacular simultaneous presence and become sites for counter-hegemonic empowerment that exist beyond and against the modern neoliberal capitalist systems of power and control. From cleanliness to social cleansing, these acts recall the dynamics of discarding through hygienic modern logic. By focusing on bodily discarding in the waste-spaces in cinema, we can approach the discursive and mediated construction of the wasteland by uncovering what are formal and symbolic mechanisms that construct certain subjects and spaces as wasted.
66 THE STATE OF WASTE The concept of class as a socially constructed group of people has shaped and is shaped by political conceptions and engagements with power. Marx’s coding of “high class” as bourgeoisie, and “low class” as proletariat is an example of terms that help understand a specific socio-political, and ultimately, cultural impasse. There is a history of adapting and creating terms to understand how different societal groups relate to each other through local politics, from the Brazilian class classification system that utilizes letters to name the different strata of society, to the large assortment of Mexican categories still based on colonial conceptions. A more recent categorization that contemplates the globalized, increasingly unstable socio-economic phenomenon includes terms like the-ninety-nine-percent and “the precariat.” What these two terms express is the increasing vulnerability of a large part of the over six billion inhabitants of the planet.
But it also points to a time of crisis.
In State of Crisis, Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni point out that the contemporary concept of crisis refers to a temporary, economically defined impasse.
Bauman proposes that in the face of crises, historically, there has always been a readily available ideological construct that seems “destined, willing and able to lead the way out of the current crises” (Bauman and Bordoni 9). For the Great Depression, it was the strong or welfare state that, following Keynesian economic directives, dragged the U.S. and eventually many other countries out of the largest crisis yet. As the strong state was found to fail in its attempt to oversee and control all aspects of society, this gave way to the market as the obvious answer to the crisis of the state, as can be seen in the fall of
67 state-control whether it would be the military government of Brazil or PRI dominated
Mexico (but can be seen in the fall of communism, the arrival of the Chicago Boys in
Chile, etc.). The market, through deregulation, privatization, outsourcing, and free trade established an ideological mode of control that we now know. Although opening space for personal liberties, uncontrolled production, consumption and trust in the market, in turn, has precipitated a dramatic increase in the accumulation of waste. Within Free
Market ideology, the relationships between supply and demand will always produce a balance of all factors and in this regard waste will always be turned into a resource.
Except, it does not. Waste remains as waste. This is visible in disposability as complex as that of nuclear waste, or as simple as that of a diaper. Although our systems of production, consumption, and even some of our systems of recycling are faster than ever, nature (including the physicality of our bodies) has limits. By not recognizing these limits, the market has taken us, yet again, to crisis.
This crisis is manifest in spaces that are, as the market wills it, outside the formal control of the state. This spaces parallel to the state, or para-estatal spaces, are inhabited by the precariate and waste. But this crisis is indeed a crisis of economics – maybe even a crisis where economics thrives as a system of control. What matters is that economics has made it so “finances, investment capitals, labour markets and circulation of commodities are beyond the remit and reach of the only political agencies currently available to do the job of supervision and regulation” (Bauman and Bordoni 11–12). It is this same conundrum, the impotence to respond to the crisis of the market, to which Jorge
Castañeda alluded in his Utopia Unarmed (1993). Castañeda lamented the end of the left, 68 and the type of politics that it practiced. He most importantly declared the full-fledged arrival of neoliberalism, as the rule of the market, in Latin America and urged his readers to the need of articulating a new utopia. Clearly, neoliberal reforms have, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, transformed Latin America since post-Keynesian economics appeared. In fact, it could be argued that neoliberalism is still not the all-powerful model that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt propose as Empire in their book by the same name. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that a global form of power established through the precedence of the free-market, the retracting of state dominance, the privatization of physical space, the deregulation of finance, and the coding of profit as the ultimate goal, is the ruling ideology of the period. These changes, also known as neoliberalism, are the reason behind the exponential growth of waste in the present when compared to waste in the long history of capitalism.
The increase of wasting and the presence of waste speak to cycles of “nature” in barbarous voids, spaces that have “fallen behind” the modern capabilities of the market.
It only makes sense that as the state interacts with the inhabitants and the objects within the wastelands it does so with the violence of design. In the wastelands, then, violence becomes the modern-capitalistic mode of interaction. This resembles Sayak Valencia’s diagnosis of Mexico where she sees the arrival of a Gore Capitalism, or a capitalism where violence has become the primary mode of subjectification, arises when a weakened state, a strong market, and unprotected citizens can only interact through violence. Valencia proposes an enlightening approach to the logic of violence by citing it as the direct product of capitalist consumption and production, and as the mode of 69 visualizing of necropower (in line with Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics) (Sa Valencia
19). Understanding necro-empowerment as the process of subjectification through the ability to take life, she calls these gore-violently formed subjects: sujetos endriagos, or draconian subjects – half dragon, half human beings whose existence depends on the reproduction gore-violence. If subjects are self-made through violence, and not through the processes of appellation (Althusser) or through the state’s control (Foucault) of their everyday-lives (DeCertau), this means that they are subjectified to power other than that of the state. Since in neoliberalism the state has minimized their presence but the market has expanded its own (even into our emotional lives, as Eva Illouz proposes), we can agree with Valencia that the nation-state has given way to the market-state (Sa Valencia
31–34). Although Valencia takes this to speak of the Narco-State, in reference to the important part that Narcos and their violence have historically played in Mexico. Rather than jump to conclusions about the part that drugs and Narco-violence plays, would first like to see what happens to the state, after its breakaway, the nation, has been privatized.
Here, Paul Amar’s look into how states-in-crisis in the semiperiphery (more specifically Brazil and Egypt) gave way to an unexpected coalition between the forces of securitization through the discourse of humanitarianism in his Security Archipelago
(2013), can be enlightening. More than his focus on the unstable creation of human- security states16, I believe his methodology can point to what happens to the state during
16 Amar sets to analyze how the unexpected alliance between (1) moralistic (evangelical and Islamic groups), (2) juridical-personal (rights and property, rule-of-law discourses), (3) workerist (the interesting appearance of collective, social security and post-consumerist citizenship) and (4) the forces of securitization arose through moralistic discourses of humanity in attempts to prevent the spread of gendered and sexualized perceptions of globalization created crisis (Amar 6–7). 70 the crisis of neoliberalism. First, he separates the work of NGO’s and other civil groups from that of military (be it police or army) forces. Doing this, he shows that the four groups that create these human-security states are at the source of a post-neoliberal state.
More importantly, he points out that, in this state, gendered and sexual communities continue being stigmatized. In other words, these groups the foundation of a “human” state still depends on the cleaning or removal of non-modern beings. Amar calls the groups that create the security-state para-statal, meaning, parallel to the neoliberal state, and not directly under its control. In other words, these are privatized entities whose activities exist outside political power. It is here, where we can see Bauman’s “divorce between power and politics.” Even though political inability (loss of power to the market) causes this crisis, the one group that is part of the neoliberal state and remains after the time of crisis passes is the armed forces. In other words, the state becomes a securitization-state. The ability to cause violence is all that remains. This, in turn, recalls
Charles Tilly’s racketeering state.
In his, at the time, controversial article “War Making and State Making as
Organized Crime”, Tilly forgoes established ideas of state-making to show “the interdependence of war making and state making and the analogy between both of those processes and what, when less successful and smaller in scale, we call organized crime
[…]. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum – that I shall claim as well” (Tilly 170). Whether we choose to believe Tilly that the European state was created like this, or not, it is clear that Latin American states were indeed created through war, a war of conquest and then re-made in their wars of 71 independence. The colonial background of Latin America might be unique but it shares a history of colonialism with most of the Global South. In Mexico we can point to the many armies and militias that eventually became the standing armies of whoever would become the president both in the war of independence and the revolutionary war of 1910.
Although Brazil underwent a different type of independence, state militias and smaller armies were central to the foundation of the first republic, to the military dictatorship that lasted until the 1980s. As I have noticed before, these technologies of control have also served to expand the limits of the state and to continually advance the efforts of modernity, in a search to configure both the Brazilian and Mexican states as modern by expulsing the abject from within the state. But as power moves from the state to the market, all that remains is the state as enforcer of the power now dominated by the market. And the market’s need for expansion into the wasteland prompts the state to become a rival gang, among all the groups of draconian subjects that inhabit the wastelands ruled by gore capitalism.
These wastelands, then, are a site for contestation to the power of the state.
Although the violent logic of the market is prevalent in these spaces, this still means that a flux and a constant exchange of power could prove the wasteland to become a site for the reformulation of the res-publica. Although the heightened appearance of the wasteland in neoliberal and post-neoliberal states makes it a timely space of analysis, it is, as well, a pre-state space, as I will explain in the third chapter when I focus on the construction of the state. In the wasteland, we could find a politics to challenge the need to follow or become subjected through the state’s Agambian politics of Bare-Life, 72 Necropolitics and even the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In a place where the state is discredited, discourses of wasting and anti-abjection could prove to be the revolutionary politics that give birth to a new mode of community making. The relationship between modernity and film, as well as the inter-textuality that Valencia’s choice of the metaphor of gore implies, including the impermeability or danger of entering the spaces of the wasteland also prompt us to see films where waste and abjectivity are ubiquitous as a particularly unique cultural products that allow for a type of engagement and analysis the wastelands deserves.
Through film, the artistic genre that arose along with the city and turn-of-the- century industrialization, we have seen the rise of production and consumption as modes of capitalist enrichment. However, with all process of production and consumption, there is disposing of waste. We’ve explored how wasting is coded as the modern impulse to separate the subject-object through capitalist design by making the abject and expulsing it from the limits of power. In contemporary spatial terms, wasting is discarding the abject- others outside of state-controlled space. This in turn, means that there is a space outside the state: The wastelands. Outside the state’s power, the wasteland is the void, the vastus that modernity constantly probes to expand itself. Subjects inhabiting the wasteland are abject, never citizens, and no different from the waste-objects that exist there. I explore six films where characters are wasted, considered waste or engage in creating and inhabiting spaces of waste. What is unique about these films is that they don’t engage in the modern politics of cleanliness, and modernity. This allows me to explore the dynamics of the wasteland and map its limits. By delving into the aesthetics of these 73 films and engaging the spectacle of violence in them, I hope to encounter ways in which as audience and participants in the act of wasting, we can move past the spectacular capitalist relation to waste, which I understand as the setting in place of processes of securitization. If the wasteland is indeed outside the state, and modern incursions into these spaces are violent, how can “the wasted” obtain an empowered citizenship?
Furthermore, how can understanding wasting as the spectacle of capitalist design at play, incarnated in abjectivity, better our relationship with nature, and one another, past a simplistic subject-object or self-other relation, and transform the wasteland from a space of death to one where being does not need adjectives. It is my perspective that, searching for an existence outside the state may redefine the popular in anti-capitalist, and anti- bourgeois terms past de limiting relation between self and state-power.
74 Flushing it Down: Femininity, Waste and Private Space in O Cheiro do Ralo and Malos Hábitos
A charming prince and a white unicorn with a rainbow-colored mane, traditionally the stuff of fairy-tales presents the squatty-potty– a stool for your stool. The prince explains that:
this is where your ice-cream comes from: the creamy poop of a mystic unicorn. Totally clean, totally cool, and soft-serve straight from a sphincter. Uhm, they’re good at pooping! But you know who sucks at pooping? You do! That’s because when you sit on a porcelain throne, this muscle puts a kink on the hose and stops the Ben & Jerry’s from sliding out smoothly.
This commercial for the squatty-potty introduces the toilet as the site of the construction of discourses of purity and taboo. These discourses intersect the restroom, and set the private space of private spaces within the geography of patriarchy, modernity and neoliberal capitalism. In this chapter we will explore the restroom as the private site of a critical construction of modernity and of the spectacle of capitalist production of waste.
By equating purity and cleanliness with modernity and dirt and waste with anti- modernity, discourses around the restroom frame wasting as central to humanity, as the prince of fantasy reminds us: “If you’re a human being that poops from your butt, click here to order your squatty potty.”
By euphemistically connecting feces and ice cream, the commercial comically refers to the restroom as the site where a spectacle, with a prince and a unicorn takes place. Although jokingly, the commercial exposes the water closet as a place where technologies of modernity such as toilets, toilet paper, bidets, and, in recent neoliberal history, the privatization of flush-water that embellish defecation through a complex 75 system of management and design. In this sense and as a modern creation the restroom materially signifies an anxiety with regards to waste within modern discourse. In this chapter I explore the restroom as a space of waste, or a wasteland, that has undergone a change from private to privatized space and thus become central to the construction of the subject-object relations in neoliberal modernity. As such, the films I analyze expose the restroom as a site for the processing of the abjectivity that codes others as wasted. In both films, we see how the site of waste works as a site to turn feminine bodies vulnerable.
Finally, I question whether these vulnerable others can find forms of empowerment and subjectification even if they are unable to engage in the neoliberal act of discarding.
In the 2006 Mexican film Malos Hábitos, directed by Simón Bross, the impossibility of constructing female beings as subjects by making consumption and discarding impossible to them. The feminine is abjected as seen through the presence of vomit and the acts of cleansing the female body. Similarly, in O Cheiro do Ralo, a
Brazilian film from 2002 directed by Heitor Dhalia, the main character expresses his power through consumption and accumulation but most importantly, his fall is caused by his inability to obtain what he desires which changes his relationship to his bodily discard. This change makes the main character as vulnerable as other bodies that he had previously engaged by enacting violence. Mexican and Brazilian cultures share and have unique expressions of modernity that are reflected in cultural differences and similarities visible in the films. These differences are visible in the cultural markers to the extent that these films are recognizable as Mexican and Brazilian accordingly. Since the late nineteenth eighties, however, with the arrival of neoliberalism to the region, both 76 countries have increasingly intersected and mimicked economic, political moves that make their populations vulnerable in similar ways.
When these two films depict these vulnerable characters similarly, they also expose ways in which wasting can be seen as an expression of how the modern subject is crisscrossed by capitalist production, consumption and accumulation. Thus, in them, the logic of spectacle within waste becomes visible and speaks to the psychologies of vulnerability. Because these psychologies oppose the ruling ideology, they are considered pathologies and could be said to exist as Deleuze and Guattari term schizology. The similarities become clearer as the neoliberal logic of wasting surfaces through the vulnerability of feminine bodies within a privatized social space. Eventually these feminized bodies turn into sacrifices to reinstating the patriarchal order. Whereas production, consumption and accumulation have, historically, been studied from many perspectives and fields, wasting or discarding is less present in cultural critique. In this chapter I look at waste in the private space as nowhere are body and discard more closely intersecting than in the restroom. The squatty potty’s commercial takes advantage of the awkwardness when speaking of feces. This ubiquitous product of human existence is believed obscene, as are the bodies that do not engage with it to clean it. The anorexic and bulimic embody this obscenity. Discourses of the proper need to be suspended to engage with these films past the limits of sanitary discourse and understand that abjectivity and its violence are a direct product of capital and modernity in support of patriarchy. In this dissertation, my goal is to analyze the biopolitical implications of waste in a space where state control is scantly if ever present. In this chapter, I focus on 77 private spaces of which the restroom is the central place for the interaction of body and waste. The films O Cheiro do Ralo and Malos Hábitos point to how the capitalist logic of neoliberalism has entered the private space of the restroom and instilled processes of spectacular wasting that have changed this private space to a privatized space.
CINEMAS OF HUMAN DISCARD AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF BODILY WASTE In this chapter I explore the intersection of space, waste and the body in filmic space in O Cheiro do Râlo (Drained, Dhalia, 2006) and Malos Hábitos (Bad Habits,
Bross, 2007) to approach this, I analyze the restroom as a space where these bodies have been historically formed and then reconfigured. In the 2006 Mexican film Malos Hábitos, psychological disorders, vomiting and the putrid food signify female bodies as abject.
This abjection is most explored within the restroom, the private site of waste creation by excellence but it appears in other private spaces when the characters are alone. In similar fashion, in O Cheiro do Râlo, a Brazilian film from 2002, the main character, Lourenço, expresses his power through consumption, accumulation but most importantly by wasting. Symbolizing waste, the abject smell of feces from the toilet next to his office empowers and him. This process of subjectifying through wasting is also central to the construction and rebuilding of masculinity in Malos Hábitos, but the films also point to waste itself as providing the material basis for the rejection of patriarchal values by subaltern disposable or wasted subjects.
Malos Hábitos tells the story of four women and the one man that connects them:
Linda, the daughter; Elena, the wife; Matilde, the sister; the Gordibuena, the Peruvian
78 exchange student; and Gustavo, the man at the center of the action and whose masculinity will be rescued through an exposure of the “badness” of the female characters’ habits.
Using the word “habit” in the title (both a nun’s clothing and everyday actions) the film foretells both as negative through wordplay. The trailer, meanwhile, focuses on the consumption of food, cultural standards of beauty, and the pathologies of bulimia and anorexia interweaved with religious discourse. The film does a good job in exposing the relationship between the culture of control over female bodies as thin by personifying this in Elena’s anorexic body and her constant policing of her daughter, Linda’s body.
Simultaneously, the nun, Matilde’s story develops as one of religious self-sacrifice in exchange for holy miracles. After all, the coding of religious and affective energies within the private through the capitalist logic of exchange is central and recurrent in both films. Suffering from delusions, and visions, from the moment she arrives in the convent,
Matilde imagines a Teresa, a nun who threatens her, watches her and at one point attacks her. In her desire for self-immolation Matilde changes from simulating of St. Theresa in search for her holy visions to a schizophrenic’s anorexic torment. Contrary to these three females’ suffering, Gustavo is an empowered, rich, man-of-science whose consumption is never hindered and who would be a less-than-ordinary character were he not the only beneficiary of the female characters’ self-discarding. The Gordibuena, a character whose presence in the film is solely to demonstrate Gustavo’s ability to consume stands in contrast to the Mexican Elena, Matilde and Linda and as a Peruvian who is, for the most part, able to consume without guilt.
79 Much as the Gordibuena, most characters in O Cheiro do Râlo also lack a name and instead are given a title, which makes their existence purely utilitarian. Just as the
Gordibuena’s title-as-name in Malos Hábitos presents her as an object for Gustavo’s consumption, the characters in O Cheiro do Râlo receive titles that point out their utility to Lourenço, the main character who undergoes a change from being empowered and subjectified through capitalism to being wasted. Lourenço’s change can be seen in two simultaneous movements. As the film begins, he excuses himself for the “smell of the drain” to a customer of his pawnshop. He explains in a voice-over that it is the food at the corner restaurant that is so bad for him and produces such a smell. But in this restaurant works Bunda a synesthetic name for a female character who is the center of his desire, her behind. The irony in being obsessed and objectifying a woman because of her derriere and his smelling toilet is lost on Lourenço. But not on a character who chastises him for both his capitalist practices and tells the protagonist that the smell of the drain is the smell of his insides. As the film progresses, Lourenço stops his upcoming marriage with his fiancé, pays an abjected character named Viciada (the drug addict) to undress in front of him. While initially the main character under-pays most of his customers, things begin turning around as the smell of the drain disappears and “the eye” appears.
After being sold a glass eye by a customer, Lourenço begins re-creating a synthetic father. Later in the film, he buys a leg for his father, all the while slowly loosing buying power or giving away his money. This transition from powerful capitalist to affective and feminine abject follows his focus from his many objects to one object that evades him, Bunda’s behind. The references to Bataille and the solar anus, the eye and 80 the desire to remake the father, opens up a reading that enlightens processes of subjectification through the abject. Importantly, however, both films also expose the spectacle of the presence of waste within private space of the restroom, through the politics of vulnerability of gender.
The restroom, then, appears as both a social space where vulnerability is performed upon the feminine and a site for the empowerment of subjects that enforce such violence upon abject-beings. Mexican and Brazilian cultures share and have similar relationships with modernity although these are expressed through their unique national realities. These two films depict wasting as a form of capitalist empowerment, highlighting these instances through the spectacle produced by on-screen violence.
Because of the centrality of spectacle in film, they draw attention to waste and its violence by accentuating or underperforming the expectations of disgust around bodily waste and also presenting these wasted bodies and their discard interchangeably and in spectacular ways. As such, bodily waste becomes an ominous presence that haunts the films but is never truly visible. This points to a change in what has traditionally been a feminized, private and liberatory space, the restroom, to a space where such feminine bodies are no longer protected but become ever more vulnerable when escaping the patriarchal order. Because the excess presence of bodily discard speaks to the limits of modernity’s control over waste, we can speak of the limits of modernity and what exists outside and beyond these as that-which-is-wasted. Since both stories reach their climax as these systems break down and feminized bodies are disposed-of, both stories highlight a
81 change from a private space regimented by ideological apparatuses to a private space that works ruled by unimpeded capitalism.
These films illuminate a space that is conceptually difficult to approach because it is a vulnerable subaltern space that exists in the shadows and its products are rejected because they are abject by design. The wastelands themselves are the byproduct of creating the modern state and as such exist outside the state. This, in turn, allows the state to ignore who inhabits them and what happens within. Whereas the concepts of
Biopolitics and Necropolitics look at the power of the state within its limits, by being outside it, the body-politics of the wasteland necessitate a critical language that accounts for the different modes of violence, power and control that are enacted therein. To approach such a space from the realm of cultural studies, that is, accounting for the cultural construction of the wastelands I take three concepts that are central to the development of this chapter: Abjection, Szhizology and the psychological concept of
Socio-pathologies as Ethnic Disorders. I explore the abject through Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. For Kristeva the abject is not precisely and object nor is it a subject; instead, it is somewhere in between, at the limbo between these. The Abject is the separation between the I and the Other. Thus, the
I rejects the abject. In other words, the abject is a reminder of the subject’s otherness and as such, it causes abjection in the form of disgust, expulsion, separation (Kristeva 5-6).
Abjection expresses both the process of becoming abject but also the affective force of that rejection.
82 To understand the psychological sources of Abjection, Kristeva recalls Melanie
Klein’s psychological work on children undergoing the psychological basis for the abject: the separation of self and other. In the moment when the I creates distance and desire for the Other, the Abject is created as the liminal reminder and remainder of oneness and of the self’s otherness. This instance is also when the limits of the psychological are defined as the self, the subject of the psychoanalytic, is constructed. In Anti-Oedipus, Modernity and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari, point out that in such a moment, what is outside the defined limits of the psychological is defined as schizophrenic. Thus, they propose that desiring-machines are the schizophrenic beings that, based on feeling, go against the psycho-logic of the oedipal, they are anti-oedipal and are, in turn, named schizophrenic (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 51–53). Kristeva notes this when she expalins that for each Ego there exists an Other, and for each Superego (the cultural, societal norms imposed upon the ego) there exists an Abject. Thus, the schizophrenic is abject; it is anti-oedipal; it is outside (in the wasteland?), beyond the rules of the organized religion that delineates desire, disgust, etc. In this light, schizophrenia is the
(dis)order of the psychic of the cast-out – the pathology that goes beyond the Oedipal, outside the modern triangle of father-mother-self that constitutes psychology and the social (the modern). If schizophrenia is socially determined as outside the limits of the social, it follows that socially prevalent pathologies mark their subjects as wasted or outside the social order. If capitalist consumption creates the psychological, the schizophrenic is created by capitalist dejection. This is what Richard Gordon (taking from George Devereaux) understands as Ethnic disorders that are produced by the 83 capitalist culture of consumption and produce Social Epidemics (Gordon 2000,
Devereaux 1976). One of the ways an ethnic disorder is produced includes naming. If psychic structure already existed but is therein named as outside the limits of the cultural, then it may be understood as part of the larger “schizophrenic” (as outside the limits of the modern, the capitalist, the psychological) if it provides or points to a way of thinking outside the accepted.
What I hope will turn visible in my reading of these films is that neoliberalism, incarnating the latest iteration of modernity, enforces wasting through the structure of capitalism as a primary expression of power. As such, neoliberal Latin American film, or film affected and created since neoliberalism has become the ruling logic of cultural production, reiterates and transmits the abjectivity of gendered bodies through its use of space, mise-en-scène, plot and other stylistic features. Much as in the commercial for the defecation aid, the squatty potty, “if you’re a human being that poops from your butt”, you are prone to reinforcing these notions of power and wasting if we don’t understand the ill effects these everyday actions of discarding reproduce in politics. As the films propose, the body and our politics of being can become a site of rebuttal to the biopolitics of waste.
PSYCHOANALYSIS, SOCIO-PATHOLOGIES AND SCHIZOANALYSIS O Cheiro do Râlo opens with a handheld camera following what later is known as the gloriosa bunda or “glorious ass” of the eponymous character Bunda and the embodiment of the main character's desire. Contrasting with the gray and unkempt
84 background of unspecific Brazilian almost third-worldly houses and walkways, the magnificent ass is covered by a colorful pair of short with a colorful beach stamp. A soundtrack where scat, whistling and an acoustic guitar represent the general stereotypical island happiness highlights the gray-vs-color contrast. The colors might be even more noticeable, were it not for the yellowish taint of the bright outside sun. Finally, as Bunda arrives at the nondescript “lanchonete” or corner-eatery, yellow bananas, oranges and various fruit reminiscent of Carmen Miranda’s headdress line a glass case, which if not for the decrepit state of the store, would look appealing. And as Bunda leans forward to put away her purse below the corner-store’s counter, the camera closes up on her derrière, to immediately turn and see Lourenço, staring in the same direction.
In quite the opposite tone, Malos Habitos opens with a storm. At first scarcely visible, the habits of a nun become more apparent as she walks away from the static camera down a dark hallway, and a pair of ceiling lights swivel side to side simulating the raging storm outside. Stepping on puddles, the nun interrupts the twisted reflections of the light fixtures as the camera traces from below. Cut. Her black shoe makes the puddle of water ripple as she picks up her pace; the camera cuts back to the initial medium shot and she runs. Faster, the camera zooms in, the rain gets louder, the creaking sound of old wood as in an old house, or an antique heavy door opening slowly too – envelopes the camera as it blurs. In a feeble squeal, as if the metal hinge needed but a quick smear of grease, a lighter door opens. And the big, aging, balding face of Gustavo, saying “hola” and picking up Matilde’s small-child body. “Hola tío” [hello uncle] she says as he and his thin and smiling girlfriend Elena enter Matilde’s father’s house. Cut. 85 The dinning room whose green stained glass windows, grand chandelier and red chairs contrast with the living room where the camera stands among brown couches and gray chairs, a dim beige lamp and Matilde’s mother and grandmother rushing from the kitchen, carrying in their hands a plate where a fish covered in a red-brown sauce begins to be served. Finally, Elena asks for a small serving as she is told she’ll be taught how to eat right and her future brother-in-law, Ramón, complains about disliking fish. Whereas, the masculine Ramón can pick and choose his food, the female Elena is forced to eat and admonished that she will be trained in proper female behavior. Food, and the relationship to it notes ingestion as the first step in the process of consumption but the film also points us towards non-consumption and the end-product waste. While serving, Ramon’s wife, says its “vigilia” and that eating fish is tradition. Ramón complains. As the dinner picks up, Ramon begins choking on a fish-bone. Matilde recites The Lord’s Prayer. As Gustavo helps his brother with the Heimlich maneuver, and Ramon is saved, a tear slides down
Matilde’s face and she carries on praying.
In two to four minutes, both films inaugurate what appear to be the central tenements of their plots and the main characteristics of their characters. In CdR it seems to be a fetishism for the visuality of the female body of Bunda, which along with the setting in an eatery, implies consumption and desire. Meanwhile, in MH, the main characters are established, but not completely given away. Gustavo is an engineer and a joyous man whose comment about the food establishes a positive relationship with consumption. Elena is the perfect girlfriend who is somewhat cold, and sometimes warm.
But her relation with food is one of control of consumption. Matilde is a child who in 86 response to her father’s accident prays in a sense of Christian piety. The dinning room, as introductory setting, highlights consumption and familial relationship as central to the film. Rain, thunder and mishap are at the order of the day, while in CdR the locale appears as a bright sun whose heat, a setting reminiscent of Camus’ L’etranger, presents our character almost existentially. Both films have characters to which one could apply simplistic, straightforward psychoanalytical methodologies and understand well enough.
In referring both to the sickly relationship between Matilde and her nun-dress, or habit, and to the bad habits that Elena, and even Gustavo hide, Malos Habitos remembers the
Derridean idea of différance and the possibility of different readings that the world-play enables. In such case, good habits differ from the bad habits about which the characters must maintain silent. This simplistic contrast, however, points to a need to analyze the embodiements or spectacular processes, the “bad” habits that justify wasting (Debord,
Thesis 34). As enlightening as the psychoanalytical reading can be, by revolving around desire and consumption, the films speak to a spectacular wasting that is more in line with
Deleuze and Guattari’s Desiring Machines of schizoanalysis. Instead of deploying a psychoanalytical exploration of the scatological and their effects in the representation of female and male bodies in relation to the cultural meaning of waste, I read these characters’ pathologies in the larger cultural context. Matilde and Elena’s bulimia and anorexia nervosa, as well as Lourenço’s coprofilia appear to be ethnic disorders – social pathologies that arise and are prevalent because of a specific culture or cultural reading.
By interrogating the sources of such socio-pathologies, we find the schizophrenic post- modern Latin American culture at the axis. 87 In an attempt to understand a documented increase of cases of Anorexia and
Bulimia Nervosa, Gordon proposes that these are Ethnic Disorders and that western, culture is most prone to these type of psychological illnesses. Although the book was initially published in 1990, a second edition in 2000 has added and updated information as the problem has continued. The documented rise of these illnesses in the US since the late 1970s, and a sharp increase in the mid 1980’s point to the endurance and constant presence of these pathologies. In contemporary Latin American culture, the denial to speak about psychopathologies is represented in the presence of films like Malos
Hábitos, Búfalo de la Noche (based on a novel, 2007) in Mexico, or Abzurdah (2015) and
Diarios de Ana y Mia (documentary, 2012), in Argentina. In fact, in expanding upon the pathologization of erred personal image, highly successful texts like Yo soy Betty, la fea
(1999-2001) and Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso (2006-2010, film 2010), in their original
Colombian version, their Mexican (La Fea Más Bella, 2006-2007) and United States iterations (Ugly Betty, 2006; Sin Tetas no Hay Paraíso, 2009) demand an analysis that is conscious of a transnational Latin Americanism, globalization and culture. The Case of
Brazilian film is interesting. Contrary to the Spanish-speaking countries, more expensive productions like Confissões de Adolescente (based on a TV series, 2014), De Pernas Pro
Ar (2010) and more independent films that deal with gender and consumption like
Estômago (2007) or Bonitinha, mas Ordinária (1963, 1981, 2013) do not focus on women’s self-perception as much as in men’s creation of women’s belief of self. Even films that act as stories of female empowerment like Os Homens São de Marte… E É
Para Lá que Eu Vou (2014), Muita Calma Nessa Hora (2010) or Loucas Pra Casar 88 (2015) only provide feminine empowerment through consumption and reproduction of patriarchal modes of sexualized femininity. In other words, the woman must give up herself to be consumed. This logic is what the independent film Paraíso (Chenillo,
Mexico, 2013) counters. Gordon himself points to an article by H. Pumarino and V.
Vivanco “Anorexia Nervosa: medical and psychiatric characteristics of 50 patients” that deals with upper socioeconomic class teenagers in Santiago de Chile (Vivanco and
Pumarino). In the second edition of Eating Disorders, Gordon addresses the increased presence of both infirmities as a new century begins. He goes so far as to propose that the recent appearance of Bulimia and Anorexia Nervosa in western or Euro-American and non-western cultures (he considers Latin America non Euro-American which would contradict many notions of self-identification of Latin Americans) is due to the infiltration of Euro-American culture into more “traditional” or “folkloric” values. As examples in Latin America, he mentions Buenos Aires and Mexico City, but notes the centrality of cosmetic surgery in Latin American conceptions of self-image. This would allow us to include Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela as three countries known for the prevalence of cosmetic surgery in shaping self-image. Self image being central to processes of subject-other formation (R. Gordon 85).
In light of the internationalization of these disorders, Gordon “raises serious questions about the usefulness of the traditional concept of ‘culture-bound syndrome’ as… the cultural patterns and forces associated with consumer economies and the modernization of sex roles appear to have a considerable degree of homogeneity, despite variations in the specifics of local traditions” (R. Gordon 86). Gordon is right to question 89 the place of locality in all these sites, as they have very different histories. While he moves to a conversation to note how Anorexia and Bulimia are more prevalent in whiter, more affluent societies, and groups, he does not engage other markers of subalternity that could elucidate ethnic-disorders as intersectional. By centering on the similarities of those affect, what stands out is the centrality of economic factors, race and gender as the clearest marker of eating disorder onset. In sum, these factors talk about the same qualifiers that make up a critical intersectional view of patriarchal modernity. There is something to be said of the subalternity that race implies, especially when looking at white, higher-class women as the ones internalizing their abjection and turning it upon themselves. Although I have promised to explore the racial qualities of spectacular wasting in the following chapter, since these films and Gordon’s theory talk about white- private space, the race-politics of the private could be further explored in the future.
They, however, would deviate this conversation from the conversation about dejection and wasting. But before moving on, it is important to highlight that because these texts talk about the interior space of the house, space is distributed different from the usual geographical fashion of center-periphery one might conceive when thinking about precariousness. Instead, this points us to sites of wasting within the center and not the periphery of everyday life – the restroom17.
Before we continue unto the restroom as a wasteland, I want to expand on
Gordon’s socio-psychoanalytical perspective of the ethnic disorder. The increase in the
17 This could perhaps be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari call an “anti-productive” space, which appears at the center of the creation of surplus value. It should be of no surprise, then, that the non-productivity of those entering the private spaces of capitalist power points to the production of waste. 90 number of instances of both eating disorders that Gordon documents and understands as an ethno-cultural trend, speaks to an expansion and change in the form of modernity.
Gordon marks the 1970s and 80s as the first rise in the appearance of these disorders (R.
Gordon 40) and the presence of bulimic binge-eating and regurgitating only became a recognized diagnosis until the 1990s (51), which incidentally is the same year when these pathologies begin to be recorded in both Mexico and Argentina (R. Gordon 86).
Simultaneously the 1980s is the period when neoliberalism cements itself within
American political discourse with Reagan’s presidency in 1984. In parallel, as I explored earlier, in the late 1980s (with exception of Chile) is when most Latin American countries begin experimenting with the policies of neoliberalism, in Mexico, crystalizing in 1994 with NAFTA. Along with neoliberalism, globalization becomes more ubiquitous with the arrival of the internet, which in turn catalyzes post-industrialization in large economies but pushed Latin America into industrialism as neoliberalism was institutionalized. The aesthetic embodiment of this change was already present in what Frederic Jameson termed the cultural logic of late-capitalism or postmodernism. One of postmodernity’s main qualities, pastiche, helps us understand the need for a late-capitalist, neoliberal, global, post-industrial and postmodern psychic. This new psychic should be based around notions of pastiche, of pieces that make interconnected bodies, which in turn are interconnected into larger bodies of culture. This is precisely the definition of a desiring- machine that is essential in the schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari propose in their
1972 text Anti-Oedipus. We will return to further explore this notion when speaking of
91 Lourenço’s coprophilia and the sacrificial-violent consuming nature of patriarchy in relation to femininity towards the end of the chapter.
FROM PRIVATE TO PRIVATIZED WASTELANDS Although the state has traditionally regulated how our bodily waste is treated through the creation of plumbing, sanitation and drainage systems, the restroom in itself has remained “private”– a space where the state and even the market are thought to have little to no control. The creation of bodily waste is something the state cannot regulate; yet power is discursively present by influencing how we relate to it. In studying of the insertion of the logic of capital in intimate relationships in her text Cold Intimacies, Eva
Illouz explores how the logic of exchange, following the rules of market, has infiltrated intimate relationships. As such, private space becomes embedded with capitalist logic
(Illouz 24–29). This seeming contradiction of a space where the logic of capital is present without the state drives much of my inquiry into the restroom as the traditional site of bodily waste as a wasteland. If the state is not present but the market is there, these
“intimate spaces” follow the principles of neoliberal politics by allowing market forces to regiment a space while diminishing the modes of traditional control or privatization. The restroom as the site of privacy remains although its safety might be gone. Privacy gives way to privatization. Within it we are able to find characters at their most vulnerable, least protected. In both films characters that are feminine become abject and then die and this process of abjection is most clear when they are within the restroom. When inside these privatized-private spaces intimate relationships follow the logic of capital, abject
92 femininity will be recurrently sacrificed to empower patriarchy. Meanwhile the masculine characters that create waste are empowered by such an action and live.
With the arrival of neoliberal economic policies and the acceptance of the free market, moral and state ideology has ceded control over the private space to the ideology of the market. Although this was initially achieved by inserting the logic of production within psychology into the private, as Eva Illouz illustrates in Cold Intimaces. However, waste-spaces where the logic of productive or consuming is denied are excluded from a psychological logic of self-care and self-definition and a more harmful logic of spectacular wasting takes its place. To refer to this change, I refer to private spaces becoming privatized. That is, moral and state actors no longer wholly determine the forms of power within the private sphere. Instead, by allowing the market logic of exchange and disposability to take hold within the private space, they are effectively privatized, that is, moral obligations are now substituted by obligations of exchange.
Along with these obligations of exchange comes value, and bodies that are not valuable or have nothing to exchange become vulnerable. As such, a private space refers to an inclusive ownership or a “space of someone.” But in a privatized space the opposite is acknowledged: not an inclusive ownership of a space but rather a negation of a relationship, exclusion of the state and of any moral obligation but those of value.
Privatized spaces are spaces where the state has no control. This major discursive change reverberates in how the space of the restroom is understood, on whom the hygienic responsibility falls, and how the relative distinctions between subject and object, and Self and Other are construed within it. Whereas power has always been present in the 93 relationships that become visible in the restroom (gender, sexuality, abjectivity, etc) after privatization these have also become sites where market logic becomes embodied. The violence of privatization, then, enters and is enacted through both physical and psychological means. This openness to the market’s dynamics, however, also represents a possibility for empowerment of state-dejected beings to reconfigure their communal identity. This transition from private to privatized has changed the way power is enacted and how it appears in the restroom. This, however, is of no surprise as it follows the mayor trends of neoliberal politics that enact violence through disembodied forms of power that have no real referent or subject to be accused for such violence.18
RESTROOMS IN LATIN AMERICAN FILMS, MODERNITY AND OTHERNESS Many contemporary Latin American films deal with both restrooms and the toilet while some others also explore the public sites where discard is collected. According to psychological film theorists, through the process of spectating, watching films is about exploring the personal and issues of the self. As such, it closes in on spaces like the home and the restroom, still considered private. But more socially focused films have also delved into waste spaces. Luis Buñuel’s Mexican masterpiece Los Olvidados (1950) is a clear example of this as it focuses on children living in squalid conditions. Sold as
Mexican realism and surrealism, but probably closer to the aesthetics of Spanish naturalism19, Buñuel’s representation of the “forgotten” Mexico focused on the inability
18 See Hart and Negri’s Empire for an important study of how disembodied power is central to the neoliberal form of power. 19 Naturalism is a sub-genre of realism that found its best expression in Spanish writers from turn-of-the- century. Its main characteristics were obscenity and dirtiness 94 of modernity to aid children living in misery. These public waste spaces will be the focus of the later chapters. And in fact, it is important to recognize the differences and similarities between Waste (an all encompassing term for all type of detritus) and more specific terms like feces (bodily waste of consumption), vomit (bodily waste that was not processed), Garbage or Trash (discarded objects considered no-longer useful). And as such, we can speak of different types of waste and different types of wastelands: landfills, sewers, ghettos, deserts, ravaged extraction-sites, dead rivers, and restrooms.
As I have explained, the neoliberal processes that retract and minimize the state’s presence from public places, enables the creation and expansion of sites where a logic production-consumption-disposal can function without inhibition and this has historically overproduced waste. I begin with the private space of the restroom, within the private space of the house as it allows us to expand from the treatment of bodily waste to the treatment of bodies-as-waste. But these same dynamics appear in landfills, and even in the cultural aesthetic processes of hybridity (Stam). As I mentioned before, these spaces have undergone changes since these late infiltrations of capitalism can be identified even in the design and process of making “a privada”, or a toilet, its design and utilities
(George (2008); Benidickson (2007); Viney (2015)). Even public restrooms lack in giving a sense of privacy, by design (Gershenson and Penner; Bichard and Knight). And somehow, this sort of middle space where the private self is exposed, maybe even vulnerable intersects with the public space, functions as a type of sanctuary. DeCertau reminds us, that when travelling:
95 Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. They are a lovers' phantasm, a way out for the ill, an escapade for children ("Wee-wee!")---a little space of irrationality, like love affairs and sewers in the Utopias of earlier times. (Certeau 111)
In fact, to think of the restroom as a site for utopian self-expression is not at all far- fetched. This space has been well explored in Cuba by Abel Sierra Madero’s studies of homosexual relationships in Havana (González et al.). In fact, Sierra Madero points toward Pedro Juan Gutierrez as a writer whose work goes beyond simplistic or “bad taste” as a literature where scatological images call attention to political discourses and locations where these are debated and denied. He links the abject space of the public restroom as a site of homosexual socialization through both graffiti and text interact and frame Cuban gay sexuality. Furthermore, through exploring the discourses around and the actions of the subjects involved in the restrooms. Mainly, he focuses on the attribution of feminine and masculine qualities in respect of passivity and activity in a gay sexual act, which reifies a hierarchy of power (masculine overpowering feminine). Sierra
Madero, then, cites Guillermo Nuñez Noriega’s anthropological work where he notes in these situations, the passive being in the act is metonymically feminized as nothing but a hole waiting to be penetrated (González et al. 41). This comment is interesting as in a previous text, he refers to the use of hygienic and medical/psychological discourses when institutions deal with transsexual and homosexual bodies and concludes by saying that
“Naturalizar, más bien normalizar, la homosexualidad, implica necesariamente aceptar su condición abyecta e inferior, lo que limitarÌa considerablemente su poder subversivo”
[Naturalizing, or rather normativizing, homosexuality, implies to necessarily accept its
96 condition as abject and inferior, which would considerably limit its power as subversive].
(Madero 98). This logic is also at work beyond the limits of the Cuban nation as Michael
Bronski explores the connection between the American temperance movement’s hygienic, reproductive and racial discourses through the 1800s and until the appearance of the word “homosexual” in an 1892 article by Dr. James Kiernan (Bronski 90). This
“sanitary utopia”, Bronski proposes, intersected racist and hetero-centric discourses that pathologized homosexuality. Here, it is important to understand the place of femininity in the discursive creation of homosexual bodies. In thinking this, Bronski proposes that psychological discourses of sexuality in fact created the stereotypes of the effeminate gay-man and the butch-female as the embodiments of a male or female desire in a body marked by the “other gender” and as suck the idea of the homosexual was created
(Bronski 96).
THE RESTROOM AS A FEMINIZED ABJECT SPACE As both Mexico and Brazil follow their respective calls to modernize, not only do they design and redesign the national discourses and their spatial arrangements but their film industries and films also undergo similar transformations in reaction and relation to their publics and filming sites. As Laura Podalsky points out in early Argentine cinema, the cityscape is essential as setting and background to films (Podalsky, Specular City 21).
That is not to say that all films are based around the city. As film expands to comprise the larger nation, space within film comes to reflect and affect notions of space, or as
Lefevre and Soja would have it, the social construction of space. Cinema and the city are,
97 as social spaces, necessarily expressive of the history of modernity by being influenced and influencing the social interactions that occur within them. They are media imbricated with the history of economic flows and reflective of the adaptations and subtleties of modernity in Latin America. As I explained earlier, modernity is vital to the construction of the Latin American nation.
Since industrial modernity produced both the urban city-space and film, filmic space is specially suited to represent how neoliberalism exacerbates or pushes waste creation. Film, then, points to local, national, and trans- or international geographies that uncover cultural influences and relations and these expand beyond the public space.
Whether in the public or the intimate, the presence of waste in filmic space speaks to the processes and discursive creation of those abject by the order of modernity. Spatial composition whether geographic or filmic, are part of the spectacles of wasting that map the wastelands, by highlighting processes of spatial exclusion and inclusion present in filmic representations of waste and body as abject. Both CdR and MH chart the sometimes-blurry boundaries of these spaces of detritus. It becomes apparent that the restroom is the place where the waste of the private and intimate production and consumption is recollected. Toilet technologies and the presence of modernity in this private space expose how the abjectivity of waste is feminized. Abjectivity then enforces upon the abject-feminine a violence so innate to the process of subjectification that it goes beyond, outside the realm of the state’s monopoly on violence.
By pointing to the abjectivity that is central to the restroom as a waste-site, we approach the lived violence that makes up the discourses of wasted-others. The main 98 form in which violence appears in this space is through the devaluation of subaltern life.
This appears historically in Queer and Trans histories that have particular histories of empowerment within the space of the restroom, while being persecuted in other social spaces. First, in MH we find female characters that in following the standards of femininity outlined by contemporary patriarchal modernity put their lives in risk to the point of death. Meanwhile, Gustavo, the male character empowers himself within the same spaces consuming and avoiding waste. In CdR, however, Lourenço begins in a masculine powerful position but resorts to discard in attempting to regain it. He is, then, feminized and then eventually looses his life, abject. As Luce Irigaray notes, femininity is the opposite of masculinity within symbolic order (the language of patriarchy). Woman
"functions" as a mirror for man. Man looking at the woman in her condition of inferiority sees himself in a condition of superiority (The Speculum of the Other Woman). If femininity stands as the opposite of patriarchy, traditionally feminine signs (the private, the abject and the affective) are coded as sacrificial at the service of patriarchy. An intersectional otherness is necessary in understanding this dynamic, if the wasteland is to account for the everyday spaces where habits of control of feminine-coded waste are created. This is seen more violently in the devaluing of the feminine and the enforcing of violence on her body and psyche. As I pointed out just above, this is achieved by the insertion of capitalist discourses of exchange mobilized through the market, which in a globalized world has taken over extraction sites and intimate spaces alike. In the wastelands, bodies marked as feminine face different everyday forms of violence that signal them as wasted or disposable beings (bulimia, anorexia or other self-destructive 99 habits). It is through understanding how abjectivity rears these notions of self-worth where the systems of the restroom are stretched to their limits as they attempt to control waste. Where as in Malos Hábitos vomit destroys the plumbing that reflects the unending rain in the background, in O Cheiro do Râlo, it is fecal matter and its smell which expose the limits of the drainage or râlo of Lourenço’s toilet to control the waste he produces as a form of his constant enforcement of power and disposability on those around him. Both films witness instances when the controlling structure of modernity over bodily discard stops working. It is when the structures of control break and their imaginary nature is exposed that the relationships between the characters and the process of consumption and physical discard is exposed. This process, however, is not instantaneous and it is the small acts that expose how ejection as the ideology of waste is central in highlighting the separation between modern and disposable or wasted bodies.
EMBODIED SPECTACULAR WASTE, THE FEMINIZED AS WASTED In these lands of waste, or wastelands, the separation of filth from purity takes precedence but also embodies patriarchal gendered, racialized, able-ist, sexualized and classed discourses of superiority. In both CdR and MH, this can be seen in the relationship between male and female characters and their respective relationships with wasting – the creation, treatment and separation from bodily discard, trash, antiques or newly acquired objects. Through analyzing the films we find that femininity is a category that is assigned as much to females as to non-patriarchal masculine subjects, objects and even to professions or nationalities. Femininity is, then, a marker of vulnerability in the
100 perspective of the patriarchal subject. It is through the wasting of the feminine that such power is maintained. But, for characters unable to shake the markers of disposability, femininity is the embodiment of the abject. It is the differential between the one with power and the one upon whom power is enforced and extracted through wasting. In film, these acts of waste appear in spectacular ways – both as an object to spectate and as a spectacle (a show of the extreme). Spectacular Wasting, then is the logic being the instances when the feminized undergo the change from disposable to already wasted. In this sense, wasting can mean social death. In which case feminized subjects can come out of those situations with their lives if willing to embody patriarchy. This is the main difference that I will highlight between CdR and MH. Whereas in Lourenço, CdR finds a character who struggles to maintain power through wasting, in MH the female characters
(Elena, Matilde, Linda, and La Gordibuena) have more varied if at time futile forms of consumption, which affect their inability to waste.
The film O Cheiro do Râlo focuses on the life of Lourenço, a wealthy man who is haunted by the smell of feces in the plugged-drain of the restroom within the main office of his pawnshop business. His interactions with people from all backgrounds synchronized with his own growing abjectivity point towards the empowerment that spectacular wasting provides through subjectification but also to the dangers of femininity from such a position. Similarly, Gustavo, the male character in Malos Hábitos, an architect and modern man who consumes and designs, shows how seemingly safe environments are harmful to people otherwise privileged. In both films, female characters serve as others who are controlled by powers beyond their control. In O Cheiro do Râlo 101 (CdR), Lourenço’s fiancé (Noiva), the waitress (Garconette), and a character called addicted (Viciada) and in Malos Hábitos (MH), Matilde, Gustavo’s niece and a nun,
Elena; a homemaker and Gustavo’s wife, and Linda, Gustavo’s daughter are females who transverse the limits from disposable to discarded. The treatment of feminine bodies in these films calls attention to violent acts that are all too familiar to the everyday lives of subaltern-others.
These films are aesthetic/filmic representations of the processes of neoliberal wasting of the feminine. Spectacular wasting as the act of abjectifying the female appears as the making vulnerable and discarding of the feminine. Abjection of the female exists because the feminine is the desired and undesired Other from which masculinity distances its Self. The feminine, then, is coded as abject and this action exists because of modern design. Design is the process of creating the modern– the genesis of product and byproduct. The act of Design is a schizophrenic act (it separates, splits, places the good inside and the bad outside). In the larger sense, modern national and transnational identities/cultures are also the product of design, including Brazilian and Mexican national identity. Schizophrenia can explain, better than psychology, the baroque or hybrid quality that has been highlighted of Latin American cultures. These cultures take in other cultures and discard the subaltern as they produce their national cultures.
Discarding the feminine (as subaltern to masculinity), then, is central to this logic of wasting and the spectacular wasting the films represent. This action of wasting, in the following films appears in private spaces. Since neoliberalism, there is a large trend of spatial privatization. This removal of state violence from public spaces can be understood 102 as a refusal to participate in enacting violence in private spaces. This we term, the privatization of (or the neoliberal operation upon) the private. Within these privatized spaces of wasting, an operation unique to the spectacular wasting of neoliberal capitalism can be seen in the appearance of everyday spectacular wasting. Spectacular wasting is spectacle [of wasting] for spectacle [of wasting]'s sake. Spectacle, then, is the most intense form of capitalistic alienation, which in the Mexican and Brazilian case, can take the form of Bulimia, Anorexia, depression and even suicide and thus be understood as self-sacrificial femininity for the sake of patriarchal power.
MASCULINITY, CONSUMPTION, DISCARDING Contrary to the female characters of the films who seem doomed to becoming wasted, the male characters Gustavo (in MH) and Lourenço (in CdR) are afforded a choice. They can (a) abjectify the feminine, reproduce the patriarchal violence and spectacularly waste feminized bodies to benefit from the (often self-inflicted) sacrifice of the feminine and continue consuming or (b) they can engage in self-critical thought that feminizes them and reproduces in them the same psychological and material violence female characters face. In CdR, both choices appear, first through Lourenço’s consumption, which is then interrupted as his relationship with his feces and their smell give way to the second, violent one. Although separating from the fecal-abject enables him to create a subject-object relationship in the privatized space that is his office. When
Lourenço intervenes in this relationship and covers the râlo or drain with cement
(immediately after a bodiless eye is sold to him) he completely ignores this relationship
103 and severs the distinction. After that instant, without the Other, Lourenço embodies his own abjectivity. The Lourenço that initially curses and fights all to protect his money, begins loosing his power over people. By interrupting the process of throwing away he distances from bodily waste, the fecal, the abject discard but it is the acknowledged existence of these and the constant battle against them that reifies the self and the subject’s power. In the case of Gustavo, he is able to always keep discardability at a distance. It makes sense, then, that even when his wife’s body achieves it abject-most representation, Gustavo is physically and affectively distant. In other words, these two characters discard feminine bodies as a mode of reifying power, and when this stops, they themselves become disposable. This means that the entire capitalist relationship between subject and object (from consumption to discard) is positioned to empower the subject willing to enact violence.
This dynamic is also present in the processes of cultural subjectification that
Garcia Canclini explores in Ciudadanos y Consumidores (1995) through the hybridity of
Latin American cultures. As Robert Stam has noted, Latin American cultural hybridity is also based upon that logic of consumption and disposal and that the re-codifying of waste as raw material is the basis of Latin American cultural production (Stam). In such a case, differing between product and by-product in designing a national culture that shows itself as modern implies that the spaces of waste are sites of extreme violence where subalternized wasted bodies that are not allowed within the state are vulnerable to wasting-violence. It follows then, that the cultural construction of the masculine and patriarchal national body under the privatized neoliberal logic excuses the state from the 104 violence by privatizing the private. That it, the patriarchal national subject depends on the discarding of vulnerable feminine wasted bodies in privatized sites where the mechanisms of violence cannot be directly correlated with the state but are given to the disembodied logic of the market. If the state-led cultural hybridity from which the concepts of the racial-democracy (Brazil) and Raza Cósmica (Mexico) developed can be mobilized to invisibilize the Black and Indigenous populations of each country, the free market discourse of multiculturalism appears to remove the state from the equation because it effectively works for the same patriarchal supremacist modern purpose but under the disguise of not being a political body.
In Malos Hábitos Gustavo is the only one who can productively engage with modernity as his selfhood remains stable through the film. In fact, Gustavo is the embodiment of the modern Mexican male: he is an architect, a designer of spaces. When
La Gordibuena vomits after having shared a plate of shrimp in bed with him, it is her vomiting in the toilet that gives Gustavo the reason for the failing of the system of control. The wasting of the feminine keeps him empowered. In fact, historically, as
Bordieu notes, in Masculine Domination, the feminine and masculine are defined in opposites one of which is the difference between the outside (public)/ inside (private) space (Bordieu 7). As with the arrival of neoliberalism the state privatizes, the private becomes a site for the enactment of this very logic of capitalism. As Eva Illouz notices, in the private, there already was a capitalist discourse present since the introduction of psychological and liberal feminism, as modern relationships became haunted by the logic of “equivalent exchange” that is central to capitalism (Illouz 29-30). Yet, with the neo- 105 liberalization, or the freeing of the liberalism already present, the previously equivalent exchange is now guided under the violent neoliberal abuse. Since exchange is central in understanding the act of wasting, the inequivalent and violent relationship in the private, speaks of the privatization of the private. Private spaces of wasting become sites for the sacrifice of the feminine in order to reconstruct the masculine.
Kristeva notes that the abject must be sacrificed to construct the self. According to her, sacrifice “solemnizes the vertical dimension of the sign: the one that leads from the thing that is left behind, or killed, to the meaning of the word and transcendence”
(Kristeva 73). In the neoliberal construction of space, the state leaves this act to be performed not by Althusserian ideological state apparatuses but by private entities.
Following this, the subject becomes the private actor responsible for himself and his own formation of self. That is, in spaces-outside-the-state or where the state decides not to intercede, the subject himself must perform the sacrifice of the abject. In this line, both
CdR and MH point out that female sacrifice is exacted for the subjectification of the male but by the being-to-be-sacrificed him/herself. In the case of Elena, her self-sacrifice through the refusal to consume is logicized by anorexia, but the true charge of her sacrifice of self is to re-instate her husband’s masculinity and Gustavo is aware of his part in Elena’s death. In his wife’s wake, Linda (thinking she had killed her mother) asks
Gustavo if God forgives all sins. After a few seconds, while the camera’s close shot focuses on Gustavo’s face as to highlight a certain admittance of guilt, Gustavo utters a trembling “No sé” [I don’t know]. Elena’s problem and Gustavo’s ignorance or unwillingness to admit and help her is in line with his desire to enact his subjectivity 106 thought the dictates of modernity. By focusing on Gustavo’s expression, the camera exposes him. This cycle, however, begins since the instant he can no longer consume(ate) his wife, and she becomes abject to him in the sequence where he refuses to engage her sexually. It is this discarding of an emotional and sexual consumption of his wife that could be said allows him to establish a sexual relationship with a young Peruvian exchange student. Because his wife does not satisfy him sexually, because she cannot be consumed, she must be discarded and he can consume someone else.
In fact, the other male characters in the film establish the same type of relationship with the female body. For example, worry invades the catholic priest as he hears from Gustavo that the school’s plumbing is being the leftovers of bulimic students.
“Diez años de niñas vomitando en los baños de la cafeteria. Los ácidos gástricos desbarataron las tuberías” [Ten years of girls vomiting in the cafeteria’s restroom. The stomach acids destroyed the plumbing] says Gustavo with a straight face. “Que barbaridad! No lo puedo creer, pero qué vamos a hacer?” [How ludicrous! I cannot believe it, but what are we going to do?] asks the priest. “Pues habrá que cambiar la red”
[well, the plumbing network will have to be changed] Gustavo answers. By being unclear about whether focusing on the bulimic students or the school’s plumbing, the priest’s concern could be read as either a hope that the masculine could accept the value of the feminine, as would be expected of an ideological state apparatus. But the possibility for caring about the feminine is expelled as Gustavo answers that the answer is to change the plumbing network diverting attention from the female body to the working of the modern structure of the school. The conversation, thus, quickly returns to the modern concerns as 107 price “y cuánto nos va a costar eso?”[and how much will that cost us?], work “tengo que hacer un presupuesto”[I have to make a budget], and efficiency “en cuánto tiempo nos lo puede tener?”[in how long can you have it for us?] take the conversation away from the initial concern for the students’ health. A last exclamatory admittance of a certain guilt as the priest exclaims a few more phrases: “Pobres creaturas. ¡Qué bárbaro! Pero
¿cuántas niñas tienen que vomitar para que pase esto?” [Poor creatures. How ludicrous!
But how many girls have to vomit for this to happen?]. Still, the concern avoids accepting and engaging with the violence against the feminine by never truly answering this question. The priest’s open inquiry solicits the audience to assume many teenagers are engaged in bulimia. In fact, the illness is assumed a plague. We can see even Linda’s male friend (a child too) exhorts her to eat and spit before eating. This, the kid explains, is how he has managed to loose weight under his mother’s dietary imposition and how
Linda could too. This constant attack against the female body’s health includes this unwillingness to stop the violence. The explosion of the plumbing caused by the corrosion of the pipelines through stomach acids shows that this troubled relationship between subject and wasted/abject reveals modernity’s incapacity to control the human body’s many answers and responses to the complete control over it.
Such bodily violence is subtler than it may seem. As Eva Illouz explores in Cold
Intimacies, through the entrance and acceptance of the discourses of exchange along with discursive female sexual freedom, the interior space is activated under the capitalist logic of exchange. If, as Bauman reminds us, the underbelly of all production and consumption is waste, the private spaces of wasting are sites to see how that logic of capital claims 108 lives. Most importantly, by taking away the need for enacting violence from government or government enactors of violence, neoliberalism incites the receivers of violence to enact the violence on themselves. This neoliberal female self-sacrifice, then, is a direct response to the abjection of the feminine in the most precarious of cases, as in Elena’s.
Elena fights her anorexia while Gustavo plans escapades, has sex and basks in eating delicacies with La Gordibuena, the Peruvian exchange student, a nameless character yet whose title would roughly be translated as “chubby-and-hot.” O Cheiro do Râlo, in fact, follows the same logic, although more bluntly and with an unexpected twist. In fact, while some female characters in MH have names and are central characters to the plot, in
CdR most characters (male and female) have only titles for names. As he asks Garçonette
[Waitress] for her name, Lourenço exposes how subjectivity interweaves with
Althousserian interpellation. “Eu jamas sería capaz de pronunciar aquele nome" [I would never be able to pronounce that name]– he exclaims twice in a voice-over. The unnamable, the unspeakable, the refusal to accept her as subject ousts desire and repulsion of the abject as central in understanding how Lourenço relates to others. Later, he will transform from a subject who objectifies others, to abject, disposable. Meanwhile, he constantly objectifies other females as temporary objects of his desire: Viciada, an abjected drug-addicted female; Mulher Casada, the married woman so central to understanding the film; Secretaria, Lourenço’s initial secretary. This speaks to how
Lourenço manipulates power-relations through objectification as a way of relating to the world. Gustavo engages La Gordibuena within the same process.
109 Based on a the homonymous novel, O Cheiro do Râlo tells the story of Lourenço a soon to be married pawn shop owner whose life is ruined by a clogged office bathroom drain and his obsession with a cafeteria server’s derriere. “Eu podería passar uma semana interia só olhando para essa bunda” [I could spend an entire week just looking at that ass], he explains. After lunch at the cafeteria, he returns, everyday, to his office to buy objects. As people enter his office to sell to him, Lourenço engages with them usually to show his power over them. From the start relationships within this private space are guided by the logic of exchange. In fact, for most of the film Lourenço will only be seen in four spaces: the cafeteria, his office, his home, and as he walks from his office to the cafeteria. Most places are of his sole domain. Because Lourenço is framed in wide shots in sequences that happen outside to highlight the sense of loneliness and alienation, but the private spaces, his home and his office, Lourenço consistently exerts power and control over others. This distancing and apathy towards other people is reinforced by the pale color of the walls; the almost dreamy feel created in post-production, and the post- industrial mise-en-scène and urban façade of the places where he walks. A wall with washed-color palm trees recalls the stereotypical colorful Brazilian beaches while mocking and acknowledging that his is not such a film. In the private space, however
Lourenço is also alienated. When he is accompanied by his fiancé, he ends their engagement and in a later sequence she berates him. When he is alone at home, he watches an old exercise video and fantasizes about the main character. In this way O
Cheiro do Râlo shows that there is a different logic enacted within private and public spaces. Furthermore, the film follows Lourenço’s change from a subject that enforces the 110 violence of the state (by buying, selling and discarding) to one that becomes vulnerable and is finally discarded when it can no longer create waste.
O Cheiro do Râlo owes much to Bataille’s scatological work as it utilizes similar symbolism: a disembodied eye, a dismembered father, socially “lewd” sexuality, public sexual acts, bodily discard and psychologically troubled characters.20 These acts, however, need to be read under the neoliberal reality within which the character is immersed, which is very different from Bataille’s hygenicist and anti-moralistic discourse. By engaging the film this way, we can approach Lourenço’s change not as a psycho-moral degradation but as a result and enactment of capitalist construction of the private space.
ONE KEY DIFFERENCE OR WHAT IS LOST IN ADAPTATION The central point is to understand Lourenço’s transformation from empowered to vulnerable. At first the presence of waste allows him to establish dominance and power.
However, his relationship with the logic of production within privatized spaces (a space where free-market logic of neoliberalism is unrestricted) changes and he ends being discarded. To answer this, it is important to see what was lost from original novel as it was adapted to a screenplay: The relationship between Loureço and Mulher Casada. The
20 The presence of the eye and Lourenço's explanation that the drain is a hole, a “buraco” that connects his restroom to hell is reminiscent of Bataille’s stories where spaces such as the church are repeatedly de- sacralized. To understand Lourenço one must see him as fatherless and psychologically distraught individual. Lourenço takes the pineal and disembodied eye as a mandate to construct a phallocentric and modern patriarchal entity as he takes to constructing the father. As this act commences, Lourenço becomes both more sexuality lewd as if decaying in the same way as Bataille’s characters. In this sense, Lourenço comes to symbolize, become part of and construct not only the patriarchal entity but also a desiring machine in that in the Deleuzian sense engages in establishing consuming violent relationships to the different characters. 111 general absence of the relationship in the film obviates the centrality of affect in feminizing and exercising violence on the protagonist. Because the film focuses so much on the spectacle of waste and of wasting and the violence that is constantly present in these private spaces, it obviates the reason behind this violence. However the text is keen in focusing on this part of the story. In the film, Lourenço seems a victim to a higher moral power that chastises him for taking advantage of others. But in the novel, Lourenço brings this upon himself by giving up his privileged position and gives himself to the ecstasy of his emotions. In film, this is only quickly brushed-over as Lourenço gives all his money away to the married woman when she enters his office. At that point, he has evidently lost the upper hand in the process of exchange. It is a breaking point. Although he begins to loose power from the instant the eye appears in the film, it is with the married woman that he looses all and is thereafter unable to force his economic power upon those who enter the privatized space of this office. Our main character realizes that he is no longer able to enact consumption and discarding. Although he is able to get some more money in later sequences, he is unable to discard this is simulated in the space of the pawnshop. His store, never actually sells anything. Lourenço is never actually able to choose between product and byproduct. He cannot design. The protagonist cannot be a modern subject. As Lourenço realizes that this inability to produce vulnerabilizes him, he returns to his waste. To comfort himself, he smells the drain, reminding him of his ability to create discard. Unfortunately by doing this, he also marks himself as abject. When his secretary finds him smelling the drain, she looks at him with disgust and his fate is
112 sealed. His relationship with his bodily discard marks him, like the feminine bodies in
Malos Hábitos, a vulnerable, disposable and awaiting to be discarded.
PRIVATIZED SITES OF WASTING, THE RESTROOM, THE CONVENT AND THE HOME Matilde enters the restroom only twice during the film– first, to take a highly symbolic shower as she enters the convent and before she begins wearing her habits. The restroom, after all, is a site for separating the self. But within the Christian logic, self- abjection also becomes the way to achieve holiness, that is separation– modern design.
Let us not forget that the relationship between bodily secretions and excrement management is highly intersected through these discourses which, in sum, make up patriarchal power relations with the other through abjection (Moore 108–09). Like
Matilde’s first sequence, Elena is also filmed in the shower. But contrary to the cinematography of Matilde’s sequence where her body is hidden in the darkness of the convent with a camera looking over from above, Elena’s shower sequence exposes her body. As if needing to show her bones, her fat-less self, the decayed, abjected state of
Elena’s body, the camera follows her after a workout. The soapy hands and hair with a slow pan to her back where her almost scaly backbone is clearly visible through her skin.
Her hands are then washed with the shower water but they are black, covered in her hair.
She plays with the abjected hair and looks down at the drain. It too is covered with her falling hair. Her skin is central to the sequence. Her body’s frailty is emphasized by the pale bright white neon light of the restroom and the white and blue color tones of the walls. In a play with the hand-held camera, while focusing on Elena’s shoulder, as she
113 raises her hand, the camera turns just enough to show her bony shoulder. The camera cuts and as the rain falls outside, Elena stares into the falling drops. The blurred, distorted image of Elena is hard to see. Hair, too, has that quality of abject of bodily fluids– when they are within the boundaries of the body, they are natural; when they are outside the body, disconnected, they are abject. Both shower sequences serve to show the characters’ self-alienation and the way the restroom is a central space where abjection of the body happens.
The second time we see Matilde in the toilet is after she eats trash and rushes to the toilet to vomit. To read this and say that eating waste is self-abjectifying and this almost obviously makes her vomit would ignore the ubiquitousness of vomit in abjectivity. In fact, vomiting connects Matilde to the unknown number of catholic school students only one of which we see exiting the restroom as the “Gordibuena” character enters the dinning-hall restroom. In fact, it is with vomit that Kristeva begins her analysis of the abject. Vomit, marks how “I abject myself within the same motion through which
"I" claim to establish myself” (Kristeva 3). For Kristeva, vomiting is the first natural defense from recognizing the self as abject. The rejection, the spastic violent thrusts of vomiting recognized as repugnance but better explained as a need for separation in order to prevent the self’s abjection are different from the presence of dung. Vomit is at once the product that speaks of an instance of abjection and also a fluid marked as abject.
Elena also engages with the restroom in different ways but never in discarding.
On camera she only ever consumes an apple slice and a small bite of a cake – which disgustingly swallows and later throws away in the restroom. Meanwhile, after seeing a 114 second doctor with regards to her daughter’s weight, the doctor’s voice continues playing as she showers and sits on one corner of the shower as the water flows. A wide-angle shot from outside the shower highlighting her vulnerability, we see her form the other side of the shower’s vapor-covered glass doors in a slow pan that leaves her squarely resting on the corners of the screen. The next time we see her, will be through the open casket of a coffin where dressed in a white suit her frail body is lost among the white fabric of the funerary box. Whereas Matilde goes to the restroom almost in necessity, Elena’s instances in the restroom are about looking at in the mirror, stretching her skin to see she has no fat, weighing herself, unhappy. She prevents herself from eating anything. She survives exercising, smoking and drinking water. “Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” Kristeva reminds us and both Matilde and Elena take part in food-loathing, be it vomiting or preventing themselves from consuming it and the restroom makes this clear (Kristeva 3).
Although the discourses that frame the denial of consumption in each character might seem different, they both construct new logics, what Deleuze and Guattari would call schizologies, of the self. And this is not a denial to partaking in the modern, neoliberal capitalist order. In fact, as I’ve explained, it is the fulfillment of patriarchal violence, as it desires to dispose of the feminine in sacrifice to save the masculine.
Kristeva, herself notes that the presence of such a logic of self-abjection (expressed as sacrifice in Matilde and standards of beauty in Elena) points to the birth of a neoliberal cultural logic: “the subject of abjection is eminently productive of culture. Its symptom is the rejection and reconstruction of languages” (Kristeva 64). Elena exemplifies this best 115 through her schizoid self-perception, a break from the language of capitalist consumption to a version of reality where non-consumption while producing and reproducing (in her daughter) societal standards of beauty and ending in her death. Meanwhile, Matilde’s schizophrenia is clear to the view as finally we are shown that Teresa is just a pigment of
Matilde’s imagination, something of which she is not yet cognizant herlsef. Teresa is the schizophrenic apparition who judges her right and wrong, almost as an embodiment of her critique of abjection. The feminine characters’ self-abjection through the denial of consumption contrasts with the male character’s ability to consume and to understand the market’s logic of production and consumption, in all forms: from food to sexual desire.
Before turning to analyze the consumption and wasting that male characters enact in both movies, let us stay a second longer in Elena’s restroom. There is a beautiful sequence where Elena, Linda and Gustavo alternate restroom use, almost like a montage
(since Linda has her own restroom). This provides a graceful comparison between how each character subjectifies in the restroom through the action of cleansing, in this case brushing their teeth. While Linda first eats some chocolate– using the restroom to eat, hiding away from her mother, Gustavo carelessly brushes his teeth, sets down his toothbrush and exits the restroom. Elena is waiting. She dies her husband’s toothbrush, sets it in the toothbrush-holder, folds his towel, sets it down, orderly, perfect. Recalling another sequence where she demands the maid wash a clean cup because she can see finger prints on it, she brushes her teeth brusquely, repeatedly, violently going sideways and up and down. Linda finishes eating one last chocolate that she hid inside the pouch of her stuff-kangaroo and brushes her teeth nonchalantly. Elena finishes washing her teeth 116 and cleanse the washbasin. Almost obsessively compulsively Elena cleans. Meanwhile, her husband inattentively engages the restroom as a banal space. For Linda, as it should, it is a space away from power, where she isn’t controlled. But we’ll return to better explore Linda’s character at the end of the chapter; first, we’ll explore how the logic of spectacular wasting that sacrifices feminized bodies that is embedded in the discursive construction of heteropatriachal masculinity empowers male/masculine characters.
SPECTACULAR WASTED BODIES OR SACRIFICIAL CAPITALISM The above-explored complex operation where body and space intersect is central to understanding how the pathologies of anorexia and bulimia nervosa are related to abjectivity and are the product of a schizoid-paranoid logic. Bulimia and anorexia nervosa, can, within this framework, be confronted as forms of self-sacrifice that seek to destroy the feminine if the self recognizes its body as abject. Accordingly, I explore the processes of alienation through the spectacle of the body in sites of waste, as exemplified in both CdR and MH. I hope to see how the characters come to these vulnerable bodies through the furthering of the capitalist logic. In other words, in seeing how the audience is informed of the character’s vulnerability, I hope to point out the processes of bodily spectacularization that push the characters to their self-sacrifice, in the case of Elena ending in death.
In MH the first wasted body to appear, is the catholic symbol, the body of Jesus on a cross. Blood flowing, congealed as it exits the body. The pained expression and the blooded face, the forehead being pierced by the thorns encrusted in the shape of a crown,
117 Jesus looks upon Matilde. She had rushed out of her graduation ceremony as a medical doctor to take a bus, walk down dark alleys where the play of light and shadow almost prognosticate or reflect the battle of good and evil. Wet, she awaits under the lintel until the lights turned on, the door creaked open and she was accepted and readied to make her vows. Next time we see Matilde, she is showering with the cold rain. Matilde’s sacrifice, represented as near masochistic, treatment of her body, limiting her consumption, and connecting consumption to the Eucharistic rite, is cloistered within the space of the convent. The camera approaches Matilde through dim lighting and close-up camera shots that frames instances of personal sacrifice as highly personal, yet cold. These contrast with instances when Matilde expresses warmth towards others. For example, in later instances, medium shots are necessary to include other characters and in these lighting is brighter and shots wider. The images, then, appear as slowing down when focusing on
Matilde. Her food and her body are closer to the camera, while her full body is scarcely visible. This perspective has the effect of presenting Matilde as introspectively sacrificial, a point of view that is punctuated by her relationships with other character. When her niece Linda asks about the “flavor of Jesus”, for example, Matilde answers “La hostia no es un alimento para el cuerpo. Es un alimento para el alma”21. This simplifying schism between the soul and the body, reflects a codification of bad body and good soul, similar to the schizoid position of the child wherefore the good is represented through an interior object– the soul as good lies within– while the bad appears in the form of the external object by excellence: the body; more specifically, the othered body: the feminine body.
21 The host is not a food for the body. It is a food for the soul. 118 Linda is unwilling to acknowledge this split but her aunt and mother seem to accept willingly by producing in themselves self-sacrificial feminine bodies.
The schizophrenic alienation of the feminine as self-sacrificial is encompassed within the privatized spaces to which Matilde and Elena are bound. Yet, there is variation. Elena, contrary to Matilde, is not seen in the dark, damp and stony confines of a convent. Elena’s cloister is modern. Her house is built and designed to the standards of her husband’s architect genius. Still, this modern structure reinforces the cold, silvery, pale space and alienated existence– the other side of the sacrificial body. The inhabited spaces’ own structural and architecturally designed modern ideology is highlighted by the uses of different wide camera shots, strange angles and bright, white, almost blue lighting that frame Elena as alienated, cold, almost unloving, and distant from the other characters. For Althousser, the church and the household are ideological state apparatuses, which means that they distribute, enact and instill the ruling ideology.
Althousser’s understanding of ideology focuses on the process of subjectification
(establishing the state’s power over a person) through his theory of interpellation. Henry
Lefevre, as Edward Soja points out, speaks of another, more physical, apparatus of subjectification: Space. The social construction of space means that the ruling ideology encompasses how space is read, how it is made and how beings move through it or construct meaning out of it. Understanding this is imperative in reading the ways the MH frames both the convent and the house. Following these ideas, background and landscape in film speak to the possibility for the home and the convent to be construed as social spaces of feminine self-sacrifice depending on how they are perceived. 119 Matilde is framed as highly intimate as spiritually self-sacrifical, while Elena is societally self-sacrificial. Both characters unknowingly sacrifice by accepting and enacting patriarchal discourses, be these religious or sociological, upon their bodies.
Reading them within the state/modernity as psychopathologic (one being anorexic and the other bulimic and schizophrenic) exposes the schizophrenic (casting away the external/bad body) nature of their ills as a part of the wasteland. Matilde experiences this psychological violence in her thoughts and a distorted perception of reality through close- shots and the invisibilization of her body. Being a nun, Matilde’s body is hidden from the spectator through both clothing and close-ups. The dark lighting and gray and dark tones highlight the nebulous and tenebrous place. The clearest presence of her schizophrenic tendency, however, is the presence of Teresa– an imagined character only Matilde and the audience see. Teresa chastises her, threatens her, and becomes her confidant while highlighting Matilde’s lonesome personality and her self-imposed sacrifice as she gives up, first pleasure of consumption and after, consumption at all. She does this to convince
God to stop the rain that is flooding Mexico. But food stands for a larger understanding of desire. Matilde, for example, sitting on a pew, in the dark is ashamed as she eats a piece of cake her father had brought her. During the visit, we glimpse at Matilde’s loss of faith for humanity. In speaking to her father, she notes that science cannot go where faith does.
For Matilde, the failures of the modern medical science push her to a desire to find God, and modernity is concomitantly coded as creating the abject, which makes it all dirty in front of God. On the other hand, Elena disappointedly engages with the medical 120 profession in an attempt to control Linda’s weight. She feels the doctors fail her
(although both doctors agree the child is healthy and the second points to how the mother is the one in need of treatment). Finally, Elena turns to western medicine. Again, unable to control her daughter’s increasing weight, she thinks of surgically removing part of
Linda’s stomach. The complicated and opposing perspectives, however, have the same effect discursively– they uncover Matilde and Elena’s near mental unhealthiness. The psychological ills, nevertheless, center around the same goals: sacrificing the feminine to appease the masculine, to achieve a patriarchy-imposed standard. Surrendering the body to patriarchal discourses, interestingly, does not make these characters desirable. It makes them undesirable. By acknowledging their bodies as abject, they in turn embody abjection and this is reinforced by the expectation of a non-sexual gaze on both bodies.
Just as Matilde gives up her sexuality by becoming a nun, Elena’s thinness repels her husband as they have sex. “Tu hueso me lastima” he tells her and then gives up trying to consummate the sex-act. In a sense, she gives up sexual pleasure as does her husband’s niece, Matilde. Where Matilde gives up food as a spiritual penance, Elena gives up food for “cosmetic” reasons. In searching the discourse behind Elena’s penance. Matilde’s spiritual perspective to self-sacrifice is mimicked in Elena, with the difference that a search for holiness is replaced by a search to achieve societal standards of beauty.
THE PROCESS OF SELF-ABJECTIFYING THE FEMININE BODY This abjection, then connects with the act of consumption as the outside (ideas about the medical profession her father shares) and the piece of cake, enter the clean,
121 holy (as separated) space of the convent. Then, in an attempt of expulsion, an anti- consumption, Matilde drinks Vinegar, over-salts her food in order to make it an undesirable object, even eating trash– discarded food from a trashcan, which she regurgitates and makes her sickly, in bed. She stops eating, steals food and lets it rot thinking Teresa eats it. Julia Kristeva, and Mary Douglass converge in reading of the abominable or defiling as related to the consumption of the unclean (Kristeva 101–10;
Douglas 42–58). This self-sacrificial hunger is addressed in a schizophrenic conversation between Matilde and Teresa. Matilde is lying in bed while Teresa explains that “what caused the mystic pings of pain in Santa Teresa was not an angel’s lance – it was hunger.
She stopped eating one day and made anything happen.” Immediately after, Matilde insists Teresa should eat. When she refuses, Matilde asks if she should tell everyone what she’s doing – starving herself. Eating, itself is not defiling; it is eating well, desiring while others suffer the diluvial forecast outside the confines of the convent. For Matilde, not to eat is a form of cleansing the soul– self-sacrifice of the body in name of the spirit, whereby casting out her needs and desires, Matilde abjectifies her self. Dietary sacrifice, as Douglass notes, belongs to a set of “rules of avoidance [through which] holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal” (Douglas 58). Furthermore, as Kristeva notes, within Christianity abjection is not designated “as other, as something to be ejected, or separated, but as the most propitious place for communication—as the point where the scales are tipped to- wards pure spirituality” (Kristeva 127). The unclean nature, the desiring of food and its dismissal in an attempt to achieve spirituality is most spectacularly seen during Linda’s communion 122 as Matilde, who is now suffering extreme anemia and whose constant prayer we hear repeating in the voice of a deformed recording “que pare la lluvia” [that the rain stops], collapses. As Matilde now lays on a hospital bed, she fights, first with the doctors who bypass her digestive system through intravenous application of sedatives and later with
Teresa (who crushes a piece of chocolate cake on her face) as we find out she’s a figment of her imagination– a schizophrenic projection of her psyche. We are shown a shot of the courtyard in the convent where packages with rotten food, the never-ending rain turn the place into a waste-site. Matilde leaves the hospital, the rain stops, and Matilde’s thoughts of abjecting self-sacrifice subside as she begins taking medicine. The film ends with her leaving the order, taking off her habit’s head covering.
While Matilde’s story has a happy ending, her sister-in-law suffers the opposite fate. Elena and her acceptance of modern notions of self-abjection within and equally alienating space– the cold modern home, represents the opposite-face to Matilde’s presence in the decaying monastery. In Anne Marie Stachura’s reading of this text, these two characters represent apparently opposing modes of control: Matilde (the religious, pious), Elena (as the managerial, neoliberal) and both oppose the consumption of food itself (which represents uncontrollable desire) (Stachura 24). Stachura is right to note that one difference is that Elena’s presence in the film revolves around controlling her daughter’s weight by employing “discourses of heteronormative femininity as a psychological incentive for Linda to lose weight”, whereas Matilde supports Linda eating candy (Stachura 28). The difference between Matilde’s and Elena’s relationship with
Linda and the forms of femininity they mobilize is not related to the manifestation of the 123 distorted/schizo-logic in Linda’s life as they both are unaware of her becoming vulnerable. The difference is simply discursive. As Stachura notes, Elena’s existence is dissected by neoliberal discourses. But Matilde’s existence is also dissected by neoliberal discourses. That Matilde’s boxes full of rotten food exist because the convent is forced to sell food to keep functioning and alive, following the Monsignor’s advice proves that religion, the church (an Althusserian ideological state apparatus) has lost stability as the state retreats and has reached out to the neoliberal market logic for its own survival.
Neoliberalism, then is connected both to the abundance of food around all the characters, and each character’s starvation as a denial of consumption. For Elena, this is seen under the guise of middle-class Mexican cultural standards of beauty while for Matilde the same logic takes the shape of religious sacrifice.
THE SPECTACLE OF SURVIVAL OR VIOLENCE AT THE EDGES OF THE VOID As Deleuze and Guattari begin Anti-Oedipus they introduce the concept of the desiring machines: literal machines that feel, that conduct themselves affectively, that flow, produce, and give. The desire machine consists of flows, they mention “amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
5–6). These uncontrollable, undesired, abject flows are what they call “the production of production.” Simultaneously Deleuze and Guattari note that desiring machines, are schizoid actors that mark the exit points from the throes of the ideologies of capitalism,
124 modernity and patriarchy (but they are not exits or exiting themselves, instead they are sacrificed to maintain the structure). In their second text Thousand Plateaus, these ideologies appear as planes, the desiring machines are rhizomes, and the breaks from these ideologies are lines of flight or exits from cultural regimes of thought, history, etc.
These concepts are central in understanding how schizology enables desire’s uncontrolled affects within the wastelands to allow for the survival of some abject characters but the sacrifice of others.
Deleuze and Guattari explain that “The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus 341). This is precisely Lourenço’s position in O Cheiro do Râlo, since being beaten by his customers and then killed by Viciada opens up the potential for this most abject character to choose to act. In Malos Hábitos, as Linda finds out that her mother is willing to put her life in danger, she also takes matters into her hands and Elena’s death is enabled by her premeditated self-abjection. Lourenço’s and also Elena’s deaths are the result of desiring flows for abjection and both open up the door for the empowerment of other characters. To explore these processes, I propose a reading that after presenting desire in the films engages Deleuze and Guattari along with Bataille’s concept of the pineal eye.
I will link Bataille’s concepts to those in the Anti-Oedipus by noting that Achille
Mbembe’s reading of Bataille’s notion of excess, death and sovereignty. Excess, in fact, is key as excess of vomit in one (MH) and excess excrement in the other (CdR) break the 125 systems of modern control. These instances when modernity breaks down are the slits that Elena and Lourenço provide for the presence of excess waste. Next, I propose that
Lourenço and Elena’s choices to desire the abject turns them into sovereign subjects. To choose the abject is to embody the wasteland as void; it is to become waste, it is to choose the schizoid position. By becoming the void, they embody the all-giving death.
This certainly is not what they set to achieve but both characters give their lives and force their Other (Viciada, in CdR; and Linda, in MH) to become abject and reproduce the flow of waste and the schiz (or cut) in the matrix of power that can become an escape.
Viciada first appears in O Cheiro do Râlo selling Lourenço a small jewel case, for which she receives fifty units of a nameless currency. A second time, she sells a cassette tape player after Lourenço buys an eye from a customer before her. Once with the eye on his possession, Lourenço experiences an ecstasy and an excitement that empowers him.
Soon after, in a voice-in-off Lourenço explains as he thinks:
Acho que foi o homem do violino quem me disse que o cheiro era meu. Ele disse isso à minha cara. Pior é que isso me atingiu. Era como se fosse um círculo vicioso. Eu vejo a bunda que me alimenta. O preço para poder ver a bunda é comer o lixo daquela lanchonette. A comida sempre cai mal, sendo assim o râlo fede. Ou seja, a bunda faz o râlo feder. [I think it was the man with the violin that told me that the stink was mine. He said that to my face. The worse is that it hit me. As if it was a vicious circle. I see the ass that nourishes me. The price to see the ass is to eat the trash at that cafeteria. The food always makes me sick, thus the drain smell. Therefore, the ass makes the drain stink].
Just a few sequences later, as he is rejected by Bunda, Lourenço blames the eye for this loss of power, but a second later takes it back and explains that when he is stressed he absorbed the feelings that the objects he buys carry. In other words, the smell of the drain 126 and the desire for Bunda’s behind, made him what Deleuze and Guattari term a desiring machine: a machine connected with other machines in order to maintain the series of flows motivated purely by desire. The disruption of flows and the re-making of the father are exacerbated as a character appears to sell Lourenço small plastic soldiers. Then, the drain explodes and the bathroom overflows with wastewater. It is here, in this wasteland that Lourenço admits to feeling empowered by the smell. Viciada, whose face seems more emaciated every time, returns in search of money as Lourenço admits he misses
“the bunda” and pays to see Viciada naked. Again in a voice-in-off Lourenço explains:
“power is an aphrodisiac, the smell gives me power. The smell and the eye.” Lourenço humiliates Viciada once more as he pays for him and the eye to see her naked.
While the Lourenço seems to understand both the eye and the smell as sources of empowerment, he does not realize that the empowerment of the eye and the father stand diametrically opposed to the empowerment of the abject, the fecal smell. According to
Deleuze and Guattari they appear as “opposite poles of unconscious libidinal investment…” the first is the eye, the patriarchal empowerment, “which subordinates desiring-production to the formation of sovereignty…” and the second is the abject, the smell that “brings about the inverse subordination, overthrows the established power, and subjects […] the productions of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 376). Thus the two modes of empowerment could be seen in Lourenço. The first, embodying the patriarchal, through the physical and psychic recreation of the father and the relationship with the eye and that marks him as feminine (as I outlined before). Modernity wastes him away, discards him. In the second, waste itself, the power of the drain appears as source 127 of establishing desire outside the social norms. The buttocks and the eye, are diametrically opposite sources of power as Georges Bataille notes in The Pineal Eye. The text that could be vexing and abject, is well summarized by Ryan Johnson and Phil
Cohen in the introduction to their edited text Filth:
“Bataille celebrates and finds a paradoxical potential for liberation in waste products (excrement, phlegm) and practices (mutilation, sacrifice) ordinarily considered the very opposite of what civilization esteems. But this is not a simple reversal that, by a Freudian logic, merely reaffirms established values in inverting them” (Cohen and Johnson xvi-xvii)
Instead of simply reversing the roles of the structure of power, Bataille claims that the guidance of the solar anus is one of excess and abundance. This is the revolutionary potential of the fecal. Another way of understanding this is a return to Deleuze and
Guattari’s flows. Whereas for Bataille it is the desire for the abject that has a revolutionary horizon, for Deleuze and Guattari it is desire at large. They emphasize
“Desire is revolutionary” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 118). Achille Mbembe’s reading of Bataille points out that death (as the excess of nothingness) and sexuality
(where orgasm/secretion are also excess) are instances of sovereignty that defy the conditions defined by morality (Mbembe 15–16). In other words, it is these instances of abjection are instances of sovereignty. When Kristeva notes that “any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject”, Kristeva, Bataille, Deleuze and
Guattari and Mbembe coalesce in seeing desire as abjection as sovereignty (Kristeva 4).
This is even more important as (how we will see in the following chapter) abjection and fearlessness of death dictate the politics of the wasteland. The film also exposes this as in
128 the penultimate interaction between Viciada and Lourenço she tells him that his face is a mask and that underneath the mask there is nothing. That is, Lourenço is wasted; he is an embodiment of the wasteland.
This operation of abjection, death, sovereignty and embodying waste is even clearer in Elena in Malos Hábitos as her body slowly decays and dies. In fact, when
Elena visits one last doctor, this one says that he is not worried about Linda’s health. He is worried for her whose face and body have clear marks of self-abjection. As Elena begins excusing her weight to the doctor, her voice becomes almost spectral and turns into a voice-in-off while the camera transports us back into the restroom. Again in the shower, Elena’s diminished body is now resting on a corner, weakened as the water washes her. The white and gray tones of the tiles and glass door through which the camera see her are highlighted as the shower’s space seems bigger since the camera is now the closest to the ground it ever is. Whereas Gustavo’s desire is turned away from
Elena and focused on the Gordibuena character, the camera’s focus on her abjection nodes to Elena’s self-wasting as the last redoubt of sovereignty. This is the only place where she can do what she wants. Here, a problem appears: since both Lourenço and
Elena die, is death the only form of true sovereignty? Mbembe would have us believe that it is not. The management of death or Necropolitics, he argues is the type of sovereignty that the State mobilizes. This mobilization of the death of the other, in fact is central to both O Cheiro do Râlo and Malos Hábitos. If Lourenço and Elena satisfy Deleuze and
Guattari’s definition of the schizophrenic, then their death becomes the break, the
129 “resecting schiz” or the cutting of the slit that leave the potential for another’s exit and empowerment.
Thus, Viciada killing Lourenço is simultaneously the wasting of a failed patriarchal subject and the empowerment of the abject. The same is true with Linda. As
Linda eats the host during her first communion, we hear the sound of a phone, which, along with the receding sound of the rain and the steady loudness of the soundtrack transport us elsewhere- back inside the cold home of the Soriano family. Finally we hear
Lalo, Linda’s friend calling. As they whisper, the film contrasts the images of the very public catholic celebration to the very private voices of the children talking. “Tu mamá te quiere cortar el intestino” [your mom wants to cut your intestines] Lalo whispers. As
Linda walks to the back of the church, she sees her mother who now looks weak and emaciated. As Lalo tells Linda that her mother would “rather see her dead than fat” the camera slows down and the conversation with Lalo breaks up. With the three main characters, Elena, Linda and Matilde together, it is the last one who faints as the phone’s signal’s beeps turn into an ambulance’s siren. Malos Hábitos utilizes the metaphor of
“losing her organs” as an extreme form of including Linda within the larger structure of modernity but also threatening her life. A few moments later, as the camera now shows
Linda ending the call with Lalo, we see her stealthily moving: grabbing one of her mother’s water bottles and the weight-loss medicine that the audience knows is a placebo.
According to Linda, more than three drops of the placebo could be deadly.
For Mbembe, Linda’s and Viciada’s actions are the work of the state as it is not them but the state who has chosen to take life and the manager of violence, life and death. 130 However, a key difference between the two examples is that Linda could not have killed her mother, while Viciada definitely kills Lourenço, shooting him with a gun repeatedly.
It can be said that Linda symbolically kills her mother and abjects herself as in her head she chooses to think of herself as sinful. Maybe a clearer example of killing or abjecting the Other as a process of subjectification is Matilde’s. She imagines Teresa accompanying her in the convent, even thinking that She’s attacking her in the hospital after Matilde is interned. Finally recovering, Matilde returns to the convent but the film ends as she sees herself reflected on Elena’s death. As Matilde stands on a balcony of the convent seeing the sun, the camera cuts to Elena’s wooden headstone. The rain returns and instead of returning to self-abject, Matilde takes off her habits indicating she is leaving the convent. This instance of choice as an empowered subject explains that not only is killing the other a psychologically liberating action, as in Linda’s case. But that sovereignty lies in the critical understanding of how self-abjection functions; that is, by seeing the end result of Elena’s choices, Matilde is afforded the freedom to choose.
(WASTED) BODIES AND POWER The shadow of Foucault’s understanding of power haunts these spaces as we explore how the violence that these characters experience resides within the psychic realm. Where these films escape Foucault’s explanation is that the violence of power is not all mobilized or enabled by and for the state. The restroom shows itself to be a wasteland and as such power active within it is mobilized under the logic of the market and for the benefit of re-instituting the heteropatriarchy of modernity. The wasteland in
131 neoliberalism, then, is a privatized space and representations of it expose that the intersection of the feminine body and waste are central to understanding how the violent capitalist dynamics make bodies vulnerable by reproducing the capitalist logic of waste in modernity. In the very material and psychological implications of this type of vulnerability it is central that the state gives way to the logic of the free market. The market logic then overtakes these spaces and within them reinstates modernity and its patriarchal violence without making the state morally responsible. By pointing these situations out, I am questioning the way in which the body, waste and space interact and both configure and are formed by gender. This is the question that Butler approaches in
Bodies that Matter (1993)–and that in this chapter appears as: which comes first, the feminine as vulnerable because of waste or the wasted as feminine because or patriarchy?
Where Butler begins the text by exploring the definitions of materiality and performance and setting up the arguments about what seem to be opposing views on the body, she finishes by noting that these questions point to the fact that patriarchy is imaginary and not to an answer of which view of the body is more real than the other. In this way, the fact that the discourses of waste and femininity are mutually constructed within the patriarchal discourse, they point to how patriarchy connects them in order to maintain and construct itself.
Butler’s later work in Precarious Life explores the value of representation and relates valuing life to precariousness. To do this, Butler recalls Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of the face. In pointing out that the Levinasian face can recall both the humanization and dehumanization of the other and exploring how this happens, Butler 132 slowly approaches a search for humanization, identification of the other as human. In the final pages of the text, She references how violent pictures of the Vietnam War “pointed somewhere else, beyond themselves to a life and to a precariousness that they could not show” (Butler 150). These images, she claims “showed a reality that disrupted the hegemonic field of representation” in an attempt to mourn and to give value to the deceased bodies of Vietnamese children (Butler 150). These images, she explains, were not to be published but their appearance on the public field allowed many US citizens to take a stable position against the continuation of that war.
Can representations of violence in a society of spectacle still result in the defense of human life? Is this affective response an effect of the production and circulation of spectacular images? If we backtrack from Butler’s final thoughts and expand upon
Levinas’ concept of the face, we might be able to understand what is happening when these images can both recall what Butler recognizes as “a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence” which is the very reaction the abject elicits (Butler 137). Butler recalls that for both Spinoza and Levinas it seems that it is an ethical choice to maintain peace, whereas for the psychoanalytic perspective mobilizing the desire to kill against itself would solve the disjuncture. But how does one choose between these two perspectives at such odds that seem irreconcilable? The films we’ve analyzed suggest a need for a schizologic perspective to make sense of the wasteland. This would mean that the spectacle of wasting suggests a call to the defense of the life and the humanity of those wasted-beings represented to the audience.
133 Spectacular wasting calls for a schizology, or a way to think and relate beyond the psychological and understanding the affective energies that lie beyond the reach of the material and psychological. To understand this we must explore if the spectacle of wasting can be used to prevent violence against the other or if it only serves as a morbid replay of patriarchal violence. In her seminal psychoanalytic analysis of the image of the female in cinema, Laura Mulvey reminds us that the gaze is coded as masculine in its desires and modes of empowerment, and the feminine is represented thereupon for his consumption. This in fact remains untouched within both O Cheiro do Râlo and Malos
Hábitos as it is women who generally suffer the violence and whose bodies are generally more visibly represented in these films. But where Mulvey’s reading no longer applies is in the narrative sense as these films are open to anti-patriarchal and feminist readings of the violent situations in them.
In Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), Bell Hooks expands upon Laura
Maulvey’s critique of the lack of a feminine presence on the movie-screen by questioning the audience’s gaze. Hooks suggests that the oppositional gaze, is a gaze that resists to read the text in only one specific way. Whereas Mulvey’s perspective seems to leave us with a patriarchal and unengaged, fetishist capitalist audience, Hooks sees in the same images the possibility for a reactive and critically conscious audience. As long as the films allow for this type of reading by opening a feminist narrative, as is the case of both
Malos Hábitos in Linda and in O Cheiro do Râlo by allowing the downfall of the oppressor and survival of the oppressed, the spectacle of wasting opens the films to anti- patriarchal readings at the hands of the audience simply through the presence and 134 representation of the abject, the undesirable, the un-seeable in the screen. As we have seen, the spectacle of waste focuses on the presence and vulnerability of feminized bodies, on the instances of cleansing and of wasting– when waste and body interact, these instances leave the films open to different ethical readings. These instances of vulnerability of the feminized bodies focus an aesthetic that emphasizes closeness (or the
Levinasean face that we further explore in the following chapter as the aesthetic of violence of the spectacle of wasting), which allows the audience to read either preciousness or desire to kill unto the abjected beings of the wasteland. Finally, (a question I will more clearly approach in the third chapter) it would be important to note what are the resulting material conditions of choosing not to destroy the abject as an ethical choice or because of a psychological/desiring act.
135 Throwing it Away: Spectacular Wasting and Citizenship in Estamira (2002) and Backyard/El Traspatio (2009)
I had only visited my friend’s house in the northeastern limits of Austin once, in the evening, during a weekend. This second time, I drove with clothes and books loaded on my car as I transitioned between apartments in the middle of summer of 2013. The road to his house was uncharacteristically busy with heavy machinery coming out of a side dirt-road that I had not noticed before. In the following days my friend explained that the road leads to a landfill, which will be filled and transformed into a golf course, increasing the value of his property. The same year as my first visit to Brazil, in the city of Niteroi across from Rio de Janeiro, on the other side of Guanabara Bay’s Morro do
Bumba was the site of a tragic landslide that captured the attention of the media. Bumba hill was the site of a lixão (a dumpsite) from the 1960s until 1981, when it was settled and houses built on it. The resulting unstable ground caved-in after torrential storms in
2010. Methane gas bubbles and sliding dirt mixed with torrential rain claimed the lives of an estimated forty-eight people. The fact that that space made of waste could be recast for such diverse uses and treated in such contrasting ways prompts a critical reflection on the public spaces of wasting and the people that inhabit and transit them.
Instances where waste and death intersect are not uncommon. Growing up in
Guatemala, I was used to people living and building towns anywhere, even inside dumpsites. What is more, any corner or tierra baldía (empty, unused, or wasted land) can be turned into an illegal dump and, sometimes, these proliferate. The future golf course planned in Austin, Texas contrasts sharply with the vulnerability of living Morro do
136 Bumba. Because of the differing uses of these spaces, thinking about dumpsites guides us to consider how public space, waste, power, and the body are socially constructed through modernity (evidenced in the promises of modernity in the creation of the modern state’s utopian project through which neoliberal economic policies are implemented).
Guiding this chapter’s inquiry is a desire to understand how the people who inhabit and transit these waste spaces relate to a state that may or may not know about them or wish to engage them. In other words, this chapter points to the question of citizenship in the wasteland. Thus, I undertake an exploration of citizenship and the state, examining the changes brought to it since the implementation of neoliberal socio-economic reforms. I ultimately aim to explore the possibilities of articulating a different type of relationship to modernity, the modern state, and neoliberal capitalism.
WHERE WASTE GOES
Although wasting is necessary for every mode of capitalist production, dealing with our waste is a much less conscious part of that process. Flushing a toilet, for example, performs the magic act of making bodily discard disappear, as does leaving trash-bags out and have them magically carted away, making waste disappear from everyday private spaces. In this sense, trash pickup is a magical act and garbage collectors are magicians. Like any good magic, the mystique lies in being distracted from the task and not attempting to understand it. Thus modernity dictates that the only way to approach “the problem of waste” is through the design of systems of recycling and reusing, which permit the waste material to be re-cast into the process of production and
137 return to be consumed. Nature is deemed inefficient or incapable of decomposing or managing capitalist leftovers. The management of waste in contemporary resource management involves three social public spaces: dumpsters, landfills, and waste-energy plants.
The most modern way of dealing with everyday trash is what much of Mexico, including the city of Juarez and much of Mexico City, have taken up: trash burning. By burning most of the trash at high temperatures after separating recyclables from it, these cities have been able to complete the circle of consumption and production. At high temperatures, these plants produce energy and the leftovers are but carbon and water, the base of most organic matter. Still, dealing with waste in any context is a gargantuan effort of design. Collection and transportation to sites for categorizing waste-matter and, later, distribution to the respective spaces for treatment would seem to completely close off the cycle of waste-production. This option of waste management should seemingly be implemented everywhere and (if we let modernity run to its conclusion) move to zero- waste societies. Such a dream of perfectly designed modernity seems more attainable now than ever: all the processes of nature at humanity’s behest. The problems that modern design attempts to fix, however, are not produced by waste but by the capitalist system of production and consumption to which waste belongs. These transitory spaces of waste will be the focus of the next and third chapter in which I look at narratives that explore transitory spaces and waste.
Another contemporarily designed space created to deal with waste is the landfill.
A landfill is a large hole that will eventually be filled with waste and treated, covered 138 with layers of dirt, impermeable materials, and, at times, tubing to extract methane being produced by decaying matter and toxic runoff so that the ground itself does not become toxic. This prevents the storage of underground methane that proved lethal to the inhabitants of the Morro de Bumba in 2010. The use of waste as foundation is not exclusive to firm land. In the city of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, as land near the central areas of the city became scarce, people began creating their own houses above the water.
The palafitas or houses-on-sticks of the Maré (or “Alagados” neighborhood as the state government later termed the area) the residents had been slowly filling the bottom of the bay with layers of waste and dirt in order to create more stable ground for the stick- houses. Unable to move all the inhabitants to firm ground, the state sent trucks with dirt to fill the bay and expand living grounds (Santos; Barbuda et al.; Eduardo Teixeira). A few years back, many of these wooden houses caught fire. The state eventually achieved its goal of closing down these self-made living spaces. These ingenious yet apparently anti-modern settlements like Bumba Hill or the Maré speak of the vulnerability that such spaces bestow upon whoever inhabits them (Barbuda et al.; Soares and Espinheira). The space and the people who inhabit waste-sites mutually construct each other: vulnerable populations inhabit vulnerable spaces and vulnerable spaces make populations vulnerable. Although I do not explore these spaces further, I would like to point out that these sites tend to be located at what academics call “the limits” of the state, or the periphery and that such spaces denote vulnerability. As the periphery and its inhabitants are the focus of much research on the topic of the periphery, one of the main goals of this chapter is to differentiate between these locations that are “at the edge” and those that are 139 outside the order of modernity (Bentes, “Subjective Displacements and ‘Reserves of
Life’”; Keisha-Khan; Gago; García Canclini; Quijano and Quijano; Canclini).
Traditionally texts that analyze Latin American modernity recur to explain how modernity re-shapes or adapts to show that even at the borders, modernity holds to the same tenets but this relationship between modernity and space is precisely what this chapter questions (Sarlo; Martín-Barbero).
Dumping is the least managed form of waste control. Garbage dumps, mostly illegal, are open air spaces where disposables are collected, left to rot and stink at a distance from clean spaces. Dumpsters are often prohibited but their proliferation in developing countries is pernicious because of the absence of control systems and because they also provide sustenance and a living space for a segment of society. Even when legal, these sites can pollute local waterways and endanger nearby communities because there is no control on the types of waste nor on the methods of decomposing, equivalent to those that exist in landfills. One such site was Jardim Gramacho, closed in 2012, where for four years Marcos Prado intermittently interviewed and filmed Estamira (2004), named after the main character, the so called “bruxa do lixão” [witch of the dumpster].
Estamira can be differentiated from the other inhabitants of Jardim Gramacho portrayed in Vik Muniz’s Waste Land (2010; dir. Lucy Walker and Karen Harley). In this film, a community of catadores, (people who work separating recyclables and often living from some leftovers in the trash) mobilize and eventually have a hand in the closing of one of the largest landfills in the world. Estamira, however, is not part of this community and has been cast out partly because of her schizophrenia. Another such site includes the 140 deserted spaces near the U.S./Mexico border. In these spaces it is not uncommon to find waste, trash, and, as Backyard/El Traspatio (2009) shows, sometimes the bodies of wasted beings. There, bodies are found outside Juarez’s city limits or in the desert where there are few formal roads and many times, no formal governmental presence.
Both Backyard and Estamira, call into question the limits of the state’s structures and technologies of control by noting the absence of the state and any formal state structure. In the case of Estamira, even the psychic forms of power are questioned. More importantly, as I explore these two films, I’ll note how they point to individual enactors of violence who follow biopolitical forms of power within the state. My goal is to demonstrate and analyze the systems of control, order, social space, or cleanliness, which exist to create byproducts (and not products). First, as understood by Zygmunt Bauman design is the act of separating, differentiating, and throwing away waste from the spaces, objects, and subjects of modernity (Bauman). That is, the goal of design is the proliferation of spaces of wasting. In this chapter, I focus on the wastelands, the voids of power, order, and cleanliness that appear in public spaces as sites existing outside the state and where a market-run biopolitics produces what Sayak Valencia calls a thanatopolitics, or a politics of death, where it is the market, and not the state, that dictates the embodied politics of the everyday (Sa Valencia). The perniciousness of the logic of the market is such that it affects even the aesthetic modes of engagement with the audience, which come to that follow an affective order in concordance with the market dynamics of neoliberal film.
141 REPRESENTATIONS OF THE POLITICAL VALUE OF WASTE AND THE STATE
The discourse of modernity understands waste as undesirable, as a byproduct, or a matter of barbarism. In this view, the “third world” or other such non-modern cultures are plagued by the problem of waste and the cure for this ill lies in the full enactment of scientific and positivist dictums to achieve modernization. Such is the idea behind media focused on the dangers of waste as I explained previously when referencing hygienist texts like Beijing Besiged by Waste (2012) and even Eduardo Coutinho’s Boca de Lixo
(1993), to which we will return later in this chapter. Notwithstanding these efforts to cleanse waste or prevent it from accumulating prove to be futile. Waste, after all, is not in extinction. In fact, it proliferates and its recycling or reuse only enables the continuity of capitalist production and further production of waste. Designs, as in modern technologies of separation and differentiation, that better process waste and put it back into the cycle of consumerist everyday life are both markers of modernity in “advanced” societies and mark as subaltern those who lack access to them or are untrained in their social dynamics.
As I noted in the first chapter, in private spaces, the act of wasting can promote empowerment. In the present chapter, my first goal is to understand whether this empowerment through wasting is enabled by the state or by the market and what are the structures of power that allow the spectacular wasting of the other. The action of throwing away, cleaning and minimal lifestyles (for example, the tiny house movement, minimalism, etc) are the products of affluent societies but they are also enactments of processes of subjectification by wasting and by global-north modes of empowerment. A
142 migrant family of 5 living in a small two-bedroom apartment, for example, is not considered minimalist and does not carry the social capital of a blogger and photographer living in a tiny house or a van – notwithstanding who better utilizes their resources. The same qualm is experienced in antiquity stores or museums, where objects that would otherwise be considered trash, in anti-modern spaces, are recast (and given new value). It is to this re-casting, this re-using and recycling of social space to which Walter Benjamin dedicated his monumental Arcades Project. Kevin Hetherington notes that “for
Benjamin, the arcades are a figure, a dialectical image, for everything that is associated with industrial capitalism and consumer culture” (Hetherington, “Memories of
Capitalism”). What is more, as Hetherington explains, for Benjamin it is the materiality of such a space and its eventual downfall, which should shake us out of capitalist alienation. By focusing on the reuse of space, Benjamin notes that capitalist progress needs catastrophe to thrive and that the physical marker of such catastrophe is waste. In other words, the spectacle that such waste provides and the spectacular making of that waste is necessary for the maintenance of the contemporary capitalist and modern discourse. Yet it is this very spectacle, when exposed, that opens up the chance for de- alienation and self-recognition and critical reflection.
In the previous chapter, I pointed out that neoliberal capitalism, in incorporating the market as the system that rules interpersonal relationships of bodily wasting, has changed the notions of biopolitical value and the social construction of private spaces. I concluded that, since the implementation of neoliberalism, private spaces of wasting are better understood as privatized sites, that is, as spaces where the logic of market- 143 exchange has taken hold. More importantly, the privatized space enables the act of spectacular wasting of the feminine for the benefit of and reinstatment of the patriarchy.
Such violence re-uses the wasted as source material for its own maintenance. If so, spectacular wasting might be seen as a form of recycling. However, recycling does not solve the problems of waste, instead, it makes these problems unsolvable, as waste will continue to exist. If recycling and producing energy from waste seem to turn consumption into a self-sustainable cycle, they only do so because such an action expands and furthers capitalism. Through a simplified application of the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy), we can conclude that there will forever exist byproducts that cannot be captured within a perfect cycle of capitalist consumption- production. In other words, the very materiality of wasting prevents it from being completely tamed. Its materiality will always find a mode of escape. Such an escape is the focus of this second chapter. The perniciousness of the “problem of waste” exemplifies the relationship between the state and the beings casted out. In turn, the waste that escapes modernity may produce forms of citizenship (as re-entry/recycling) or new- modes of non-modern subjectification. Therefore, I focus on the public spaces where there is scant or, at best, intermittent state presence. I follow from last chapter’s exploration of how the spectacular aesthetics of wasting denote feminized bodies in the wasteland as wasted-beings. From this, I noted that the neoliberal structure of film production and the aesthetic choices of these films are informed by contemporary ideas of consumption following neoliberal standards, which I term “the spectacle of wasting.”
All this, I believe, points to the need to explore the filmic representations of acts of 144 wasting and the intersection of bodies, waste, and space, which are crucial to understanding the methods and structures of violence (that are mobilized outside the state) in Latin American societies.22
This type of dystopian neoliberal films that I explore in this chapter,23 engage public wastelands, in other words, they make aesthetic choices that highlight the presence of body, waste and space, which in turn speak to the way neoliberalism redefines the state-subject relationship within wastelands. These aesthetics, as in the first chapter, focus on vulnerable feminine bodies and the reinstatment not only of patriarchy but also of state-power. However, in this second chapter, I approach race and gender as intersectional so that racialization and femininity are considered to be additive markers of vulnerability in neoliberalism.24 Taking from David Harvey’s notion of the racketeering state and Sayak Valencia’s Capitalismo Gore, I understand spectacular wasting in the public-wastelands as having the conditions of a non-state space where the government vies for power with other entities therefore acting beyond the rule-of-law. In other words, it behaves like a racket, gang, or mafia struggling against other such groups in an effort to reinstate its monopoly on violence (Harvey 89–91). The terms of its spectacle appear in the extreme violence that is enacted in these spaces or to the wasted-beings that inhabit
22 It is key to remember that the wasteland, while being the anti-modern space outside the state, is created through modern discourses that benefit from its creation precisely through the enactment of recycling or the reframing of the wastelands into new spaces of raw materials for the maintenance of modernity. A perfect example of this is petroleum which is the waste of previously existing bodies and becomes the energy that powers the machinery that embodies modernity. 23 As previously noted, these films can be considered as neoliberal films both because they have been created following the implementation of neoliberal policies and because they enact the affective and consuming politics characteristic of films of neoliberalism. 24 I will explore these concepts further in the following chapter when looking at the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, and migratory status. 145 the wastelands. Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba describes this in Nación Criminal (2015) when speaking about the Mexican state and how at its core, the identity of the Mexican nation is built through the myths of criminal subjects. Therefore, the retreat of the state from certain spaces enables criminal actions that will allow a violent return of the state’s enactors of violence under the guise of securitization. Paul Amar details this same process in the Brazilian and Egyptian states in Security Archipelago (2013) noting that the securitization-state allows for the empowerment of certain groups but, eventually, after re-constituting itself violently, closes off those spaces previously open for subaltern communities. Unlike in the welfare-state, under neoliberalism the production of subjects is given up. Instead, the disappearance of state-structures minimizes the number of existing subjects by promoting stateless spaces where anyone may produce violence for personal benefit. This is precisely what Sayak Valencia notes when speaking about the
Mexican state in Gore Capitalism: the state’s retreat has opened up spaces that are spectacularly violent and where violence is the only path to become empowered subjects.
Valencia calls these beings sujetos endriagos or draconian subjects25 (Sa Valencia). The gore aesthetic, as characterized by Valencia befits the violence of the wasteland. In addition, the wasteland can be constructed discursively because the state accepted and mobilized the stereotypes of the bandido (in Mexico) or the malandro (in Brazil). These singular and “free” beings are not controlled by the state– instead, as Julia Kristeva points out, they are abject.26 The violence produced by these draconian subjects upon the
25 The recently published English translation of the Valencia’s text utilizes the term “endriago subjects.” 26 “Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, 146 wasted-others that inhabit the wasteland seems to be dictated by necropolitics, and the vulnerability of these wasted others seems to be dictated by a racist-patriarchal structure, the matrix of power. However, with the absence of the state, this space is controlled by the logic of market-exchange (as pointed out in the previous chapter). Therefore I consider these spaces to be pre-state spaces because within them, state ignorance prepares the wasteland for the re-entrance and rebuilding of the state, and of its patriarchal-racist power to “cleanse” such spaces. These two films differ from other modern hygienist films that reproduce the wasting of non-state-subjects because instead of promoting the recycling or reuse of these beings and the sites they occupy, these films seek to question the very notion of the politics of death that are enacted in the wasteland. This is why this chapter maps these public locations by examining how the public wastelands are represented.
It is important to note that these public spaces are not public in the sense of being the domain of the state. Rather, when I use the word public I point out that any entity may have access and seek to claim it for itself. Furthermore, they are not under the control of the state because they embody the ideology of neoliberal capital and, as such, operate in accordance to the notion that the market is a great democratic, equalizing and humanistic force and that the state is but a roadblock to its egalitarian prowess.27 As such, those living in the wasteland cannot appeal to citizenship from within those spaces, as there is cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility” (Kristeva 4). 27 My focus is not on democracy and its relationship to liberalism or neoliberalism, however, for more on this see Parker (2017) or Couldry (2010), Skidmore, Smith and Green’s Modern Latin America (2010) also dedicates its twelfth chapter to a genealogy of the intersection between the political and economic ideas of democracy, liberalism and neoliberalism. 147 no state present that can provide it. In this sense, they are beyond-citizenship. The films analyzed in this chapter depict how these outcast characters may establish tenuous relationships to cultural citizenship, yet their situation remains unaddressed, beyond citizenship, which in turn allows for the enacting of modes of securitization. Then, the state or members of the state enter and violently reclaim such a space, all the while extending a peripheral citizenship to the denizens of the wasteland, changing their livelihoods, effectively recycling them.
The wasteland is a neoliberal space because within it, market-capital performs the duties that were previously thought to belong to the welfare state, opening up the door to opposite but concurrent actions that produce precariousness and providing the means for subjectification. However, it also allows the surviving beings to develop a schyzology, that is, a schizophrenic thought process or a non-psychology-logic that redefines their relationship to the space around them. As I explained, this is what the feminine characters do in Cheiro do Ralo and Malos Hábitos. By substituting psychology, understood as the ideological processes for understanding the relation of self with everything else, with a
Deleuzian schizopolitics the category of wasted-being allows us to reformulate the structures of control, value, and power—or the political. Such a change also enables us to see how the state securitizes a space, or enters this space under the guise of the establishment of safety. This recycles or reinserts the inhabitants of the wasteland into
“productive” state membership. When these subjects are casted outside or murdered, the actions are often framed as acts of cleansing. Once these spaces are “in deed of the
148 control” that particular wasteland is prepared to later be recast within the patriarchal, capitalist and modern imaginary of the nation-state.
This chapter offers a look at an alternative mode of engaging public space and the state through the analysis of a Mexican fiction film and a Brazilian documentary film.
Backyard/El Traspatio and Estamira provide us with examples and aesthetic approaches to the wasteland and the wasted-bodies within them. While other films, like the Brazilian
Tropa de Elite series (Padilha, 2007, 2010, Brazil) or the Mexican El Infierno (Estrada
2010, Mexico) and La Ley de Herodes (Estrada, 1999, Mexico) also explore the state of securitization and the market’s violence within the wasteland, they do so by representing the contrasts between state power and individual actors whose goal is to eventually be returned to the state. It is by representing the spaces outside the state that Estamira and
Backyard lead us to question the limits of the state’s necropolitics and into the realm of the tantopolitical, the politics of death. Moreover, these contemporary films diverge widely from the New Latin American Cinema or the Cinema Novo productions and their aesthetics. These differences weave a particular set of expectations and modes of engagement for the audiences of these films and the subjects they represent. These films engage their audiences through an intensity of affect that points to how the audience’s biopolitical actions are mobilized under the joint tutelage of modernity and the market.
THE AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC-WASTE-SITES IN LATIN AMERICAN FILM
Following the script of Italian neorealism, and as a heir to the formal hallmarks of the 1960s Latin American Third Cinema form, Marcos Prado uses a hand-held camera to
149 follow Estamira’s stumpy shape from her squalid home on the Rio-São Paulo highway unto the center of Jardim Gramacho. Still active at the time, the carioca dumpster was the largest open-air landfill in the Americas. The eponymous character dons her work clothes. The camera looks up at the aqua-blue sky where flying circling trash bags simulate black crows and focus on the black letters of the title spell E S T A M I R A.
Split in two, Esta-Mira could be translated as “This View,” and this alludes precisely to one of the qualities of this film that has brought it much credit and fame: its ability to represent the voice of the other. Estamira, also known as the “bruxa do lixão” [witch of the dump], speaks of herself and her reality appears to be truly represented. Praised as a truthful documentary or cinema verité in its highest expression, Estamira however does more than this, it speaks to the limits of representation in the way captures the spaces where Estamira transits, whom she is, and how she lives through an unassuming and unsuspected mise-en-scène.
Filmed over four years, the film focuses on Estamira, the protagonist whose schizophrenia displaces her in spaces so derelict and permeated by discarded objects and who prompts the question of her social death and societal disposal. The Mexican film
Backyard/El Traspatio echoes this problem as its main character, police captain and investigator Blanca Bravo, handles cases of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez. In both films, questions of production and its underside—waste as embodiment of the logic of neoliberal capitalism—drive the plots and the lives of the characters. In Backyard/El
Traspatio, a young female, Juana, experiences the violence of rape in spaces where bodies are restricted and capital rules. Once these female bodies appear within waste-sites 150 they are dead. Because these corpses are stripped of their humanity after they have been abjected, they lie among the waste, making us question whether these characters can ever become living subjects. Or question, as in the case of Estamira, if after their social death, they must reconfigure the world schizophrenically. I propose that by exposing the aesthetics that highlight these characters’ abjection, these films visualize the violence that prevents these “surplus humans” from ever becoming citizens. Through an analysis of how the mise-en-scène juxtaposes these female characters, waste, and the spaces of waste, we identify a process of spectacularization of waste at the limits, where citizenship is simply not available to these characters.
In her article “Sertões e favelas no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo”, Ivana
Bentes names and characterizes a cosmetics of hunger, to address an aestheticized or, as she calls it, a hyper-realist approach to poverty and violence in the Brazilian peripheral space of the favela. According to her, this only reproduces stereotypical notions of danger and denotes the favela as a dangerous space, intersecting with a racist notion of the favela as a black, poor, and exotic space. Bentes notion of the “cosmetics of hunger” dialogues with Glauber Rocha’s 1965 manifesto “Estétyka da Fome.” Whereas Rocha’s aesthetic of hunger stems from a politicized approach to Latin America’s reality of poverty, hunger, and violence, the cosmetics of hunger prevents the viewer from engaging critically, as they present violence as a consumable mystifying product that turns the favela into a commodity. My goal here is not to focus on Bentes’ argument. Instead, I consider that
Latin American filmic aesthetics have historically framed hunger and violence in spatial terms that can and are often related to waste. The representation of hunger through waste- 151 spaces prompts the audience to engage with notions of value and power that are local and global but are also present in films meant to be consumed. In this way, representations of space and waste in neoliberal film speak the affective capitalist language of contemporary affective market-driven society. Since the early 1950s, landfills and dumpsters have been represented following the political genealogy and tenets of Latin American film. This tradition includes, as noted earlier, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio, 40 Graus (1955), Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol
(1964), etc. Meanwhile, the film Cidade de Deus (2002) by Fernando Mierelles and Katia
Lund, has been criticized as perfecting the cosmetics of hunger. Ivana Bentes defines these cosmetics of hunger as transmitting an alienating and entertaining spectacle to its audiences, which amounts to a mode of alienation through the consumption of poverty.
While she has been criticized and questioned for her conclusions,28 Bentes’s contribution consists in her ability to recognize and capture a transition in the affective language that constructs the spectacle of waste.
In fleshing out the specifically neoliberal characteristics of recent Mexican Film,
Ignacio Sanchez-Prado notes that Solo Con Tu Pareja (Alfonso Cuarón, 1991) exemplifies romantic comedies that speak a neoliberal affective language which specifically targets the middle class, as it represents global standards of modern commoditization (Sanchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism 62–78). These films,
Sanchez-Prado argues, mark a departure from the melodramatic cinematic standard of
28 Fernando Mascarello, for example critiques her conclusions as elitist perceptions of aesthetic and filmic social value that praise the cinema novo while refusing to accept new notions of aesthetic and socio- political value (Mascarello). 152 Mexican cinema before neoliberalism. Speaking in this new language, films communicate in a way that can only be understood through neoliberal relationships of consumption and production. As such, the public spaces of waste also undergo a change in representation that reflects neoliberalism. If Cidade de Deus is the film that best exemplifies a shift in the aesthetics of the neoliberal Brazilian film industry, this film’s
Mexican counterpart would have to be Amores Perros (Alejandro Iñarritu, 2000). It is in these films that the spectacle of wasting and neoliberal affective language can be seen to modify film aesthetics. In The Politics of Affect and Emotion, Laura Podalsky speaks about this “new” Latin American cinema since neoliberalism, noting that critics like the aforementioned Bentes, in Brazil, and Carlos Monsiváis, in Mexico, criticize these aestheticized films for accepting the standards and values of globalized culture. In her words, “these filmmakers contribute to the characterization of contemporary Latin
American cinema as a willing participant in the depoliticized, pro-market atmosphere that emerged in the region in the late 1980s and early 1990s as neoliberal administrations took power throughout the region” (Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in
Contemporary Latin American Cinema 3). Podalsky explains that these aesthetics spell out the embodied effects of the affective/emotional relationship that requires the audience to know how to understand and relate to neoliberal film. That is, they outline an affective order for the object-subject relation to embody forms of power mediated by the neoliberal market. Such a transformation is the result of the neoliberalization of the Latin American national film industries and culture at large. This reading exposes the affective networks that Sanchez-Prado also posits as central to our understanding of neoliberal cinema. 153 Bentes highlights that these aesthetic moves produce and are produced by changing expectations of audience engagement, which shift from an expectation of activist communal political action to a focus on individualize affective movement. In other words, this newer cinema focuses more centrally on cultural citizenship through cultural consumption rather than on audience politics. This transformation seems to suggest an opening up of these films to audiences’ interpretation, possibly refuting the overt politics of 1960s New Latin American Cinema. This focus on the audience correlates with Bell Hooks’ thoughts on how subjective readings of film can be empowering and even with Benjamin’s take on space as a palimpsest. These critics push towards a critical opening of the cultural object to be read and understood by the audience. This, in turn, exposes that the politicized Nuevo Cine/Cinema Novo also expected affective responses from its audiences. Affective connections are, in short, the modes of relating and communicating in cinema. The intersection of affect and capitalism
(as exemplified in the last chapter) is particularly neoliberal. Here, at the intersection of materiality and aesthetics, in the center of a complex of aesthetics and affectivity, lie the poetics of waste and spectacular wasting. Personal neoliberal affective practices expose how the poetics of waste lie at the neoliberal nexus of political engagement of self as the poetics of waste appear to substitute the type of political mobilization to which filmmakers in the revolutionary period aspired.29 In this sense, waste and the wasteland are key examples of Benjamin’s and Hooks’ readings of cultural objects as open-ended.
29 I have discussed this in further detail in the introduction in the exploration of the differences between neoliberal cinema and its ideological predecessor Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano or Third Cinema. 154 That is, in this case, as artistic products that expose the affective character of neoliberal capitalism through the abject’s production of both desire and disgust, which in themselves are bodily effects whose spectacle demands aesthetic engagement through emotion and not in the same utopic revolutionary terms of the political activism intended by the New Latin American Cinema or Nuevo Cine.
This chance for the audience to engage subjectively through the spectacle that emerges with the presence of waste is central to neoliberal Latin American cinema and is probably best introduced at the ending of Amores Perros. In the last sequence of the film,
Emilio Echeverria’s character: El Chivo, an ex-revolutionary-turned-sicario (hired gun) has decided to leave behind his life in the periphery. El Chivo tries and fails to reconnect with his daughter to bid her farewell, sells his car, and with the company of the infamous virulent dog “coffee,” which El Chivo has renamed “negro” walks out. El Chivo looks into the distance at a vast ravaged land, an empty wasteland in the vein of T.S. Eliot’s poem. Here, through his broken and taped-up glasses, with a bag and in the company of
“negro,” El Chivo walks off into the arid darkened land next to a metal recycling plant.
The camera alternates between his face and the landscape, his face and the ground as he walks away. The camera fades to black.
Amores Perros’ last sequence sets a man on a journey into the wasteland. The lands into which he walks are eerily similar to those that Estamira consistently faces throughout the eponymous film. The uninhabited land and the used car, as well as the metal recycling lot are also reminiscent of the panoramic takes of Lomas del Poleo, the used car lots and endless desert landscape into which Juana arrives at the beginning of 155 Backyard/El Traspatio. Just as Amores Perros highlights El Chivo’s vulnerability by intermittently focusing on his face and the landscape, so does this back-and-forth on
Estamira (as it shifts between her face and Jardim Gramacho). The same formal technique of shifting and contrasting as used in Backyard’s panning shots of the desert landscape of Juarez and the face of Detective Blanca Bravo. The camera repeats these shifts between the officer’s face and the desert as she describes the found body of a dead girl in the opening sequence of the film. This juxtaposition of wasteland and discarded body, becomes the descriptive language of the Juarez feminicide victims, gives way to images of the city which bombard the screen. Beige sand and trash, wasted cars, and busy bodies turn what could otherwise have been understood as an introduction of setting and character into a spectacle of waste. Moreover, because of these verisimilar choices, I address the setting of both Backyard and Estamira as mise-en-scène and not simply as background. What is unique about these texts is that waste and abjected bodies appear in the landscape and background to frame the spaces they transit as wastelands.30 This turns a “focus on setting” into an aesthetic choice of the poetics of waste.
THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF CAPITALISM AND AFFECTIVE CARTOGRAPHIES
More than a sign denoting that which “is-no-longer-useful,” the word “waste” speaks of objects that are devoid of value and infused with the power of abjection. As waste, the material object becomes just an image, and yet as image, waste attains
30 This also refers to the appearance of the dystopia and the breakdown of the utopia of nation and modernity as outlined in the introduction. This transition into neoliberalism and the loss of the utopias refers to what Jorge Castañeda termed Unarmed Utopias (Castañeda). 156 symbolic value. The mass accumulation of waste and the way it is mobilized in film to create urgency and impact are examples of how spectacle inconspicuously creates symbolic value. Estamira as an example of the spectacle of waste reveals specific cinematic techniques used to emphasize how she exists within the context of the wasteland. In this Brazilian film, the abject and spectacular waste are confined to the space of the landfill, which marks it as separate from the state and modern society. It is precisely at the intersection of waste and abjection in the space of the landfill that
Estamira’s process of subjectification takes place.
Waste and space, or the space of waste, provides the mise-en-scène of the film as landscape and background. However, space and film cannot forgo the very materiality of the films’ location and existence within a Latin American neoliberal mediascape.
Estamira (2002) is located in Brazil and Backyard/El Traspatio (2006) is on the
US/Mexico border. Still, both arise in a period of neoliberal policies and a shift from state- to market-based (privatized) modes of control. Based on the Juarez feminicides, the
Mexican fiction film follows the detective and police officer Blanca Bravo as she takes over the investigation of the deaths and disappearances of the young factory workers. As suggested by the title, Backyard understands Juarez to be the backyard, the Other(ed) side of El Paso, one of the safest cities in the United States. Through its title, the film already questions the relationship between the safety of modernity and the violence of non- modernity. As I noted before, while post-modern and critical theories have questioned the clear separation between the modern and non-modern (Sarlo; Martín-Barbero; Canclini), the goal of modernity is to continuously reify and clarify these separations, as seen in the 157 spatial limits of the state and the wasteland. In this sense while modernity adapts to the local, it continuously re-establishes limits to and outside of those localized modes of modernity. The backyard, unlike the front-yard, is not meant to be visible, and, like the
Brazilian quintal, it is a space outside. Just as the landfill is central to the functioning of the city, the backyard is part of the house; still, the landfill is not the city and the backyard is not the house. And although the landfill can be understood as being part of the city, and the backyard, of the house, this is only so because these are defined in contrast to the house.
In this metaphor, Juarez is the backyard of El Paso and it is where those who are unable to cross unto the United States find work at the maquiladoras. The underpaid work at the maquiladora has attracted its own share of migration to Juarez and the squatting waste-material houses at the west of the City of Juarez have received these migrants. Backyard/El Traspatio is keenly aware of this, the slash of its name is a written representation of the line that separates El Paso/Ciudad Juarez. And the opening of the film speaks to the spectacular presence of waste by stopping momentarily on a close-up of a forgotten shoe and other waste among the desert sand as the main character describes the dead, putrefying body of a girl, 16 to 25 years old and an ex-worker of a local maquiladora, her uniform at her side. Similarly, as Captain Bravo rides away with her partner, the camera moves away to show the ordered metropolis of El Paso, with its
Wells Fargo building, and sweeps across to capture Ciudad Juarez surrounded in slums.
Scanning Juarez, it shows us people in downtown, a lot filled with old crashed and
158 wasted cars and, as a glimmer of hope, just like in Estamira, a flock of birds flying up and the blue sky.
Mise-en-Scène could very roughly be described as the material composition of the sequence. In this sense, mise-en-scèene excludes post-production, editing, or action-plot, but it will include all directorial decisions, scene management, props, and even the general tone and affect that the films attempt to capture and reproduce. These choices, in short, refer to larger conscious and unconscious decisions of semiotically charged signs that expose or contradict networks of meaning. In reading Tomás Sanchez’ paintings of
Caribbean islands– “Wastescapes,” Francisco-J. Hernández-Adrián proposes that
Sanchez’ work interpellates audiences by interconnecting waste and lush island landscapes, as these appear to be discursively constructed as opposites. Hernández is able to summarize the effect of Tomás Sanchez’ work, explaining: “garbage enters and grieves the field of vision. It interpellates us as spectators; it proposes itself as spectacle and mirror. The dump we see watches us with the defaced presence of past material and socioeconomic lives“(Adrián 32). Similar to Sanchez’ work, the spectacle of garbage in
Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio, recalls abjection and the embodied responses to it through the uncomfortable spectacle it provides. If we are to understand how these films manage to engage their audiences, we must understand how and which props, backgrounds, and characters—as mise-en-scène—reproduce the spectacle of waste through the interplay, in this case juxtaposition interpellation through representations of landscape.
159 As Hernandez-Adrián notes in the case of Sanchez’s work, the unexpected presence of waste expanding the space of the island makes an otherwise unassuming image spectacular because of the contrast it produces. In the same way, the second sequence of Backyard/El Traspatio’s Detective Bravo’s detailed description of the young female carcass, first through the strategic use of the soundtrack and, second, through radio host Peralta. These stories bring contrast to and complement the images that locate the film at the border. The sequence begins with the droopy trumpet of Manu Chao’s song “politic kills” while we see detective Bravo’s car passing underneath the bridge that connects El Paso and Ciudad Juarez’s main streets. In a series of tracking shots, the camera now shifts quickly upward and left. Upon the golden-brown ground of the desert, a dark Wells Fargo building stands out at the center of a skyline. Words on the screen identify the town: “El Paso, USA” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. The camera now tracks down and then right to the much smaller houses on the Mexican side of the border, the feeble housing settlement contrasting with the stable behemoths on the
American side. And the name of the city “Cd. Juarez, Mexico” appears on the lower right-hand corner. With Juarez in the background, the title “Backyard” spelled in a white, almost typewriter font denotes the city of El Paso as the backyard itself. Manu Chao’s voice begins singing, repeating “politic kills” with the same intonation over and over, recalling Manu Chao’s other song about a Mexican border town “Welcome to Tijuana.”
As the edited image cuts, now to El Paso’s iconic mountainside sign that reads “Cd.
Juarez La BIBLIA es la verdad LEELA,” the suddenly camera zooms, directly upon the biblical message that now takes over the screen. The words written on screen, the 160 dialogue, and soundtrack choices produce what Michel Chion calls “added value,” that is,
“the forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears” (Chion 5). The addition of this value through sound in asynchronism emphasizes contrast and complement present in the core ideas of the film: that Juarez is El Paso’s backyard as such, it contrasts and complements it, all while being a continuation of it. The camera does this through the continuous panning shot
(complement) and placing the names of each city in opposite corners (contrast).
Meanwhile, the title of the film exposes that their relationship is similar to that of the house and its backyard. Furthermore, the discourses that the film introduces about Juarez through the added value of the soundtrack to the images, is that Juarez needs the truth, as the biblical message proposes, and possibly per of that truth is that “politic kills.”31
Although this message is introduced through post-production, and as such, not part of the mise-en-scène per se, it prepares us for the following set of images, a scenic archive of
Juarez that repeats the asynchronic techniques of complement and contrast. Most importantly, however, that these images demarcate and reproduce an affective and material cartography for these interconnected cities.
The panning image (from El Paso to Juarez) does more than introduce the film’s exploration of how Juarez is the “backyard” of El Paso, as the title states; it suggests these spaces are connected. In her analysis of the films Che (Steven Soderberg, 2008) and
Diarios de motocicleta (Walter Salles, 2004), Isis Sadek notes that each film mobilizes
31 Manu Chao has another song that speaks of Mexico’s other border-metropolis: Tijuana, it is impossible not to think that the choice of soundtrack is directed by chance. 161 opposing notions of space, constructed through the relationship between characters and space (Sadek, “Propuestas Para El Análisis de Espacio Fílmico Y Dimensión Social En
Los Cines de Brasil E Hispanoamérica”). Whereas Diarios reiterates the location of its main character in ways that anchor the experiences and affectively locate the audience,
Che omits such information so that the audience’s inability to locate the character provokes suspense and a sense of instability. Backyard/El Traspatio, engages its audience, like Diarios, by placing them. If Diarios uses the entire movie to locate its audience, Backyard engages its audience from the start and delineates an affective map through a montage of images of Juarez: urban youth, a kid descending a dusty mountainside, an older male looking out to the city, now a child looking into the distance—a cut, a zoom into the child’s face as he looks down a set of stairs, a dirty dog in the street—a zoom-out to see the people around him. Furthermore, the film continues its play with juxtaposition as the camera focuses where the abject (human or otherwise) highlight the abject landscape. In other words, it introduces the mise-en-scène of Juarez as a mise-en-scène of abjection. These shots, whether scripted or not, shift the focus from the main characters to their surroundings, the environment upon which they exist.
Much like Juarez, the rest of Latin America must be understood as a socially constructed space. If Rio de Janeiro is typically represented through images of Guanabara
Bay, Juarez is repeatedly represented as the site of intersection between the “first” and
“third” worlds. In both cities, urban, almost squalid housing areas similar to the favelas in
Brazil, or villas in Argentina, are distant settlements. Although markedly remote, their danger and violence are always too close. Locations like the deserted areas of Lomas del 162 Poleo or the dumpsite of Jardim Gramacho are not even considered attractive or reflective of Mexico or Brazil. Yet, their appearance is spectacular and the bodies living within them are wasted bodies, they are outside, abjected. It is within the logic of capitalist spectacle that we can read the following shots of a moving motorcycle with two passengers, a moving, retrofitted bus, bodies in the center of Juarez, and the image of a man begging for money, sitting in the street. As the camera cuts to focus on landscape, waste appears as a part of the mise-en-scène of the film. The bodies and the trash appear on equal ground as central nodes to understand the abject landscape. The camera moves us from Lomas del Poleo through a graveyard of used, destroyed, and old cars, probably brought over from the American side, to the final image of birds moving freely across the sky. Finally, the letters “El Paso del Norte” signal the border; a helicopter in the sky flies off and the camera stops on a flaccid American flag as Peralta, the radio host, begins describing Juarez as the receiver of second-hand items, of the waste of the north.
Peralta’s descriptions points to Juarez as the place where female Mexican bodies become usable and disposable to those able to pay the right price. Thus, he introduces the feminine body as the site where discourses of wastefulness become embodied and the images of discarded products from the U.S. in Mexico receive new meaning through this superposition. The discursive construction of the disposable Mexican feminine body in
Juarez, intersected with the migrant’s body exposes the material repercussions of such an intersection: “ciudad herida, coronada con la sangre de sus muertas niñas” (wounded city, scar-city, crowned with the blood of her dead girls). As Peralta reads a poetic eulogy to the dead girl that Captain Bravo found at the beginning of the film: “desde Juárez y 163 abarcando todo el estado de Chihuahua,” the radio-host reminds us of the feminicides, as he dedicates the song “Mi Buena Suerte” by Los Tigres del Norte. This montage provides information regarding space, waste, and body, especially the feminine body, and points us to violence as the central mode of interaction between these. The film, then, by providing such a slew of images, reproduces a visual and affective cartography that positions its viewer within a diegetic space that is coherent with the contradictions of the border, many of these stemming form the use of real-life locations.
Estamira achieves the same effect in its opening sequence although instead of images full of movement, it provides slow, abstracting black-and-white images that reproduce the abject space where we first find Estamira. Starting with the image of
Estamira’s house, as the camera advances towards the entrance, the hand-held camera cuts first to her address, then to an old and empty bottle, a dead lizard, a rusted empty teapot, a knife without a handle, a dog, and among the gray images, a shadow. Playing from the start, the sound of the rochimbau and an echoing and distant singing voice quiet down only slightly as the camera focuses on rusted, old, and rotten things. Yet, these sounds start again. Finally, we see a door without handle or a lock. It closes in front of the camera. The image cuts to a moving bus and a dusty road. In the open road, trucks and cars contrast with Estamira’s swaying, feeble body walking along the side. The camera follows her until she stands to wait for the bus. She struggles to balance her body as she boards the bus. Now, we see Estamira’s face in a close-up. A sign announces that the landfill is nearby “Gramacho, ultima saida, 1 km.” Although using a very different aesthetic approach to the one in Backyard, Estamira is also focused on creating a 164 connection with the audience by transiting the same liminal spaces as the protagonist.
Unlike Backyard, however, Estamira is a documentary. This difference sets them up to speak different aesthetic languages, although they produce the same effect. While
Backyard’s camera focuses on the faceless masses, the mapping of the towns from above and the interconnectedness of the two border-towns, Estamira uses a white-and-black handheld camera to focus on personal spaces, and produces an experience of movement that recalls Cinema Novo.
Both Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio approach the spectacular through abjection. By focusing on it and highlighting the human qualities of characters, the films highlight the presence of the body (wasted and disposable) in the wasteland and the violence that it suffers. They expose this by contrasting and complementing the locations of waste and the sites of cleanliness, and the wastelands and the spaces under the control of the state. Although they speak different visual languages, both films constantly highlight the human in reference to waste. In other words, by presenting the bodies of the victims through the spaces they transit, they map an affective cartography of the wasteland. In this perspective, the bodies, waste and, wastelands inform and create one another. This is a single aesthetic approach to waste: spectacular wasting, which opens the screen up to reproduce visual critiques of the wasteland. Jens Andermann, for example, notices that breaks in the narrative pace of a film to focus on the landscape, specifically upon the rural diegetic space, produce a focus, a break that calls attention to the space as a character (Andermann). Indeed, the wasteland as character provides this diegetic space, and the objects within it refer the audience to orders of power that make 165 the films veritable. By introducing these many images and affectively mapping the space where the films take place, both films open the landscape as a site for critical engagement with the situation of the character and for reflecting upon her discourse. This spectacular interaction and constant alternation between landscape, prop, and body, and the films’ engaging in the affective mapping of the spaces where the films take place, are central modes in which Estamira and Backyard recall the abject and open both films up to engaging the audience affectively. This is the effect of mise-en-scène of capitalism. The films map the spaces of waste by engaging with abjection as spectacular wasting.
INTERSECTIONAL SPECTACULAR WASTING AND THE LIMITS OF THE NATION
In alluding to the spectacle of waste, we refer not only to the shock produced in a sequence through the sum effect of plot, mise-en-scène, and other cinematic tools, but also to a process of spectacularization. Guy Debord defines spectacle as the accumulation of capital to the point of becoming just an image (Debord, The Society of Spectacle). In the world of spectacle “commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 29). In this sense, the image of waste is a commodity that, through its very presence, interpellates the viewer, in a turn of events that exposes the processes of capitalist waste-production. In spectacular wasting, waste allows us to see the underside of capitalism because it mobilizes the discourses of abjection. However, when representations of the abject intersect with bodies that are necessarily gendered and racialized, they require us to engage with the way that gender and race are constructed within the modes of power that configure the
166 space they inhabit. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva explores of the psychological effects of abjection and concludes that the abject is produced through recognition of oneself in the disgusting object. That is, to experience abjection is to recognize oneself as object (Kristeva). This interplay of desire and disgust notes an intermittent and repeated movement of identification with the Other.
In addition to Kristeva, Mary Douglass’ exploration of the antithetical concepts of pollution and taboo in Purity and Danger concludes that disgust is a reaction, an expression of the fear of pollution that is central in understandings of male and female sexuality. Following on some of Douglass’ concepts, Kristeva explores the simultaneous rejection and desire for the abject by linking it to the discursive construction of the abject as feminine. By referring to Kristeva’s and Douglass’ concepts of waste, I establish the spectacle of waste as a lens through which the female body’s vulnerability is produced by the convergence of desire and disgust in it. This notion of vulnerability is central to Kevin
Bales’ critique of what he calls “new slavery,” a slavery that has found open spaces in the shadows, where the welfare state is not present and where the neoliberal state only enters to establish a securitization state. But Estamira’s body is not simply female, she is a black woman; and in Backyard, Juana, the young woman arriving in Juarez, does so as an indigenous woman. Both characters embody femininity and race, and their racialized/feminine bodies each contributes to mark them as vulnerable. As I noted in the first chapter, such vulnerability denotes them as disposable bodies to be used in the
(re)construction of a subject’s patriarchal and modern power. What appears as violence within the wasteland (a space in which the state is not ever-present in the terms of 167 foucaultian panoptic power) is the only available process to exercise power. In
Disposable Women, Melissa Wright proposes the myth of the “disposable third world woman,” and notes that woman is an intersectional identifier of vulnerability. If the last chapter focuses simply on markers of femininity, this one explores the role of race in vulnerability (and in the next chapter I will also explore age).32 Wright finds that the discourse that creates and justifies the disposability of these characters, marked by race and gender, “travels around the globe and with definite productive effects” (Wright 11).
She goes on to note that:
Determining how the body materializes as a site of multiple identities, where no
single identifier establishes the sole definition of the subject’s existence (or its
“essence”), is vital if we are to understand how the laboring body, under capitalist
conditions, emerges as an embodied site of exploitation and accumulation
(Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism 13).
Wright highlights that the intersectional character of vulnerability arises because the myth of the third world disposable woman is intersectional itself, but this would also mean that to mobilize power subjects may also refer to multiple identifiers of privilege.
That is, the international corporations that reproduce such power do so notwithstanding the actual political conditions of the state. Whether in Mexico or in China (the sites of
Wright’s research), the disposability of these women is naturalized because of the many
32 Although Estamira’s disability could be understood as another marker of intersectional difference, my point in this chapter is that within a schizologic reading of the character, schizophrenia is not a disability; rather, it constitutes a different, more positive mode of engaging with the environment around her. 168 markers of otherness. If their status as waste is naturalized by the discourses that capital mobilizes, representations of such disposability may provide insights into how such capital creates the conditions for female vulnerability. The first such device is the comparison of body and space that simultaneously emphasizes the spectacle of capital that has produced these wasted subjects and spaces. Another is the intersectional character of these wasted subjects. It is necessary to examine these two devices to understand how films establish vulnerability. The films further note this by juxtaposing the abject space and the body, and thus developing another mode of critique. This shows the audience a bewildering characteristic of the wasteland: the simultaneous and contrasting subjectification and abjection of the characters. The films highlight some characters’ ability to intermittently enter and exit the wasteland–this is done by wasted beings and those who enact violence to dispose of them. This type of fluid relationship exposes the limits of the state as being not only always in flux, but also ever porous and in a constant process of violent wasting. Ultimately, this helps maintain the state.
INTERMITTENT BEING AND BECOMING WASTE
Generally, subjectification through the state involves being subjected to it while also gaining membership to it. Foucault, Althusser, and Bourdieu, expose the state as generally working by way of a larger patriarchal matrix of structural and psychic power that functions through cultural products, discourses, etc. However, the arrival of neoliberalism effects a measurable change in the state that, more often than not, enables certain people empowered by these structures to circumvent the state. This act is what
169 we’ve termed privatization: the structural and bureaucratic diminishing of the state in favor of the sovereignty of the action of private actors. Such dynamics are facilitated through and for flows of capital, which gains the freedom to move within and out of the state. To hold capital, then is to be able to enter and exit the wasteland. Thus, not all beings who enter the wasteland are wasted beings. After all, even most of those who enter do so intermittently as the wastelands are in fact time-spaces of waste. This is visually represented when Estamira starts. The protagonist is seen entering and exiting, transiting different spaces: peripheries of the state and spaces outside the state. These different spaces are always peripheral to state power. What differs between the limits of the state and the wastelands is the enacting of the spectacle of wasting, as seen in the representation of the characters and objects around them as abject.
This intermittence is also seen in Estamira’s schizophrenic episodes. In one case,
Estamira yells and curses at her daughter and son-in-law as they disagree on their spiritual views and, a few seconds later, her daughter leaves the conversation chuckling, explaining: “Ela não é louca mas ela não é completamente aciente entendeu?” [she’s not crazy but she’s not all there] . Later, she will continue telling of how Estamira began working at the landfill, intermittently returning to stay with her son and daughter. The film’s editing also adds to Estamira’s intermittent thoughts by cutting between different moments, alternating between color and black-and-white shots focused on Estamira, or focused on Jardim Gramacho, or on dogs living in the landfill. These breaks in continuity are a reflection how the documentary was filmed intermittently over four years, and also expresses the difficulties in entering and finding time and space, in defining when and 170 where to film in a way that captures Estamira. Estamira further emphasizes her liminality as, after she explains that she does not believe in the God of churches and laws, she yells
“é claro, se eu sou a beira do mundo. Eu sou estamira. Eu sou a beira. Eu tou lá; Eu tou cá; Eu tou em todo quanto é lugar e todos dependem de mim, todos dependem de
Estamira…” (it is obvious, because I am the edge of the world. I am Estamira. I am the edge. I am here; I am here; I am everywhere that is a place and all depend on me, all depend on Estamira…). Her movement at the limits, at the peripheries has placed her in vulnerable situations, but she understands that there is a difference between living in the lixão or in a house. The limit is not the outside. The limits of the state demarcate the spaces inside and the outside of it, between disposability and waste, between life and death.
If Estamira points to how the main character embodies vulnerability and wasting while she traverses from the fringes of the state to its outside (and from disposability to being wasted), Backyard explores these limits territorially at the physical division made between one country and another, between inside and outside. At the periphery of nation,
Juarez is crisscrossed by market and exchange: discarded objects (Peralta, the radio-host, mentions second-hand clothing and trashed cars) are exchanged for wasted-beings (the migrants who are ready to cross the border that Peralta also mentions). It would, however, be a misconception to think that the border is a wasteland or that the wasteland is always a border. As a third space,33 the border (in this case the U.S.-Mexico border) might be thought of as correlating to the wasteland as both are socially constructed third
33 In the initial theoretical section, I explore this concept and how the wasteland relates to it. 171 spaces. If borders and wastelands can coalesce spatially, this is because they both exist at the edges of the state. I will better address this overlap when exploring the centrality of citizenship in shaping abjection. A comparison between borders and wastelands highlights that while wastelands are socially constructed time-spaces defined by the acts of wasting violence, by the suspension of the rule of law and the abjection enacted within them, the border, as Thomas Nail notes, is “something created not only by the societies that divide them from within and from one another, but also something that is required for the very existence of society itself as ‘a delimited social field’ in the first place. In this sense, the border is both constitutive of and constituted by society” (Nail 4). However, the deserted nature of the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the diminished presence of the
Mexican state at its northern border, allow for Juarez and the general border area allows to be understood and constructed as wastelands more often than other spaces that are perceived to be “closer” to the center of the state. In other words, because of its diminished regulation on the Mexican side of the border, this frontier allows entities to enact the spectacular wasting that creates and is characteristic of the wastelands. This is precisely what Mickey Santos, the El Paso businessman who crosses every week into
Juarez, represents as he speaks of going into Mexico only to run his gas and adult entertainment businesses. His business dealings and crossings into Mexico are accounted for by his own records, which he shares with Captain Bravo when she visits him to ask questions about his relationship with the gang “Los Cheros.” Eventually, we learn that its is Mickey Santos who in performing full-moon sacrifices of young women, keeps their bodies until they can be brought to light, thrown in the desert. 172 Santos’ ability to move freely between the two countries and to pay the police so they can act freely under the full moon is paralleled by the transnational maquiladora’s ability to move freely between countries and leave unemployed, vulnerable, discarded bodies behind. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, note that transnational companies, like the fictional Kikai in Backyard, “directly structure and articulate territories and populations. They tend to make nation-states merely instruments to record the flows of the commodities, monies, and populations that they set in motion” (Hardt and Negri 31). Hardt and Negri explain that in neoliberalism, these flows of capital are paralleled by the flows of affects and people. In this regard I posit that these flows permit the making and unmaking of the abject time-space of the wasteland while also allowing those who enact spectacular wasting to enter and exit such a space. Thus, in this space, the intermittence of being wasted and being disposable, reflected in Estamira’s psychological state and in the way she lives between the landfill and the periphery, is mirrored in Backyard in the way private (non-state) enactors of wasting violence can enter and exit, make, and undo the time-space of the wasteland. This intermittent relationship with space is further emphasized when state-actors who do not mobilize the wasting violence of the wasteland enter these clandestine spaces and experience abjection. This is precisely why, when Captain Bravo finds the commercial fridge in the middle of the desert, near the border, she exits distraught. While the place was empty, her intuition is that bodies are kept and butchered there. The space holds the abject even while the bodies are not there. Even though there are no bodies, if Bravo had remained there, she would have entered the wasteland and taken those women with her. Blanca 173 Bravo understands that the very abjection of such a space puts her and the other women in danger, in the view of the agents of wasting, outside the protection of the state.
Although they entered, they must quickly leave. Further ahead in this chapter, I explore better what this relationship between the state and the non-state, abjected space of the wasteland means in terms of citizenship. But as Hardt and Negri point out, these structures and spaces are re-shaped, shaken up and participate in making vulnerable peripheral, othered, racialized, and gendered beings.
THE LEVINASEAN FACE OR RECOGNIZING ABJECTION
Recalling two of the most appalling and spectacular sequences in the films, we will now examine how the use of the camera, props, dialogue, and location enable us to read the rape and death of Juana as the action of wasting and Estamira’s life in the Jardim
Gramacho as being-wasted. This is why both films provide us with the gruesome presence of decaying female bodies among waste–they unveil for the audience the feminine body as detritus and its dejection as patriarchal violence. In her dissertation
Affecting Violence, Lydia Huerta Moreno analyzes frame by frame how a free-moving, handheld camera enters the van where Juana lies after being drugged by her ex-boyfriend.
Following this, editing alternates between two cameras: the first is located in the back looking to the front and a second camera films from within the circle of rapists, as if the spectator were participating in the action (Huerta Moreno 125–28). Huerta speculates about how the breadth of the film’s possible audiences, which might include people who have previously experienced such violence to those entirely unfamiliar with the
174 feminicides in Juarez, even sadist spectators who may be aroused by the scene. All audience members are indiscriminately confronted with the situation. The film faces all audience members with the action of wasting or the repetitive discarding of female bodies. In this film, such an action frames rape as the “ritualization of moral paradigms, in which human life is no longer valued” (Huerta Moreno 130). Faced with the spectacle of waste or the moment in which a female body is emptied of all value through rape, the audience is forced to question their own part in such an action. As Juana’s ex-boyfriend suffocates her, in exchange for his own life and at the behest of his partners, Juana’s body has produced all that it will be allowed to produce. Her body is now waste and is thrown out of the van to the desert. Thrown on the sand of a nameless dirt road in the desert, among trash, Juana is spectacle itself. The only visible signs of civilization are power lines and towers that function as markers that the location is far from Ciudad Juarez or its suburbs. Juana’s body is seen with the transparent plastic bag that was used to suffocate her still on her head, thrown off from a dirty blue Dodge van like a sack of trash, the sequences effectively point to how throwing these bodies away is the de-facto solution to waste. The blue dodge van, the electrical towers and the plastic bag on her face all speak of the flow of transnational capital in the age of global capital. More than that, the inside of the American-made vehicle can be a metaphor for spaces that move along the paths of capital. Racialized and feminized third-world bodies can be taken into these modern spaces until they are exhausted of their value to then be discarded, thrown out, like
Juana’s body.
175 Estamira’s story is also one of rape. As both Estamira and her daughter Carolina recall the many times the main character has been raped, it is Carolina who makes the connection between this violence and her mother’s lunacy. The daughter explains that
Estamira’s dementia first manifested itself some time after Estamira was anally raped as she walked down the street. The violence Estamira faces after being wasted is no longer the act of becoming waste but the violence of being waste. Like Estamira, Carolina Maria de Jesus, a catadora34 de lixo, told her life story in two testimonios in the 1960s. Her
Quarto de despejo (1960, Eviction Room) won her worldwide acclaim and told of her life in the landfill. Like its title, Despejo–eviction–effectively summarizes the interaction between Carolina and the state. The state is focused on ejecting her out of its boundaries unto the space of waste–the landfill. Much in the same way, Estamira inhabits Jardim
Gramacho after her house along the highway catches fire and she is “evicted”–thrown out. Once in the landfill, she faces the elements, not the violence of the state but the risk of being hurt or dying in such a space. In a poorly understandable stream of consciousness, Estamira explains the concept of energy flows, and how scientists seek to control the energy of nature. With different words, she explains how modernity uses technologies of power to manipulate “blood and muscle humans.” Soon after, as the weather changes and the landfill devolves into a tempestuous storm and the wind blows strongly, the falling rain and the graying sky overcome the bright light earlier in the film.
In this case, nature and the heaps of trash, thunder and the toxic fumes of decomposition are the mise-en-scène that denotes a modernity that has produced the trash that can harm
34 Garbage Sifter, someone who not only collects but scavenges trash. 176 Estamira and a state that has abandoned and evicted her unto this land of waste. In this world, Estamira’s psyche adapts by creating a new logic, a schizophrenic reasoning that positions her as directly in conversation with the powers that can harm her.
Because of its theme and location (living among waste in Rio de Janeiro)
Estamira is often compared to or set alongside of Eduardo Coutinho’s film Boca de Lixo
(1993). Both films approach this space in quite different ways. Coutinho engages the subjects of the film through conversation, simulating Cinema Novo neo-realist and television realist aesthetics that highlight the presence of the camera and the filmmaker.
He further tears down the distance between audience and the protagonists by drawing a parallel between filming them, taking and giving them copies of their portraits (which he gives out throughout the film). Similarly, Estamira recalls the aesthetics of third cinema by emphasizing the main character not as interlocutor or producer of knowledge but instead as material guide and cartographer of life outside the state (Grupo Rev(b)elando
Imágenes; Peixoto; Bacal). While Coutinho is effectively mapping those living at the limits of the state, he can move through such a space. Estamira, meanwhile, moves in spaces where the director often does not. Only she can serve as guide because the space is effectively outside the state. Where Boca de Lixo points to practices of representation,
Estamira highlights the production of knowledge. By not introducing the filmmaker as an entity within the film, Estamira emphasizes the absence of traditional forms of power in the space of the lixão. This contrasts sharply with the constant presence of filmmaker, camera, and sound-crew in Boca de Lixo, which recurrently appear within the frames.
Although seeking to challenge notions of power, Boca de Lixo highlights how power 177 moves in the same way at the limits of the state as it does in the state’s center (even if it ultimately challenges how that difference should be represented in film). This contrast is so central to the structure of documentary filmmaking that if Coutinho’s goal is to humanize and de-abject the characters, so as to show the injustice and prompt action against the squalid conditions in which they live, he also notes that they are subaltern to centralized modern power. Estamira, meanwhile, seeks to highlight the character’s notion of her own abjection in the opposite way, accepting and knowing that she speaks, thinks, and lives regardless of whether the state and its traditional structures of power engage with her.
This mode of engagement serves the film as it allows Estamira to explain that it is those who mobilize the discourses of modernity and capitalism who are the impares
[odds/uneven] or incomplete ones, contrary to her, the par [even], the “inteira”
[complete]. These, whom she also calls “espertos ao inverso”35 are not the ones that harm her, but the ones who prevent her from securing herself. This is true violence in the wasteland–to be prevented from participating in communal and state forms of security.
Johan Galtung in his article Violence, Peace, and Peace Research defines violence as
“the cause of the differential between the potential and the actual”–which, in essence, mimics Estamira’s schizophrenic perspective on a violence that is reproduced and all that prevents her from bettering her life (Galtung 168). That is why the mise-en-scène, the
35 Upside-down wisecracks. A concept that is often repeated in the film. It offers Estamira’s view as being one riddled with irony and sarcasm along but also a consistent inversion of priorities and logic. 178 piles of discard and the thunderstorm, represents the violence upon the wasted. The objects that highlight her being-wasted keep her as such.
THE CORPOREALITY OF WASTE OR THE MATERIALITY OF WASTED BODIES
Waste, the decayed female body, the abject conditions in which it is found and
Juarez as the backyard where the leftovers of neoliberal production are thrown away parallel Estamira’s female body, surrounded by waste and in abject conditions. From the dead girl and the trash-living woman neoliberal capitalism no longer extracts work–they are, in other words, wasted beings, already thrown out. They represent, as Bauman notes, the sinister negative side of production. Or, as Slavoj Zizek points out by citing Fredric
Jameson: “The exploited are not only those who produce or ‘create;’ but also (and even more so) those who are condemned not to ‘create’” (Less than Nothing, 1004). The ones unable to participate in capitalist alienated work are also denied citizenship. This, in turn, prevents them from participating in surplus accumulation, production, and consumption.
Here, the act of wasting appears as an extreme mode of capitalist control that is endemic to neoliberalism. If the material conditions of neoliberalism in modern spaces consist of the post-industrial production of goods, globalization and post-modern aesthetic practices, in the anti-modern spaces (wastelands) where the neoliberal logic and the morality of the market rule, the preferred mode of production is wasting.
In New Slavery Kevin Bales notes that disposable people are maintained in deplorable living situations while work, energy, and life is extracted from them. But neither the dead women on Backyard nor Estamira are profit-making subjects. In other
179 words, they are not disposable beings; they are already-wasted. For these wasted characters, waste is more than an adjective: wasted is a reminder, the fact that they are no longer producing subjects, but have been already discarded. “To waste” as an action is to get rid of the disposable. That is, our characters are what Zygmunt Bauman calls Wasted
Lives they have already been taken out of the space of the subjectifying violence of production. Instead, they face a new type of violence, one that does not subjectify them to the hegemonic mode of control.36 Bauman characterizes these lives, not as reserve labor, but as “surplus population,” a “variety of human waste” (Bauman 39). By understanding
(a) how these characters relate to the mise-en-scène of waste and (b) how wasting is central in the process of neoliberal hegemony, we are faced with subjects who are excluded from the state and for whom citizenship is, at best, a questionable mode of empowerment. For example, by exclaiming “Vocês é comúm; Eu não sou comúm,”37
Estamira attests to the lack of a shared or common culture. In other words, as they are wasted beings, these characters cannot appeal to even the most rudimentary, emergent, or cultural form of citizenship.
Just about thirty minutes into Backyard/El Traspatio two children find the remains of four young women sprawled over heaps of leftover construction trash, burnt trees, and other random objects on the arid sands of northern Mexico. The confluence of detritus and the dead female bodies is no coincidence. Such is the space of waste–all is abject, and the body is but an object outlining who can be and cannot be. The female
36 In the last chapter I explore the modes of violence that wasted and disposable othered beings enact as a form of subjectification 37 You are common. I’m not common. 180 bodies and the trash are reminders that women cannot be subjects in the violent rule of the wastelands, as femininity is considered a type of vulnerability. Similarly, during the filming of the Brazilian documentary, among the piles of waste, the body of a woman is found in the mounds of trash of Jardim Gramacho, similarly to how the bodies that are found in Backyard/El Traspatio. Bodies without life are waste. But such detritus has further connotations. Waste speaks of those who make it and of itself. “Isso aqui, é um depósito dos restos. Às vezes é só resto e às vezes vem também descuido. Resto e descuido,”38 explains Estamira when admonishing that discard is the product of a careless logic of production. The simultaneous appearance of dead-female bodies and waste highlights Estamira as a lone survivor after social death–she has been cast aside by other catadores or landfill collectors as a witch. In this way, the materiality of the bodies and their decay lead us to the psychic realm. Later in this chapter, I examine Estamira’s schizophrenia as a way of thinking that allows her to survive in such a space of decay.
What is important to note is that in the Mexican film as well as in the Brazilian documentary, feminicide is what frames the disposability of female maquiladora workers and the socially-dead schizophrenic subject. Waste is not an empty object waiting to be filled with meaning. It is a socially constructed sign that also frames as abject Estamira’s and other bodies because they all make up the mise-en-scène of the waste-space.
Femininity, waste, and the main characters appear in the same sequences, one with the
38 This is a deposit of leftovers. Sometimes its just leftover and sometimes it is also lack of care. Leftover and lack of care. 181 other and this juxtaposition is produced by a patriarchal, modern, neoliberal capitalist logic that is pivotal to engaging with these films.
IT’S NOT THE STATE, OR ABJECT CITIZENSHIP
In the spring semester of 2014, I had the opportunity to take a survey course on
Brazilian Urban Studies under the guidance of Dr. Lorraine Leu. At the end of the semester, the course participants drafted a few pages of text that summarized what we had learned after a semester-long search into understanding the forces that define, construct and delimit Brazilian Citizenship mostly within the boundaries of the city. In the seminar, we studied citizenship in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador,
Brasilia, as well as, thanks to other classmates, other less-studied cities like Curitiba,
Maceió, and even the ruined city of Fordlândia or the bustling metropolis of the Amazon
Belém. During the course, many films helped us approach the concepts that were being discussed in texts from various fields. One of these texts made it to this thesis. The documentary Estamira (2004) directed by Marcos Prado and produced by Prado himself and José Padilha39 impressed me. At the end of the semester, thinking precisely of
Estamira, we produced some final thoughts that spoke of an “abject citizenship,” thinking of subjects that transit in spaces where the state appears intermittently to enforce war-like or bare-life biopolitics reminiscent of states of exception. As a result, characters that live in squalid conditions, like Estamira, exemplify how the nation-state establishes processes
39 Director of the 2014 Robocop remake, the famous Tropa de Elite (2007, 2010) films, but also the documentary Ônibus 174 (2002) which he directed with Felipe Lacerda 182 of abjection through violence on its citizens. This would in turn mean that they are the subjects of an “abject” citizenship. This concept remained dormant in my thoughts and eventually drove me to questions regarding the mediated relationship between space and the body in neoliberal Latin American film –countries in the region, after all, have been shaped by different iterations of neoliberal economic policies, and share similar ideas of nation and citizenship.
I recall the term “abject citizenship” when thinking of Estamira and her life in the wasteland because abjection and citizenship seem, as I write this text and better understand both, to form an oxymoron. That is, abjection refers to an ejection, a characteristic of derision and being outside. Citizenship describes the opposite: belonging, participating, and empowerment in relation to the state. In other words, citizenship sets the conditions of death and life determined by the state’s monopoly on violence, but abjection is being thrust outside the state’s space. Achille Mbembe’s concept of Necropolitics and Agamben’s conceptualization of the “state of exception” explore the ways in which life, death, and the state relate within the nation-state’s limits.
However, being abjected, dejected, wasted, or thrown away by the state implies also being beyond the necropolitical, beyond the state. In the previous chapter I explored what it means to be abject and the processes of abjection in private spaces. In this chapter, I have looked at how abjection in public spaces also refers to an intersectional vulnerability that places female and racialized bodies in danger. Once wasted, these vulnerable bodies are considered to be thrown outside the state and into the wasteland. Being outside means that the relationship with the state is no longer defined through a monopoly on violence. 183 That is, the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics–the psychic control of the body and repetition of the modes of power as a panopticon of power–is still present, but these biopolitics are not mobilized solely at the benefit of the state (Foucault 195–229).
Instead, as the state gives way to the market as enacting democracy and subjectification in neoliberalism, the ability to waste or discard the other ceases to be monopolized by the state and can be mobilized by private entities. In contrast to Mbembe’s concept of
Necropolitics (where the state holds beings in states of injury), here the market upkeeps a politics of death– thanatopolitics, where beings exist in states of death (physical, social, etc).
In this second chapter, I have, so far, explored the aesthetic qualities that these films mobilize to demonstrate how the wasteland is the site of intersection between body, space, and waste. Up to now, I have freely moved between using the terms vulnerability and being-wasted because, as the titles of the chapters note (flushing it away, throwing it away, tossing them out) to be wasted a being must be marked as vulnerable first. I have also focused on the processes of wasting and the way they are represented. This means that to become wasted, the characters are first marked as disposable. Yet the difference between the conditions of vulnerability and those of being-wasted is equally crucial to exploring the limits between abjection and citizenship. The difference between these is axiomatic. That is, an already-wasted being is someone who has been marked as a non- citizen, as inhabiting the wasteland, the space that is outside the state. A wasted-being is symbolically constructed as an abject being. The term wasted here allows me to highlight
184 the new non-citizenship that is established with the state, the process of becoming- wasted, and the qualities of undesirability and disgust that represent them aesthetically.
In the following sections, I will explore this difference between the abject and the citizen. First, I will define certain key terms and introduce the historical relationship between the state and the cinema in Latin America and outline how this has changed during different periods: the foundational cinema, Cinema Novo and the revolutionary period, and the neoliberal period. Then, I will present the instances where wasted characters in Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio come in contact with the state. This demands an exploration of different forms of citizenship that have been theorized and of the explanations of the characters’ conditions as abject. The chapter will close out by presenting a form of subjectification without the state, a type of subjectification that does not depend upon the interpellation by the state. This type of subjectification, however, still needs a set of rules and a name. I propose that these rules are not those of the state, but those of the market. Thus, I address a broader inquiry of whether the state is at fault for the feminicides of Juarez, and for the slow death of people who do not have access to hospitals or healthcare. If the state is not directly causing the wasting, deaths, and de- humanization of people–who are not its citizens because this state is simply not present in the wasteland–it is, nonetheless, responsible in its retreat from vulnerable spaces that allows market forces to waste them.
In retrospect, the paradox of Abject Citizenship points to the necessity of better understanding citizenship and abjection as complementing terms. This requires us to map the limits of the nation-state and inquire about the material and everyday realities of those 185 living outside the nation-state, in the wasteland. In the title of this dissertation “the poetics of waste,” I refer to the aesthetic and artistic indexes mobilized to represent the act of wasting. Poetics, coming from the greek poesis refers to the act of making, in this case, of making wasted-beings through their representation as abject, as moving through spaces of waste, as dejected from the state. Importantly, this situation does not leave us without an exit as Estamira reiterates Deleuze and Guattari’s schizological proposal through her enacting of a non-modern logic to explain what wasted beings can do about their situation. This requires us to revisit the politics of being-wasted as a politics of death where power is mobilized not in favor of the state but in favor of the market.
BEYOND NATIONAL CINEMAS OR PRIVATIZING THE NATION
National Cinemas map the nation-state and outline the national spatial practices of belonging and self-recognition. They provide the visual representations of national myths and enable the citizens to establish affective connections and belong to the state.
Cinema’s ability to transmit messages through sound, written word, and image, makes it an interactive medium. Such interaction has only increased with the development of video, the handheld camera, and currently cellphone and activity cameras, have all further cemented it as an accessible product. The academic study of Latin American
Cinema has understood its development periodically. For example, the Mexican Golden
Age of Cinema is a unique period where foundational myths of nation were commonplace. If before the development of cinema, the national myths of nation formation were disseminated through literature and other folk and cultural practices, in
186 the first half of the twentieth century films created the national myths of liberalism, progress, and a mode of scientific modernity, as Laura Podalsky notes in the case of
Argentina (2004). Similarly, Nagib (2007) notes how the dichotomy between urban and rural spaces in Brazil has been, and still is, central in understanding modernity as is the case on films about the sertão40. The same dynamic is present between urban and suburban locations such as the favela, as Ivana Bentes noted (Bentes, “Sertões E Favelas
No Cinema Brasileiro Contemporâneo”). The same division is recurrently explored and plays a central role in recreating national identity in Mexican films like, Mai Morire
(Enrique Rivero, 2012), Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, 2009), Drama/Mex (Gerardo
Naranjo, 2006) where the rural subject appears as source of a national uniqueness.
However, ever since neoliberal practices began affecting Mexican and Brazilian cinemas, the relationship between the rural and urban has mutated and the representations of the state-citizen relationship have undergone varied changes that include the redefinition of policies of securitization and the modes of subjectification for the citizen.
The state is no longer understood as the harbinger of safety and modernity. Instead, modernity's notions of progress, democracy and subjectivity are deferred to the market.
As a result, the state functions as a simply a manager of security and as a strengthener of the market. As seen in early neoliberal cinema in both Brazil and Mexico, neither the urban nor the rural provide sites for citizenship-empowerment of the other. The filmic exploration of how women, black, indigenous, and sexually non-normative peoples exist
40 I have explored this national space in earlier chapters and will return to it in detail in the following chapter. 187 in these spaces attests to the failure of neoliberal multicultural politics of identity of the state. Instead, the exploration of the urban and rural leads these characters to cultural and consumerist citizenship as sites of empowerment still directed towards the same homogenizing efforts of progress and modernity that the state has traditionally supported.
This shift towards the increased appearance of the other, the failure of the state, and the mobilization of the market to supply for subjectification is exactly what Ignacio Sanchez-
Prado notes in his exploration of neoliberal cinema in Mexico. Brazilian Cinema also develops the same qualities in neoliberalism. As an example, Sanchez-Prado notes that
Danzón (María Novaro, 1991) explores a working-class urban female’s sexuality, her inability to relate to the nation, and her search for her place in the multicultural state through her trip to the coast(Sanchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism 15–59). Similarly,
Ivana Bentes notes that Central do Brasil also questions urban women’s normative femininity, motherhood, and sexuality through a return to the interior (Bentes, “Sertões E
Favelas No Cinema Brasileiro Contemporâneo”). Thus, the market replaces the state as mediator of democracy and citizenship, and this affects the way in which space is socially constructed. In Consumidores y Ciudadanos (1995), Nestor Garcia Canclini notes that
“consumers’ interpretative communities” establish the citizen as consumer and vice- versa. As an antidote for the “crisis of the nation” neoliberal empowerment through the nation mobilizes the discourses of nation for their national subject to simultaneously become citizen and consumer (García Canclini 196).
It is this change in the modes of citizenship that prompts Canclini to question what place of national cinemas have in a period of transnationalism. This leads Canclini 188 to ponder the relationship between Mexican national cinema and Hollywood (García
Canclini 134–39). Canclini’s focus on Mexico, however, ignores that Mexican national cinema was always a transnational venture that was actively imposed through out the rest of Latin America.41 What does indeed change in Mexican cinema is that its producers and filmmakers now are some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Written in 1995,
Canclini’s text foresees the development of neoliberal Latin American cinema into the twenty-first century, the transition of Mexico’s “Tres Amigos” into Hollywood and the increased transnational nature of independent filmmaking, both thematically and in terms of funding. While certainly many national cinemas in the Americas continue to address localized problems like ethnic and racial representation and national identity, the training, funding, exhibition, and recognition of independent filmmaking push these national cinemas towards an ever-more transnational reality. While independent cinema does increasingly depend upon international funding sources, national funding is still central, even if supplemental to international funds. Similarly, films produced by large conglomerates or corporations, such as Televisa, Albavisión, Netflix, Globo, and even by the likes of Eugenio Derbez and his incursion into Hollywood, consistently aim to find audiences beyond the national, regardless of whether the productions are made within national boundaries or across them. Even smaller film industries like Central American cinema have a clear goal of establishing transnational audiences with films like Morazán
(2017) by Hispano Durón, Días de Luz (filmed across different Central American
41 For more on the subject of the politics and the domination of Golden Age Mexican cinema through out Latin America see El Cine Mexicano se Impone (2011) by Maricruz Castro Ricalde and Robert McKee Irwin. 189 countries, TBA) or even Julio Hernandez Cordón’s recent efforts at making film in
Mexico and Costa Rica.
Because neoliberal policies and globalization change the relationship between cinema and citizenship and between citizenship and space changes, we are reminded of
Jeff Garmany’s advice on the very concept of citizenship:
Herein lies one of the many pitfalls in citizenship, constituted as a legal category and brandished as a discourse of the state. Perhaps citizenship that can be appropriated, at least temporarily, for radical, progressive social change, but ultimately, citizenship is a category–a very spatial one in fact–that tends to ‘other’ and exclude rather than acknowledge multiple differences and include. When appeals are made along the lines of citizenship and the rights that citizenship guarantees, they address the state… (Garmany 18) In other words, although cultural citizenship developed through discourses of identity and belonging is central in the way we analyze and understand culture in a post- national and multicultural world and societies, the category of citizenship itself is still mediated and granted by the state. Acknowledging this implies that certain modes of cultural identification and belonging go beyond the state and do not necessitate citizenship to enact forms of empowerment and subjectification. That is, power is effectively mobilized outside the limits of the state. This begs the question, what is it that exists beyond the state? Whether we take the neoliberal state to be the state of securitization or we follow Canclini’s notions of citizenship through consumption, the answer is clear: the market is what’s beyond the state. When Canclini notes that citizenship goes from being a productive process (productive of self and subjectivity) to become a mode of symbolic consumption, he denotes citizenship as being constructed as much through legal discourse as by culture: citizenship as state-managed discourse and
190 citizenship as a consumable discourse, as a malleable and marketable, or sellable mode of identification. This latter form of citizenship is the type of citizenship available in the neoliberal state. Or else, it is a citizenship granted by the market but managed and distributed by the state.
ABJECTION AND THE STATE OR ENDRIAGO SUBJECTIVITY AND THANATOPOLITICS Framed within the changing and evolving relationship between state and cinema, the aesthetic and social conceptualization of abjection denies citizenship because these two terms are mutually exclusive. The productive opposition of citizenship and abjection points to more than conceptual paradigms as it exposes a set of interactions (or the lack of interactions) between representatives of the state (police, medics, army, clerics, etc.) and those wasted-beings who intermittently come into contact with the state’s structures. In avoiding any interaction with these disposable, vulnerable, peripheral beings, the state effectively sets up a vacuum of power that enables violent actors the wiggle-room to enact spectacular wasting violence. Within this framework, I will now analyze the instances when wasted beings interact, willingly or unwillingly, with the welfare state to point at how those instances outline political modes of power. This will guide us towards a crucial difference between necropolitical and biopolitical enactments of power. By noting that there can be life in death (symbolic, social, etc…), I refer the concept of thanatopolics as introduced by Sayak Valencia in Gore Capitalism. Through analyzing these politics of death, I point to the wasteland as a site for the formation of “sujetos endriagos” or draconian subjects, that is, beings that become subjects through the
191 enactment of death upon others. As Valencia points out, the mode of subjectification achieved by these draconian subjects can be understood as a return to the “self as sovereign” and the de-centering of the state. By rethinking the limits of the state also denote the spaces where the rule-of-law is enacted, my analysis proposes that these politics of death are not necropolitical (because neither death nor states of injury are performed by the state) but instead foundational forms of subjectification central to modernity. In this perspective the wasteland cannot be understood as a state of exception whereby the state enacts violence by suspending the rule-of-law. Instead, this thanatopolitical violence is necessary for the re-construction of the state but now as a product of privatization (the accelerated design of neoliberalism) that is central to the neoliberal state. This would mean that the wasteland is effectively the product of the enactment of death by the sovereign, and the byproduct of the modern production of the state. Both the state and the wasteland are produced simultaneously through the subjectification-through-death of the endriago subject.
I am interested in enumerating the instances in which the characters come into contact with the state to expose the visual, spatial, and political instances where state’s absence is noted. These instances point at the neoliberal state as a vulnerabilizing and securitizing force whose failure to protect and empower its subjects prevents them from subjectification and effectively disempowers them. The first of these instances of the absence of the state will be a quick analysis of the papers, photos, and other material/photographic and documentary sources present in the films. In both films, one being a documentary and the other being a fiction film, the female characters who are 192 subject to this power of death lack documentation. In Estamira this is seen in the absence of Estamira’s paperwork as a state-protected worker and her inability to keep a job other than the one at the landfill, while Backyard highlights the ineffective tracing of the number of dead or disappeared women and the role of maquiladoras in controlling women’s bodies. Secondly, I will point to the moments in which both Estamira and Juana face illness and rape and how the state’s absence and the market enable to make them vulnerable. Because the state is subject to the market’s push-and-pull the latter’s decisions have key effects on the way in which the state is mobilized. The governor summarizes all of this succinctly in Backyard, talking to his right-hand man, Ramirez, as they leave Juarez saying “esto de las muertas es un avispero. Mejor dejarlo tranquilo, que mientras más le movamos peor nos vá” [this thing with the dead girls is a hornets’ nest, its better to leave it alone, the more with mess with it, the worse it gets for us]. In the media climate of neoliberal interactions between the market and the state, the representatives of the state either ignore the problems or act in the shadows, as just another enforcer of violence in the vastus, the wasteland.
Carolina, Estamira’s daughter, tells the story of her father and her mother’s previous life: “era uma vida de verdade.” It was a real life, she says. They continue speaking and the conversation touches upon their differing spiritual beliefs. After a brief argument, Carolina continues:
Vivía com meu pai, né? Numa casa boa. Meu pai era mestre de obra, ganhava razoavelmente. Tinha uma combi. Tinha… numa época, tinha uma Belina. Ela tinha pendente de ouro; eu também tinha bastante. Meu pai dava. Até então tudo bem. Vivia bem com ele, mais o meu pai judiou muito dela, muito muito dela mesmo com traição, levava mulher até dentro de casa dizendo que era colega. Ai 193 ela não aceitou. Ela começou brigar, né, xingar, ai ele puxou faca pra ela; ela puxou faca pra ele, aquela brigarada toda. Ai botou a gente pra fora de casa. Ai de lá começou a luta, né? [She lived with my father, you know, in a good house. My father was a foreman, made a reasonable amount of money. He had a van at that time, a Belina. She had gold earrings and I also had a lot. My father gave them to us. Until then, it was all good. She lived well with him, but my dad was cruel to her very, very, very much, even cheating on her. He would take women to the house saying that they were coworkers. That, she didn’t accept. She started fighting, you know, cursing, then he threatened her with a knife; she menaced him, all that fighting. Then he threw us all out of the house. That’s when the struggle started, you know?].
In Carolina’s monologue, her voice-over can be heard while the visual track features pictures of Estamira, Seu Leopoldo, her brother (Herani) and herself, including her father’s ‘registro de empregado’ (employee’s registration). Although this story is centered on Estamira, the pictures shown by the documentary refer to a time of family and of existence within the panoptical order of the state.
The description of Seu Leopoldo as a subject of the state but also enactor of
Estamira’s abuse sets his actions within the biopolitical repression of the female that is characteristic of the performance of patriarchal violence enacted by subjects of the state.
In other words, Seu Leopoldo mobilizes violence in order to become empowered as a subject of the state. This, in turn, defines him as a biopolitical subject of the state.
Because the gendered violence mobilized by Seu Lopoldo enacts takes place within the home and the state, Estamira in a state of injury refers us to Achille Mbembe’s
Necropolitics. Starting from Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which presupposes the division of people into groups of those who deserve to live and those who deserve to die,
Mbembe notes that bioplitics is the psychic or psycho-logical reasoning (technology) of
194 racial difference (and of gender difference, as Butler notes in her the Psychic Life of
Power). This, according to Mbembe leads to racism (and, in a gendered critique of biopolitics, to patriarchy) and exists “to make possible the murderous functions of the state” (Mbembe 17). These functions are embodied by those who are subjectified by the state, who belong to the state, who are members of it. Thus, Seu Leopoldo’s violent actions that lead to Estamira’s expulsion from their house are necropolitical. By throwing her away from the house, Seu Leopoldo effectively discards Estamira. As a black woman,
Estamira suffers, here from both racial and gendered violence at the hands of the state. As
Carolina, the daughter notes, after Estamira’s exit from the home, “the struggle started.”
This fight for survival, however, happens intermittently, both within and outside the state’s reach. At one point, Estamira is working at a job (Carolina mentions her working and drinking with work-colleagues), other times she is sleeping and working in the lixão– outside the state. This is a reminder that the wasteland is a symbolic space that coalesces in the conjunction of waste, the abject, where there is a lack of state-presence and wasted- beings move. This separates the “outside” of the public space from the wasteland’s way of being “outside” the state. When Seu Leopoldo throws Estamira out of their house, she is still able to appeal to certain capitalist constructs managed by the state such as work, consumption, and leisure. However, it is when she decides to leave this configuration of power and modernity for the landfill’s abundance of waste that Estamira steps beyond the boundaries of the state.
Melissa Wright contemplates this being-forced-out and having to fight against the violence of the state in her work on femicide and necropolitics in Ciudad Juarez. To 195 remain protected by the state, young maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez, as shown in
Juana’s arrival to the border city, must participate in cultural and material consumption, they must work as the hands of neoliberal capital (exemplified by the maquiladora) and, as is recurrent in Juana’s many meetings with Cutberto, to whom she looses her virginity, they must consume leisure. However, the state, in ignoring certain spaces where these women move, effectively sets up the possibility for their disposing. Thus, Cutberto’s house inside an old and wasted yellow school-bus located on an uninhabited dirt road, and the road without street-lighting that Estamira’s daughter mentions as the location where her mother was raped for the second time, are void of state-presence, security, they are full of waste and abjection. In Estamira’s case it is not being kicked out of her house nor being sent to Juarez (in Juana’s case) that makes them vulnerable. It is the absence of the state. It is the necropolitics that threatens to dispose of them or keep them within its boundaries but in a constant state of injury. It is not being outside the home that poses a risk to these characters. It is the multiplication of instances where they transit through wasted spaces. For example, Wright notes that much of the symbolic struggle waged by activists with regards to the death of women in Juarez, many of them young maquiladora workers, centered upon re-framing these women as hijas, as daughters who must “exit” the home to work and aid the family’s income. This discourse sought to (re)value the lives of women whom the state, elites, and media had begun characterizing as “public women” (Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide” 715–16). Use of the term
“public women” sought to discredit these dead and disappeared women and imply that they were somehow deserving of their own deaths, to blame them for being dead. In other 196 words, calling the dead and disappeared “public women” is necropolitics. As Mbembe explains, necropolitics is the set of structural and psychic rules of power that differentiate between those who can live and those who must die. In order to make this differentiation, the state must keep the “slave” or the other in a state of injury (Mbembe 21). This condition was attained through the chaining of hands and feet which controled slaves and limited them, and through the disposition to end a slave’s life, keeping them in a state of terror.
This is where I find it necessary to understand the locations where the terrorized- other experiences fear. Fear [miedo], as Rossana Reguillo reminds us, is the affective relation of being scared–the recognition of the possibility of receiving violence. While terror is the political immobilization produced by such fear (Reguillo). Reguillo notes that this forms a “mythology of punishment” [mitología del castigo] that is enacted upon subjects that abandon the traditional structures of power. Punishment is what helps instill the same terror central to the symbolic construction that Teresa Caldeira exposes in City of Walls (2000). Taking as a starting point Michael Taussig’s concept of “terror as usual,”
Caldeira notes that violence can be trivialized when it is treated as a natural occurrence.
Because of this trivialization categorizes the terror of drug trafficking as distant from the self, is understood as resolved individually and not in the social sphere. Individual and privatized modes of punishment enact what is essentially a mythology of punishment
(Caldeira 279–80). The construction of fear across Latin America is masterfully explored in Susana Rotker’s edited volume Citizens of Fear (2002). In it, Jesús Martin Barbero also points out how media coverage of violence socially constructs a form cultural 197 citizenship among those who consume this coverage and instructs its public how to react.
Meanwhile Ana María Sanjuan points out that “the state’s limitations in guaranteeing order and public security […] have dangerously widened the socially and politically excluded fringes […] making the exercise of citizenship impossible for the most vulnerable elements of the population” (Balan 91). Although Sanjuan attributes this expansion of the fringes to the Venezuelan state’s economic and political crisis, this parallels what I have pointed out about the enacting of neoliberal policies in both Mexico and Brazil. In both countries, violence has multiplied precarious and peripheral spaces.
Neoliberalism has multiplied the spaces that experience being at the limits of the state (I will return to this point in the following chapter when I explore the multiplication of otherness and liminal spaces).
Estamira denies the god of churches, or the state’s structures of control
(Althusserian ideological state apparatuses) that purport to give safety but deny it to her.
In excluding even the cultural markers of precariousness, Estamira signals that her position is not at the limits of the state, but fully outside of them. This cut-and-dried division (between being on the limits of the state and being outside of it) is necessary to understand that in the absence of the state. It is out here where she is at the mercy of endriago sovereign sobjects who benefit from empowerment through violence in the wastelands. After all, the creation of the state depends on the creation of the wasteland as much as the maintenance of the subject of the state depends upon the enactment of necropolitics on the other. This much is clear in the events represented in Backyard. First of all, the film also points to the absence of documents that count the victims as members 198 of the state. When Captain Bravo meets Sara, who runs an NGO called CAREI focused on helping women (based on the real-life organization Cooperative for Assistance and
Relief Everywhere International). Bravo notes that “ni siquiera hay un archivo formado”
[there isn’t even a real archive]. Sara answers, “voy a completárselo, nomás por no dejar” [I’ll complete it for you just so that its not left]. There, Sara proceeds to give the captain a series of newspaper articles with pictures and descriptions of the 680 disappeared and dead women to whom she referered earlier. Sara and Bravo construct an archive and put down countless photographs on the desk in front of them. The camera focuses on the images. The film thrusts the audience to understandanding the magnitude of the problem. Thus the camera slows down, and stops to emphasize the conversation between Sara and Captain Bravo. As they resume looking at the photographs, the camera sweeps very close and slowly over the pictures of disappeared women until it returns to focus on Captain Bravo. As the captain looks out from the desk to the wall in front of her, the camera reveals an entire wall of pictures and notes related to the disappearances and deaths of women in Juarez. The absence of such an archive in the police office exposes that these 680 women do not matter to the state. More than that, the fact that a private citizen, and a member of a privatized entity (an NGO) is able to create an archive, exposes that in the absence of the state, and of state-administered citizenship, these bodies do exist in the privatized sphere, although not as citizens. This is the product of the policies outlined in Caldeira’s and Reguillo’s texts. That is, much like Estamira acknowledges her existence outside the state and outside the control of ideological state apparatuses, fully in the wasteland, where the dead female bodies of Backyard also 199 exist—outside the state. These citizenships of fear function as a form of vulnerability that predisposes subjects for disposability. And as Rotker, Reguillo, and others have pointed out, these are directly under state control. But vulnerability through fear alone does not explain how they are wasted. That is, if these deaths are produced by the state, as
Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics points out, then it is the state that should benefit from their wasting. However, since the state is not present, NGOs, businessmen (like Mickey
Santos), organized crime (like the Cheros), and individual enactors of violence (like
Cutberto) are the ones who benefit from the women’s deaths. Instead, it is the absence of the state that enables the production of fear. Without the state’s presence although the state benefits.
OTHER CITIZENSHIPS OR “IS IT FEMICIDE OR FEMINICIDE?” In looking at the performances of citizenship by women in the state capital of
Chihuahua, and the forms of citizenship historically available to women in Mexico,
Charlotte Haney points to how the fracturing or dismemberment of citizenship is the state’s response to the subjectification of wasted women through discourses of
“sisterhood” or “daughterhood.” It is true, as Wright notes, that NGOs and citizenship groups began calling disappeared and murdered women “sisters and daughters” in order to mobilize public opinion to the defense of women being killed and disappeared. This move challenged the state’s statistics and launched a national and international campaign against the deaths of women because they are women, commited in the country, and in the states of Chihuahua and Juarez. This same process is represented in Backyard when
200 the police finds eight more bodies thrown in the desert while the alleged serial murder of women, Abdallah Haddad aka el sultán, is in jail. After Captain Bravo finds Hilda, a victim of rape seconds before she is killed in the desert, Sara calls a reporter to ask her to publish a note on women being killed only because they are women. “En Juarez hay mujeres violadas y asesinadas cada mes, eso ya no es noticia” [women are raped and killed every month in Juarez, that is no longer news], the reporter says. To this, Sara answers that “el chiste es que usted haga noticia de primera plana que las muertas ya no son noticia en nuestro país” [what is important is that you make first-page news that dead women are no longer news in our country].
Haney notes that the state’s response to this gathering of anti-feminicide forces was to define feminicide as the death of a woman for gendered or sexual reasons and to specify that that sexually active women working in prostitution or breaking the limits or parameters of state-deemed “proper actions” are the only ones that do not count as feminicides (Haney 242). Haney expands the mythology of the “public woman” to include the term “cualquiera” [any and nobody] By admitting the term feminicidio or feminicide into legal lexicon, however, the state has reclaimed and limited who is and is not deserving of state protection (Haney). This type of “dependent citizenship,” as Haney terms it, subjugates and makes female citizenship hinge on a woman’s relationship with protective males (Haney 245). Such dependence allows the state to ignore the death of any non-dependent females as “cualquieras.” While Haney’s point is that such dismemberment (of who deserves state protection and who does not) fractures the body politic, my focus is to understand who causes the violence and how to lay claim to safety. 201 This is precisely what happens to both Estamira and Juana in their respective stories.
Estamira, for example, is considered to be outside the regime when she went out drinking with her friends from work until very late, as her daughter notes. Moreover, although the daughter admits that her father was generally to blame, because Estamira is the one kicked out of the family home. She and her children are punished because she is unwilling to let her-self be physically abused and defends herself. Although Backyard does not criticize Juana overtly, she is seen flirting with other men. At one point, she is taken into the police station for questioning in relation to Captain Bravo’s investigation.
This presents Juana as willingly occupying dangerous spaces. Being cast outside the formal definition of those who can advocate vis-à-vis the state and those who follow the strict rules of the patriarchal family structure, both characters are announced as cualquieras. As victims of violence against women for being women, they are effectively in danger of being expelled, abjected from the state. Ideologically, the state defines feminicide in a way that ascribes blame to societal change but not to itself. At the end, it is women who are blamed for their own deaths.
Haney’s work points to the need to repeatedly question the terms “feminicide” and “femicide” and to understand the place that the state and society have in the protection and death of women who are killed because they are of being women. I begin by acknowledging the differences between these terms and proposing a framework to understand and differentiate them while taking into account space and subjectification (as well as patriarchal, racial, and structural violence). Because I have already delved into how Backyard and Estamira expose the connection between environment, race, and 202 citizenship, and the ways their female bodies and waste cross that connection, in these final sections, I understand the wasteland as the site where abject female and racialized bodies are wasted spectacularly. Since Backyard acknowledges spaces characterized by their environment as socially constructed, it shows the relationship with these spaces to be a metaphor for the struggle, pain, and violence that must be tamed in the same way that documentaries like Boca de Lixo (1993), Maquilapolis (2006), or Lixo
Extraordinario (2010) emphasize the need for a modern response to the challenges of waste and nature. Meanwhile, Estamira, thanks to its central character, challenges modern notions of nature and presents the lived experience of the Deleuzian schizology that I introduced in the previous chapter. Thus in subjugating or destroying nature, modernity is effectively mobilizing upon a feminized environment the same modes of power that, as Haney notes, the state reproduces in feminicide.
In a 2006 article “¿Qué es feminicidio?”, Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato explores how to define a feminicide and what constitutes one. Segato begins by tracing the terminology and pointing out the English and Spanish terms, femicide and femicidio, or feminicide and feminicidio. In tracing these terms in academic exchanges, one notices a common sense of urgency for the safety of women’s lives among Spanish-, Portuguese-
, and English-speaking academics. However, there also are major divergences in the uses of the terms. In the aforementioned article, Segato notes that, as crimes committed under the guidance of the principles of patriarchy, feminicidios42 are “claramente, crímenes de
42 Through out the text I have and will continue using the word feminicide as a translation of feminicidio and femicide as a translation for femicidio. 203 poder, es decir, crímenes cuya dupla función es, en este modelo, simultáneamente, la retención o manutención, y la reproducción del poder” [clearly, crimes of power, that is, crimes whose double function is, in this model, simultaneously to retain or upkeep power, and to reproduce it] (Segato 4). For Segato, feminicide is the term that recognizes a woman’s death as the byproduct of the mechanism whose goal is the reproduction of power. As this term has been institutionalized in certain legal discourses and national bureaucracies, Segato has also proposed the term femigenocidio in an effort to properly term women’s death at an international level. By establishing a terminology the death of women can be legally sanctioned. Recurring to this terminology in her quest to analyze the large number of feminicides in Brazil, Izabel Solyszko Gomes explains that in the
Brazilian case, the terminology is limited and that because of the racial context of the country, feminicide must be considered as also overlapping intersectionally with necropolitics. Moreover, Solyszko Gomes traces the history and development of the two terms through Latin American academic conversations around the topic. She cites
Marcela Lagarde who initially translated the term femicide when it was first used by
Diana Russell (Gomes 26–28). As Lagarde explains elsewhere:
Cuando traduje el texto de Diana Russell, me tomé la libertad de modificar el concepto, ella lo llama femicide y entonces yo lo traduje desde hace ya varios años como feminicidio, precisamente para que no fuera a confundirse en castellano como femicidio u homicidio femenino; no, yo quería que fuera un concepto claro, distinto, para que entonces viniera junto con todo el contenido del concepto, que es, como ya lo expliqué, muy complejo [When I translated Diana Russell’s text, I took the liberty of modifying the concept. She calls it femicide so I translated it, already a few years ago, as feminicide precisely so that it would not be confused, in Spanish, with femicide or feminine homicide. No. I wanted it to be a clear and distinct concept, so that it
204 would come accompanied with all the context of the concept, which is, as I have already explained, very complex]. (Lagarde 22)
Solyszko Gomes offers the reader a further exploration of the terminology that circumvents the term feminicide. What can be acknowledged, however, is that feminicide has become the accepted parlance for referring to the death of women because of power’s misogynist violence. The term, however, backfired as the state assimilated it and reserved the term “feminicide” for situations in which a woman was murdered for reasons that they deem as falling under “gender violence,” which have since been limited to inter- relationship violence as Charlotte Haney notes (Haney 714–15). Still, academics have held unto the term and consistently re-imbue it with notions of structural violence, while proposing a more complex terminology as a way to understand the multiple forms in which gendered violence produces the death of women (Gomes 32–37). Ileana
Rodriguez, for example differentiates from Lagarde’s equivalence of “femicide and female homicide” (as cited above) and direct both femicide and feminicide to speak of an implicit impunity by the enactor of the violence.
Both terms (femicide and feminicide) point to a violence that is directed at women to reconstitute specific modes of patriarchal power (i.e. recreating the patriarchal nuclear familial structure). The term feminicidio is utilized, for example, in the report of the International Human Rights Federation in their International Research Mission on
Feminicide in Mexico and Guatemala. In that text, they define it as the murder of women because of their gender (Meléndez 5). Meanwhile, the Guatemala Human Rights
Commission (GHRC) provides an information sheet where they differentiate between the 205 terms femicide and feminicide. The first refers to the death of women because of their gendered condition, and the second, in line with contemporary academic thought, refers to the state’s involvement, maintenance and enabling of misogynic violence that leads to death. The differentiation made by the GHRC makes the term femicide particularly relevant to describe enactors of violence beyond the state. In fact, when Ileana Rodriguez outlines the differences between strong and weak states, she notes that weaker states are those where femicide goes unpunished, effectively providing impunity to the killer.
While impunity in femicide does happen within the state, impunity through the state’s absence is a more effective mode of disposability that is enacted by the neoliberal state.
In other words, if feminicide is the gendered enactment of necropolitical violence or death that the state produces or condones, femicide is the gendered enacting of death beyond the necropolitical or outside the state’s monopoly of violence.
CONCLUSION OR THE VIOLENCE OF THE MARKET
Throughout this chapter, my goal has been to exhume the biopolitics of the wasteland and to point to how these are permitted by the state but enacted by private actors, draconian subjects, in their search for a mode of sovereign empowerment and subjectification outside the state. I have noted that such an emptiness of the state is precisely what the wastelands embody. In the wasteland––a vastus, or a space void of a state monopolizing violence––a pre-state racketeering structure develops because of the absence of the state, which makes citizenship impossible. In fact it is the substitution of necropolitics for a thanatopolitics that points to the absence of the state. While
206 necropolitics is strictly produced by the state, the spectacular wasting of the abject is produced by anyone (beings already casted outside after their social death or their physical death). In such a vacuum, however, the biopolitical, that is the psychic forms of control, remain through the presence of the market. Yet, unlike within the state, where the psychic structures of biopolitics procure the maintenance of the state, outside the state, by private or privatized entities are the ones that mobilize power structures. The discarding of these bodies is symbolically and ideologically justified through discourses of modernity and patriarchy and once they are outside the state’s jurisdiction, they are left to fend for themselves. Violence and death, Sayak Valencia proposes, are the preferred modes of subjectification by draconian subjects. Such is clear in the interactions that leave behind the dead bodies of young women in Backyard but also in Estamira, where it is the state’s negligence that pushed her into the landfill.
In Jardim Gramacho, where Estamira works and sometimes lives, she is completely outside, rejected by most others dwellers and workers of the landfill who call her the bruxa do lixão (witch of the landfill). Estamira’s schizophrenia, however, frames her relationship to the waste, the landfill itself, and to the uncontainable power of nature as an empowering ones. Unlike psychological (through psychic power) modes of subjectification, Estamira embodies the schizology that, in the previous chapter, I explored as necessary in creating non-violent venues for subjectification within the wastelands. At one point, in her delirium, she tells the director “antes ontem eu dei uma briga com meu propio pai astral. O senhor oviu? O senhor oviu o toró? O senhor sabe o que é o toró? Eu estava brigando. Eu estava brigando com meu pai astral!” [The day 207 before yesterday, I had a fight with my own astral father. Did you hear? Did you hear the toró? Do you know what is the toró? I was fighting. I was fighting with my own astral father]. In her schizophrenia, Estamira reframes the natural phenomenon that is the toró
(extremely strong rains and thunder that occur as two storms clash) as a conversation, a fight between her and an almighty power. Nature, in Estamira’s schizology is cast as affected by human will. She refers to this power as the “remote control,” the ability to mold the environment that God and herself have. This new mode of perception of nature reconstructs it as more than an unwilling site or space to be manipulated through notions of design, science, or modern ingenuity. This is where Estamira differs from Backyard/El
Traspatio, or other documentaries like Maquilápolis,43 Boca de Lixo,44 and Lixo
Extraordinario.45 These three films procure the re-entering of their characters into the state, as citizens, as subjects of the state and portray the waste-spaces they inhabit as rescued and recycled. Meanwhile, Estamira proposes that the relationship with nature can be re-framed to produce empowerment and subjectification beyond the limits of the state.
While the other films all advocate for the intervention and saving of their characters, in Estamira, the goal is not to extract the protagonist from the wasteland. To insert the characters within the state and turn them into citizens, Lixo Extraórdinario introduces the characters living in Jardim Gramacho into the art world and turns them into Brazilian cultural agents and insurgent citizens. Maquilápolis turns its characters into
43 A film centered on an activist group that begins a lawsuit against a multinational company. 44 A documentary that procures the representation of the ‘real’ lives of the inhabitants of a landfill. 45 A story focused on the creative artistic process of Vik Muniz and its consequences in the activism of a group for the defense of the rights of catadores 208 a sort of environmental citizens by pursuing the reasons for their poor living conditions (a concept that I develop further in the following chapter). Boca do Lixo looks to self- recognition, representation, and the gaze as modes of subjectification through media and cultural citizenship. Even Backyard/El Traspatio also seeks to maintain the female body within the securitized spaces of the state. Through the story of Captain Bravo, Backyard supports the inclusion of women within the national structures of power but also notes how such structures are made to castigate and expel women. In Juana’s case, although the film frames her as strong (she is learning self-defense) and determined (she repeats empowering feminist phrases so that Cutberto will leave her alone more than once), it also points to the inability of those modes to prevent her death. At the end, her naivety and empowerment mean nothing in dangerous spaces. Although this film seemingly advocates for the empowerment of women, cumulatively it appears to suggest that
Juana’s death was deserved. Ultimately, the empowering cultural discourses and politics of gender are unable to save Juana’s life.
In highlighting the lawlessness, the emptiness of the time-space-ideological construct of the wasteland and allowing the character’s schizological re-structuring of the laws and relationships outside the psychic modes of power, Estamira leads the way to a non-modern restructuring and a questioning of modernity. In the schizological, literally being diagnosed as schizophrenic, as Deleuze and Guattari would note, it is up to the self to create its boundaries, its limitations and its modes of relating to an-Other. In the following chapter I will discus precisely how the thanatopolitical or the racialized and gendered modes of violence create schizological reframing of reality that reinforce the 209 market dynamics of violence. Furthermore, I will approach the Othering notion of age, a major difference between the wasted characters in Backyard and the elderly Estamira–at the end of the day, the most aware and sovereign character, the subject of abject citizenship.
210 Tossing them Out: Vulnerability in the Interstitial Spaces of Waste in La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas (2012) and Baixio das Bestas (2006)
In the summer of 2013 I visited Guatemala to do research on Central American cinema. At the time, a friend mentioned knowing El Chiqui, one of the actors in
Marimbas del Infierno (2010) a fairly recently successful independent film directed by
Julio Hernández Cordón. We met in zona 10, near Casa Comal, a few blocks from
Oakland Mall, one of the fancy areas of town. Since 2006, Casa Comal had become a key player in the training of filmmakers in the region. In 2012, Rosa Chavez, Maya poet, presented the first set of short films written, directed and produced by indigenous filmmakers working with the same Casa Comal. Like Chavez, Victor– El Chiqui– also found a place to develop as a filmmaker. Victor Hugo Monterroso became the unplanned star of Marimbas. The film was meant to highlight Blacko Gonzalez, the metal-head leader of Guerreros del Metal, and Don Alfonso Tunche, a marimba musician running away from the extortion of dangerous gangs or “maras.” But it was El Chiqui’s personality and charm that made him a standout character and won him the Central
American Film Festival’s Ícaro prize for Best actor in 2010. Victor’s magnetism was palpable when my friend introduced us. We talked for a bit and he mentioned that he had been working at Casa Comal for some years and that he was working on a few projects for the future.
In August of 2014 details about his research for a feature film were published along with the news of his death. El Chiqui lived in Colonia Landivar in zona 7. Apart from being known as dangerous, the neighborhood is also known for bordering the 211 basurero de la zona 3, the dumpster of the capital city. El Chiqui’s dismembered cadaver was found on August 11: his arms and legs at the crossing of 7th avenue and 29th street, zona 7, while the rest of his body was scattered across different places in the dumpster
(“Cadáver de Actor Fue Desmembrado”). His death was mourned by much of the creative scene in Guatemala and unlike many of the murders in the country, the people responsible were tried and found guilty in October of 2017 (“Dos Personas Condenadas a
50 Años Por Muerte de Actor”). The trial revealed that the killers were two adults and a minor, while another minor had been present. The gang of extortionists was said to have drugged and sedated the victim to later kill him and leave his body parts as a warning to blackmail a business. They, then, left his torso and head at the dump while his extremities were positioned at the entrance of the business they hoped to extort. The dismembered body, they hoped, would shock and instill fear in the business owners.
It was discovered that El Chiqui had been researching the gangs of the dumpster, especially going into “la mina”, the swamp at the end of the dumpster that is said to be replete with bones, and the forgotten and lost dead (local legend says that after not paying their space in the national cemetery, which also borders the dump, are thrown out in the swamp). Victor’s death would exemplify how spaces of waste constitute an interconnected geography, which cartographically span from the privatized (private space where market logic enables gore practices of death), as seen in chapter 1, to the public spaces (where any actor willing to engage in the spectacle of wasting may enact violence), as explored in chapter two. In this chapter, I look at the other location, those
212 spaces where El Chiqui’s remains were found: the interstice be it a street, a saguán, or a threshold– spaces of transition.
The privatized private46 and privatized public47 spaces appear connected to the landfill in the Guatemalan imaginary, which helps understand that terror is made visible through the spectacular violence of waste to which El Chiqui’s body was subjected. Both
Miguel Ángel Asturias’ famous novel El Señor Presidente (1946) and the film La Jaula de Oro, directed by Diego Quemada-Diez point to transitory or interstitial spaces as continuations of the discarding begun elsewhere. The dump of Guatemala City is where
Miguel Cara de Ángel, main character and right-hand man to the president of the story, finds Pelele bloody and with a broken leg. The Pelele had murdered an important character in drunken stupor at El Portal del Señor, itself a place of transit where drunks and the homeless rested in the story. The same landfill is the home, workplace and the starting location of Sara, Juan and Samuel’s journey in La Jaula de Oro (Diego
Quemada-Diez, Mexico, 2013). Even as La Jaula de Oro begins, it presents a sequence where black crows fly above head like in Estamira (Marcos Prado, 2004). Starting and ending in the dump, however, Estamira’s characters stay put while La Jaula de Oro follows the children’s voyage to the United States. Through their pilgrimage, they face harassment, death, disappearance, theft, and even forced work. These films and stories point towards transitory, interstitial, or in-between spaces, as part of the geography of
46 Private spaces that obey the affective and psychological modes of neoliberal capitalist engagement as I noted in the exploration of the films Cheiro do Ralo and Malos Hábitos. 47 As I noted in my analysis of Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio, the wastelands are open to public access however they are framed as capitalist spaces where private and sovereign endriago subjects enact violence. 213 wasting violence. These transitory sites of wasting is best exemplified in La Bestia, the train that Central American migrants ride in their attempts to cross Mexico into the
United States. In this lawless and transitory site, anyone may enforce the spectacular wasting as violence or death at will, be it la mara, la migra, or any private actor, all these being what Sayak Valencia calls sujetos endriagos, draconian subjects. Victor Hugo
Monterroso’s story and spectacular wasting signals the interconnectedness of the private and public spaces of wasting. More than that, it points to youth as especially vulnerable when transiting through abject spaces.
THE INTERSTITIAL WASTELANDS OR SPECTACULAR WASTING IN TRANSIT OR SPACES IN-BETWEEN The interstitial wastelands in this chapter are socially constructed spaces that find their highest state of danger in youth, ethnicity, and yet again gender. In this last chapter, then, I approach the films La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas (Luis Mandoki,
Mexico, 2012) and Baixio das Bestas (Claudio de Assis, Brazil, 2006). In La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas (hereafter Sabina Rivas or SR), Luis Mandoki tells the story of
Honduran underage teenager Sabina Rivas who is forced to flee her home in Honduras.
Based on the Novel La Mara by Rafael Ramirez Heredia, she is employed at “El
Tijuanita”, a dirty bordello in the Guatemala/Mexico border city of Tecún Umán. With hopes of becoming a famous singer in the United States, Sabina performs at the brothel where she hides from Jovany, her brother. She is the object of all male character’s sexual desire and as such, will be exploited, abused and raped. This includes her brother with whom she is found having sex in his home in Honduras (this prompts Jovany to kill his
214 parents and both to flee). Sabina’s desire to migrate to the United States, however, will be consistently thwarted. This makes it so she returns to “El Tijuanita” at the end of the film gesturing to a defeat of her dream and loss of hope. In Baixio das Bestas (hereafter Baixio or BdB), Claudio Assis introduces Auxiliadora, also an underage teen whose grandfather
(and rumored progenitor), an amateur entomologist, strips her naked in the back of a gas station to be seen by locals and passing-by truck drivers that stop in the town. With references to both a 1930s poem and the film Menino do Engenho (Walter Lima Jr.,
1965) both about Pernambuco, Assis also introduces Cícero, the rich son of a local landowner and his partner Everardo in the search for sexual (repeatedly anal) escapades climaxing in his raping Auxilidora. Meanwhile, the rest of the town goes about on their business, cutting and gathering sugar cane, processing it, working and partying, getting ready for a sambada, and for a performance of Maracatú, a local music genre.
These films point to enactments of spectacular wasting at locations that are consistently in flux: the Mexico and Guatemala Border in Mandoki’s film and the Brazil's
Nordeste in Assis’. These two spaces are affectively charged spaces that are oftent presented as only temporarily inhabited. Instead, the main characters are congealed in the in-between and as such embody the abject of the location. As in the previous chapters, the simultaneity of spectacle and wasting violence is central in understanding the role of violence in the processes of subjectification of the characters and directing the audience’s gaze. Simultaneously, as Rosanna Reguillo notes in Culturas Juveniles, categorizing youth as dangerous– as bodies that create, reproduce fear, and suffer in a state of terror also is part of the social construction of youth spaces as transitory. In turn, bodies-in- 215 transit are more likely vulnerable and disposable when they embody the intersectional aspects of race, femininity, gender (as noted in previous chapters) and also youth and ethnicity (as we will see in this chapter). Where wasting exposes the effects of disposability in the ideology of modernity, spectacle points to the modes of constructing the characters of the films as disposable and wasted beings. In the following pages I will examine these three modes of representing spectacularly wasted beings in the wastelands.
First I will summarize how the last chapters describe the wastelands as voids of the state, rule of law, and spaces of non-modernity demarcated by their abjection as exemplified in the presence of waste: landscape, youth and ethnicity.
THREE SPECTACLES OF WASTE OR ETHNICITY, LANDSCAPE AND THE YOUNG GIRL The spectacle of waste is an idea based around the disposability of bodies whose only value is that of serving as fodder for the maintenance and increase of modernity.
Film, like literature before it, has traditionally explored the idea of nation and belonging to it. National projects revolve around the ability of the modern nation-state’s to create a disposable other. As I mentioned in the analysis of Malos Habitos and Cheiro do Râlo, the foreign others (in both films it is Peruvians) help demarcate the state’s limits. As such, I read Sabina and Auxiliadora as not only young girls but also considered ethnic- others within the larger perceptions of otherness end ethnicity preset in the films. In both cases such otherness is constructed by identifying them as characters limited through their age, sexual abuse and the locations where they exist.
216 In Sabina’s case, she is attempting to break the law to enter Mexico and eventually the United States. The concept of illegality, Kristeva notes, is created to denote the abject as breaking of social norms and the rules of modernity48 (Kristeva).
Because our characters live outside the limits of what is socially accepted, they are prohibited from being part of it. Where peripheral subjects attempt to enter the state and claim citizenship, neither Sabina nor Auxiliadora do, instead they are limited and kept outside by male forces. They exist beyond the limits of the rule of law. Their presence, thus, is considered unsightly (abject) because they are "outside" of where they are supposed to be. They are othered and "illegal" beings. Beyond their racial characteristics,
I focus on how the construction of Central America and the Northeast as separate and retrograde spaces stereotypes these locations to embody a colonial otherness of anti- modernity that results in ethnic otherness. This ethnic otherness, as I will explore, functions intersectionally with racism. Nordestinos are recognized, much as Latinos who live in the United States as the opposite of the modern “national.” Central Americans
(who also span different nationalities or places of birth) are also recognized as colonial others in Mexico and effectively undesired, as the film portrays.
The next of these modes of spectacle can be seen in the use of landscape. Because of the centrality of space in framing Auxiliadora and Sabina as disposable and eventually wasted, landscape and setting are central for their characterization and representation.
48 “The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good con- science, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility” (Kristeva 4).
217 Therefore I will explore how each film represents their respective spaces of transit: the
Brazilian northeast (which has historically been represented through the interior/coast or desert/ocean dychotomy) and the Mexico/Guatemala border (historically known as a dangerous and unregulated space of transit). Following the academic work on spatial filmic that I have highlighted through the previous chapters, I follow the films’ focus on landscape to represent mobility. As it turns out, if traditionally road films are centered on mobility and take place in the same locations as SR and BdB, but these films negate movement to the main characters they are, perhaps, better understood as anti-road movies. Mobility happens in the films but not for our characters who seem stuck, and their lack of movement contrasts with the road next to which they live (Garibotto and
Pérez). This, in turn, signals to the use of the Deleuzian concept of the time-image, which, as Jens Andermann and Laura Podalsky note in some Brazilian and Mexican films, respectively, point to the constraining of the possibilities of connecting audience and character, unsettling the audience’s gaze and the characters’ representation as subjects (Andermann; Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary
Latin American Cinema). Thus, these spaces are not portrayed as sites of hope. Instead, the Sertão and the Mexico/Guatemala border have been framed as the site of struggle-to- overcome for a greater goal that will be achieved elsewhere (Southern Brazil and The
United States respectively). Instead, the films place the character in the interstitial dystopian non-place of the wastelands.
Both Sabina and Auxiliadora embody contrasting characteristics: desire and disgust, consumption and waste. These characteristics point to their status as abject but 218 also to embodying capitalist spectacle (Debord, The Society of Spectacle). Therefore I look to two more characteristics of how they are framed as abject and disposable.
Understanding youth as an age of transition, and ethnicity as a historical and structural concept that intersects with race, this chapter explores how the abject, young, female and bodies in-transit are configured as disposable in the interstitial waste-spaces. The process of wasting is, thus, seen as a becoming, always in formation as this is central to both youth and ethnicity. This, in turn, recalls Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts of becoming- machines and schizology as modes of existing and thinking within the wasteland. These interstitial sites of waste are closely related to abjection because of the abject’s relation with the interstitial (the abject is the reminder of the symbolic nature of difference, as
Kristeva points out). The characters’ bodies in flux– neither child nor adult, national nor located outside the national– are constructed as vulnerable, abject and disposable. As in the past chapters, the location of these beings is central to enabling their wasting. But it is the simultaneity of body and space, waste and violence, in concert with the characteristics of otherness outlined in the previous chapters that produce them as wasted. Although
Auxiliadora and Sabina begin the films as disposable, because they can be wasted spectacularly for the benefit of sovereign subjects empowered through death, they end their films as wasted beings.
While Auxiliadora is an unwilling participant in the performances where she is visually consumed, Sabina is a performer and wishes to become a singer when arriving in the US. These films seem to contribute to the “claim [that] contemporary commodity culture, and popular media in particular, prematurely and excessively sexualises girls” 219 (Driscoll, “The Mystique of the Young Girl” 286). Different from the concepts of the child, teen, or adolescent, the gendered term Young Girl fit the situations, relationships and realities in which Sabina and Auxiliadora exist. Taking from the French feminist group Tiqqun’s conceptualizing of the young girl as spectacle, then, the spectacle of the
Young Girl lies at the nexus of trafficking and prostitution. As the films show these characters are always already visible, consumable and disposable. This is emphasized further through their performances in abject intermediary spaces where these girls are constructed as disposable, visible and desired while abject because of the locations where they exist. Marc Augé’s theory of non-places enlightens these performance locations as sites of transience that are somehow suspended in the movement implied around them and where these young girls embody spectacle. Both girls perform differently in these spaces/non-places. Secondly, while Sabina’s performances consist of speaking and singing, Auxiliadora stands in silence. Still, neither seems to provide an exit for our characters. This contrast calls attention to the interplay of voice and silence. Either way voice will become silence. And silence as suspension reflects the characters’ status as stagnant de-humanized wasted objects.
ETHNICITIES: CENTRAL AMERICA (IN FILM) IS TO MEXICO AS THE NORTHEAST (IN FILM) IS TO BRAZIL Ethnicity is a key concept if one wishes to understand the difference in vulnerability between indigenous and mestizo Central Americans crossing Mexico. I begin exploring this by noting the colonial implications of race, and the integration of war and terror into the formation of Central Americans in Mexico as ethnic but also racial
220 others. Afterall, coloniality and race are concepts constructed along with modernity and
Latin America through European rule. This matrix of meaning is (re)created or
(re)formed through the symbolic construction of Mexico as a land of danger and war from the United States in a neo-colonial fashion in the war against drugs. It extends further to encompass and ethnicize Central American migrants crossing Mexican territory. In Brazil, Norderstinos face a similar mode of racialization rooted in colonial structures of power and agrarian extractive practices. These modes of racialization and formation of ethnic others denotes them as abject, vulnerable and disposable beings.
Films like El Norte (1987) and La Jaula de Oro (2012) explore ethnicity and race by focusing on indigenous and gendered characters. In both films, young indigenous characters die as if unable to embody the promises of modernity as Alicia Ivonne Estrada notes when exploring these Maya border crossings (Garibotto and Pérez 175–95). In El
Norte the character that remains alive is an indigenous male teenager who sheds his indigeneity in favor of taking up a US Latino identity (Garibotto and Pérez 187). This contrasts with his dead sister (pointing to gender as a vulnerable category of itself).
Meanwhile in La Jaula de Oro both a girl and an indigenous boy die, leaving only a ladino or mestizo, lighter skinned boy alive (or at least not dead) at the end of the film. In another film, Sin Nombre (Fukunaga, Mexico, 2009) it is the survival of a virginal metiza
Honduran female that necessitates the sacrifice of a white Salvadoran gang-member.
With these many iterations, the relationship between ethnicity, gender, and race to the character’s value and disposability proves to be convoluted and variable. It is this entanglement that directs us to question the racial differences between indigenous and 221 ladino Guatemalans, a light skinned Salvadoran (Casper in Sin Nombre) and mestizo
Hondurans (both actors in Sabina Rivas are of Venezuelan origin) from a Mexican perspective. When Sabina attempts to cross the border with a fake Mexican passport given to her by her madam, the girl promises she’s been nationalized as Mexican.
However, officer Burrona, Joaquín Cosio’s character, immediately ousts her as
Honduran. No explanation is given in the film for his recognition of her as Honduran. In her anthropological research of the representations of Central American migrants in
Chiapas, Tania Cruz Salazar note that while Guatemalan women are perceived as ethnic and indigenous (and therefore docile and allowed inside the home), Salvadoran and
Honduran women are perceived as sexual objects.
This sequence repeats a discourse presented in Gregory Nava’s 1987 film El
Norte where an indigenous brother and a sister are advised by a family member to say they are indigenous people from Oaxaca so they are not deported. When Enrique (the brother) and Rosa (the sister) are given a ride by a Mexican truck driver they tell him they are from Oaxaca, to which he scoffs and laughs– clearly recognizing them as
Guatemalan. In her chapter on “Central American non-belonging”, Yahaira Padilla summarizes the reading of El Norte in saying that the film presents the characters as unable to escape the coloniality of power49, even after becoming diaspora. Although having crossed two national boundaries, the characters never stop being indigenous. In
Padilla’s perspective, Mexico is there only to be crossed, and as the film shows, even
49 Padilla explains that coloniality of power “is a system of dominance rooted in the social classification and integration of colonized subjects on the basis of race under European colonial rule” (Garibotto and Pérez 164). 222 while crossing the nation in-between their home and their end goal, the film shows that they are recognized as indigenous others. In the same text about the Latin American Road film, Alicia Ivone Estrada analyzes La Jaula de Oro and El Norte arguing that they “are border crossing films, because of the narrative frame they employ as well as their movement within the border and road movie genres” (Garibotto and Pérez 177). In La
Jaula de Oro, however, the opposite happens when Chauk, an indigenous Mexican
(Tzotil) is deported to Guatemala because he is thought to be Guatemalan. If anything, this confusion of race and ethnicity shows that both have a clear effect on their transits.
La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas, however, points to the need to question Central
American beyond the limited paradigm of US Latinx studies as migrant transits or the inability to cross Mexico has impacts the cultural construction of Central Americans at home, in Mexico and in the United States.
Contrary to the films previously mentioned, which Padilla and Estrada analyze as road films, in Sabina Rivas, there is no transit. Instead, the characters consistently feel the effects of precariousness of an ethnicity that denotes these characters as abject. The
Encyclopedia of Geography defines ethnicity as a social construct derived “from both an internal sense of distinctiveness and an external perception of difference” (Smith 1016).
Seen through Bauman’s concept of design, the making of difference is central to differentiating between the modern and the non-modern, the desired product and its waste. Meanwhile, Kristeva’s notion that the liminal is abject (because it reminds the self of its own otherness) points to ethnicity as an otherness that embodies abjection as a product of modernity (Reynoso 55–60). Sabina and Jovany are perceived as abject in the 223 Mexico/Guatemala borderland. In fact, they take up the two illicit acts that are stereotypes of the area: prostitution and gang-affiliation. Sabina and her brother run away from their home in Honduras after Jovany murders both his parents. Trapped in Tecún
Umán, in the Guatemalan side of the border, and unable to cross into Mexican territory to then advance into the U.S., the brother joins the Mara Salvatrucha 13 gang while the title character, Sabina, works in a bordello where underage teenagers perform singing and dancing numbers and are prostituted. The characters find themselves in a cycle of violence and in a location where there is no Guatemalan state presence, allowing the wasting of their bodies and lives. Padilla notes of the Xuncax siblings in El Norte, they are simply perceived as “brazos” (literally arms), bodies from which to extract labor
(Garibotto and Pérez 162). But the abject does not solely produce disgust. Kristeva notes that it is also enticing. This is visible through Sabina’s nearly magical energy that produces desire. The young Honduran teen embodies the seemingly oxymoronic quality of attraction and disgust when the U.S. agent in the Mexican border sexually abuses her.
While he sexually desires her, he also hurts and beats her. Burrona does not like stepping on Guatemalan soil. In a meeting with Doña Lita, Sabina’s madam, he tells her: “Yo no cruzo el Suchiate […] del otro lado en Guatemala no somos nada. Allá el SIDA anda en la atmósfera y eso es peor que la rabia de los murciélagos” [I don’t cross the Suchiate river […] on the other side in Guatemala we are nothing. There AIDS floats loose in the atmosphere and that is better than the bats’ rabies’]. Still he crosses to get Sabrina for “el gringo” – an American border officer who has previously physically abused Sabina while forcing her to have sex with him. As she fights him off at the entrance of El Tijuanita, the 224 brothel, Sabina exclaims in desperation “ese cerote quiere mi cara y sin eso no tengo nada” [that bastard wants my face and without that I have nothing]. The simultaneity of desire and disgust results in Sabina’s characterization as disposable.
When the Mexican consul in the city of Tecún Umán asks for Sabina he asks for
“la catracha” or “la hondureña” as does Burrona when he benefits from her prostitution.
At another point, Sabina complains to the homosexual presenter and right-hand man to
Doña Lita of having her name changed. She exclaims that she does not mind if he says she is from the amazon or “guacayíl”, referring to Guayaquil, Ecuador. The presenter explains that she doesn’t know anything. With a slight Chilean accent, he explains that with name like Gracie, Carla or Marilyn she could perform anywhere. As it turns out
Greisy (a possible spelling for Gracie in Spanish) is the actress’ real name. She and
Fernando Moreno who plays Jovany, her brother, are both Venezuelan. Passing as South
American, would seemingly make her more desirable and possibly get her out of El
Tijuanita. Alicia Ivonne Estrada notes that in El Norte, it is Mexican mestizo actors who perform the indigenous Enrique and Rosa Xuncax. While this could be read in terms of the under-representation of Central Americans in non-Central American cinema, I propose that Mandoki made this casting decision consciously. Mandoki’s other film representing Central America is Voces Inocentes (2004) although it was mostly filmed in
Mexico with Mexican actors. Even the film Sin Nombre (2009) only casted one Central
American actor for a title character with Edgar Flores playing El Casper. This invisibility signals to a reduction of Mexico repeating the patterns of otherness that are set in the
United States. It is, however, the character of Thalía played by Asur Zagada that may 225 somewhat clarify this situation. Zagada also played the character of Juana in Backyard/El
Traspatio (2012) the film I analyzed in the previous chapter. There, I pointed to Juana’s characterization as indigenous.
Ramón Grosfoguel notes that schools of social analysis “keep using racialized categories to lump together a diversity of ethnic groups” and instead proposes that race and ethnicity can be (and often are) mobilized together in order to demarcate the unwanted Other (Grosfoguel 316). This recalls Omi and Winant’s work on racial formation. They note that “linkage between structure and representation” of gender, race, ethnicity, and age as mutually socially constructed (Omi 59). In the case of
Mexico/Central America these ethno-racial formations are based on historic constructs that go back to the colonial period. This takes us back to Cruz Salazar’s findings of
Guatemalan characters perceived as indigenous while Hondurans and Salvadorans are understood as sexualized. Such sexualizing, if set in counterpoint with indigeneity, leaves only whiteness and blackness as the other racial categories available. Having Venezuelan actors play the stereotypically sexualized Honduran characters, the film suggests that there is a certain pan-Caribbean motion towards blackness.50
The simultaneous mobilization of ethnicity and race brands the Central American characters as colonial from the perspective of the Mexican characters. In a sequence when the Mexican General Valderrama and Licenciado Cossio have dinner with the
United States border agent Patrick, they look at a map of the Mexico/Guatemala border.
50 In her analysis of Black trans-Atlantic performance acts, Daphne Brooks notes that not only is the black body hyper-sexualized but also that in performance, spectacular representations of blackness can have the power to de-center or “disrupt” as forms of subjectification (Brooks 6). 226 The map features the cities of Tapachula and Ciudad Hidalgo on opposing sides of the boder, and Tapachula above them. The resulting agreement is that from Tapachula and in the rest of Mexico, the U.S. Americans will have control of the drug trade. From
Tapachula to Ciudad Hidalgo belongs to the Mexicans. And the Suchiate River below will be controlled by the gangs (who are not present in the meeting). Glenda Mejía concludes that this sequence “portrays the corruption of the authorities in power, the hegemonic and disciplinary domain of power based on bureaucratic hierarchies, and a law that depoliticizes oppressed groups' dissent” (Mejía 252). As these subjects engage in illegal actions, they seem to be suspending or upending the rule of law and metaphorically exemplifying Mexico as the road to the United States. I believe that the act of demarcating limits (mapping) points to the cartographies of nationhood and colonial power to which Grosfoguel refers. Not only do the Mexican characters cede control of Mexican territory to US authorities, but they frame Mexico as a space of transit. If we are to understand the place that the southern Mexican states and Central
America play in the Mexican imaginary, we have to go back to colonial times. While the
Viceroyalty of New Spain expanded unto Colombia (which was then the Vice Royalty of
Nueva Granada), it included, to the south, the Captaincy of Guatemala (and Socunusco).
At the time, the captaincy’s northern border included today’s states of Chiapas, Tabasco,
Quintana Roo, Campeche, and Yucatán bordering north with Veracruz and Oaxaca.
With Mexico’s independence form Spain in 1810, the captaincy of Guatemala
(the Central American Republic once it became independent of Spain in 1821) annexed to Agustín Iturbide’s Mexican Empire. Just two years later, Chiapas and Yucatán would 227 separate from Guatemala and annex to Mexico as the Central American Union broke apart. In other words, although Central America is understood as separate from Mexico there is a history of Mexican empire and as such, of colonial relations between the two spaces. Such coloniality is what white characters mobilize when they attempt to colonize
Sabina’s body. The historic relationship between the State of Pernambuco (the state where Baixio das Bestas takes place) and the Brazilian empire is different in that
Pernambuco (unlike its southern neighbor, Bahia) never became an independent nation.
Auxiliadora’s young female body, just like Sabina’s embodies the legacies of ethno-racial violence that coloniality51 and colonial history established. As a hereditary captaincy,
Pernambuco along with Bahia and Rio de Janeiro were, at one point, the largest sugar producers in the world. Where the other two states and their capitals were at one point or another seats of the Brazilian crown, Pernambuco’s historic significance cannot be underplayed. Although racial-ethnic identities can be mobilized by the characters to become empowered subjects, in the wasteland, these modes of Otherness serve to make them vulnerable. In Sabina Rivas’ opening sequence, when the local Mara Salvatrucha 13 chapter inducts Jovany, the leader explains to all present that they will never protect anyone who is not part of the “clica” – the gang. Through the act of induction, the denies nation, origin, gender, ethnicity, race and any other marker of difference as pointless when compared to group affiliation.
In Bog of the Beasts, English title for Baixio das Bestas, Claudio Assis turns the promise of Brazilian progress upside down as he focuses on the sugar cane-growing
51 Understood as the ideology of colonization. 228 Agreste region of Pernambuco. Assis challenges Glauber Rocha’s binary opposition of the northeast as between the ocean and the desert. Instead, the agreste as in-between space serves as the location of the story of Auxiliadora and her grandfather Heitor. In the film, Heitor, strips her off her clothes in the back of a gas station for the sexual enjoyment of passing-by truck drivers in exchange for money. As the film develops, other characters emerge: Cícero, and Everardo, agroboys52 who use and abuse prostitutes to satisfy their sexual violent desires. Their obsession with anal and oral-anal sex sets them in the path of wasting female bodies similar to that of Lourenço, Seiton Mello’s character in Cheiro do Râlo (2006) as I analyzed before. Cícero will eventually rape the teenage Auxiliadora while Everardo and other nameless characters will kill the prostitute
Dora. Two other characters central to the actions in the film are Mario, the leader of a
Maracatú (a carnavalesque troupe and music performers) and Maninho, played by
Irandhir Santos, who is digging a hole for a latrine and likes Auxiliadora. As these characters’ stories develop, in the back the sugar cane growing cycle continues as workers go back and forth on roads in the background and the fires of burning cane fields rage at night along with sambadas/carnival-like parties for the town.
Pernambuco has historically been a pole of literary, cinematic and cultural production as such it has been represented in Brazilian literature, film and culture. In O
Novo Ciclo de Cinema em Pernambuco, Amanda Nogueira asks if there is such a thing as
52 The right sons and inheritors of local landowners but I will develop the term further. 229 a distinct contemporary cinema of the state53. Such an exploration looks at productions that follow the history of neoliberal national film: Baile Perfumado (Lirio Ferreira, 1997) as part of the retomada of the 1990’s; Cinema Aspirinas e Urbús (Gomes, 2005) as well as Cartola (Ferreira and Lacerda, 2006) exploring the state’s past. The films Aquarius54
(Mendoça Filho, 2016) and Som Ao Redor (Mendoça Filho, 2012), meanwhile, explore the decadence of the Brazilian middle class and the results of globalization. In fact, Assis’ opera prima Mango Yellow (2002) is among those films that focus on everyday urban violence in urban Recife, Pernambuco’s capital. With newer director Gabriel Mascaro
(Boi Neon, 2015; Ventos de Agosto, 2014; Um Lugar ao Sol, 2009) joining the well established Kleber Mendoça Filho, Claudio Assis, Lirio Ferreira and Marcelo Gomes, these directors point to a Cinema of Pernambuco that looks to redefine the interior of
Brazil. If Central do Brasil (Walter Salles, 1998) dealt with leaving the big city to return to the interior of Brazil, Lirio Ferreira’s Árido Movie (2006) deals with that return in
Pernambuco, while in Viajo porque Preciso, Volto porque te amo (2016) Ainouz and
Gomes restructure ten-year old footage to put together a road movie that also looks at the
Brazilian Northwest as forgotten, backwards dry landscape. In Baixio das Bestas, however, Assis departs from the traditional focus on the arid desert-scape of the northeast, or the urban locations of other films. By focusing on the in between– the bog in the Agreste, neither the interior nor the coast– Assis challenges notions of the
53 Nogueira concludes that there is such a thing as new cycle of Cinema Pernambucano. Through her research, she uncovers the common approaches, trajectories, themes and an interdependent search for a style or aesthetic standard by the filmmakers of this cinema. 54 A more recent film and as such not explored in Nogueira’s publication. 230 Northeastern backlands but most importantly frames this location as partaking to the legacy of representations of the Brazilian northeast while also challenging them. As Dan
Sharp notes, Pernambuco is a site of nostalgia and what Is considered authentic culture .
Perhaps the other filmmaker that closely looks at locations not often represented in film is
Gabriel Mascaro. In Ventos de Agosto, Marscaro focuses in a forgotten town slowly being swallowed by the ocean’s rising tide. His most recent Boi Neon (2016), meanwhile, also looks at the Agreste region. Outside of Pernambuco, Rudy Lagemman’s Anjos do
Sol (Rudi Lagemann, 2006), Deserto Feliz (Paulo Caldas, 2007) and O Céu de Suely
(Ainouz, 2006) explore underage sex trafficking and prostitution in the rest of the north and northeast.
As Nogueira notes, this group of filmmakers has created an affective network built through collaborative work (Baile Perfumado had participation of nearly all of them) and through the pursuit to a varied representation of Pernambuco and the state’s cultural manifestations. Nogueira first notes the raise of Manguebeat, a musical genre that mixes maracatú and rock and whose best-known starts are Chico Science and Nação
Zumbi. In fact, Nação Zumbi’s musician Pupillo led sound design and sountrack for
Baixio das Bestas. This effort to represent the northeastern state in film is paralleled by its performer’s television presentations. Through his analysis of television performances,
Dan Sharp also highlights through its music the city of Arcoverde in the argreste has been framed as a site of nostalgia (Sharp 200). He concludes that artists from Pernambuco exotize themselves to obtain a sort of representational space in what he considers the colonial relationship between the Rio-São Paulo center of power and the northeast (Sharp 231 202). In BdB Mario explains that they would rather entertain people in Recife with their dancing and music than have to work at the plant or picking sugar cane. Heitor, the grandfather, rejects this saying that hard work makes one a good person while the dancing and singing is just an excuse to get drunk. The colonial relationship between the south and northeast of Brazil is also one that is built through racial discourses. Vinicius
Navarro agrees that the expansion of Pernambuco’s filmic production has produced varied discourses, his analysis of social inequality focuses on class as inequality(Navarro). Inequality (therefore, social class and difference) in the Latin
American contexts, however, cannot be disconnected from the racial differences at the center of coloniality (Grosfoguel; Skvirsky).
This ethnic-racial otherness of the northeast is further emphasized through the geographic and representational differences as produced from the Rio-São Paulo axis.
Luiza Lusvarghi notes that Pernambuco’s recent cinema has diverged from idealized representations of the northeast and the sertão just as Bahia’s recent filmography diverts form the hypersexual and essentialist representations perceived in Jorge Amado’s texts55.
In fact Lusvarghi’s points out that the Brazilian northeast has not always been geographically defined as it is today, these shifting limits point to a process of shaping southern and south-central Brazil (Lusvarghi 35). The excising of Bahia from south- central Brazil to become part of the northeast solidifies the past – be it the racial past
(Skvirsky) or the ethnic stereotypical (Sharp) within the limits of the northeast. As if
55 Dona Flor e seus dois Maridos (Bruno Barreto, 1976) based on Amado’s novel with the same title, held the record for most tickets sold by a Brazilian film until recently. 232 burying the myth of racial democracy, the reorganization of the site of the Casa-Grande, the captaincies, the racially mixed and black and indigenous Brazilians are limited to existence within the limits of the North and Northeast (Lusvarghi 35–36). This re- ordering, according to Lusvarghi, in line with Bauman’s notion of design, points to a process of streamlining the production of nation where the ethinicization of the
‘nordestino’ colonial subject is produced for supplying the rest of the country with symbols of nation. The cartographic processes in SR and BdB both speak to structural processes of making subjects as ethnic and racial others.
In 1986 Michael Omi and Howard Winant introduce the concept of Racial
Formation in the monograph with the same title. They meant to point to a theory that explores “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed” (Rosado and Kao). At the time, and often today, this perspective has been seen as opposing ethnicization perspectives on race that posited race as an imaginary category whose purpose was to denote difference and Otherness. In this perspective, race only existed to organize society in terms of the ruling class. However,
Omi and Winant point to race and racism as central concept to the way power is structured in the United States. Racial formation promotes that the processes of separation and of making and describing others is ever-changing and never stagnant. As
Grosfoguel argues, ethnicity is not only a signifier of societal difference. Instead it works simultaneously with racism in order to mark subjects as “more black” or “more indigenous” but also “more mestizo” or “more nordestino.” As I have pointed out when looking at Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio in the previous chapter, blackness and 233 indigeneity are racial categories that point out a character’s vulnerability to become wasted. Omi and Winant motion to Racial Formation as a critique that takes into consideration the fluidity of Race to note how it adapts to different social structures and reproduces violence over black bodies. Along with the aforementioned theory, Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s introduction of the term intersectionality, provide a fruitful encounter for understanding Grosfoguel’s idea that the two categories are closely linked (in indexical and historical ways), and work in synchrony with femininity and gender in the processes of wasting, as explored in the previous chapters.
The delineation of frontiers between Mexico and Central America and the internal re-structuring of the northeast within Brazil, as analyzed previously, obey the processes and logic modernization. As I explained in the chapter about Malos Hábitos and Cheiro do Râlo, the psychic logic of modernity proposes a certain type of order of border- making and separation. It is as Bauman realizes, the making of the outside and those who belong outside. As such, ethnic beings could be understood as those who begin outside but cross the divide and contaminate. Such a concept leads us to think of border making and ethnicity as a process of dirtying or making abject, which as Mary Douglas has pointed out is also socially constructed as dangerous and in need of cleansing. Burrona, the policeman, for example, notes this dirtiness when speaking to Doña Lita that “in
Guatemala AIDS is loose in the air” yet he, like all men in the film, desires Sabina (who lives in Guatemala) even if it is only to benefit economically from her prostitution. The same association of dirtiness and desire can be seen in the characters that live in the
Agreste as Auxiliadora’s job is washing clothes for other people. This constant process of 234 cleansing and separating is born out of the logic of modernity, and is the same process that creates spaces where such waste can be discarded. This violence of wasting is mobilized upon bodies that are considered vulnerable and disposable (as are ethnic beings) in spaces where the rule of law is suspended but processes of empowering disposing are enacted by the draconian or endriago subjects that Sayak Valencia describes in Gore Capitalism. As I explore in the next sections, landscape and the social construction of the young girl are two other concepts that are mobilized to reproduce precariousness and the spectacle wasting.
AFFECTIVE LANDSCAPES AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE BRAZILIAN SERTÃO Known for its dryness and rocky landscape, the Sertão is the large desert inland in the northeast of Brazil. Its inhabitants, known as sertanejos, have been represented in depictions of the Brazilian Northeast and as such, the Northeast and the Sertão have come to represent tradition and anti-modernity in Brazil. In the colonial period, the northeastern backlands were already considered the periphery, the opposite of the litoral or Brazilian coast where power resided. The dry inland desert opposed the fruitful coast (which at the time housed the Atlantic bush lands) and such a difference was utilized to differentiate between native Brazilians and the European settlers of the coast. Such discursive contrasts began appearing along with yearnings of independence (Lima). Yet, the independence of Brazil did not change the situation for people inhabiting the draught stricken locale. Against this disparity, spiritual leader Antonio Conselhero led an insurrection in the town of Canudos. He prophesied that “O Sertão vai virar mar e o mar
235 vai virar Sertão” [the sertão will turn into the ocean and the ocean will turn into the large desert]. As the first Brazilian republic was founded, however, state armed forces quelled
Conselhero’s uprising, as he defended the king of Portugal. The armed venture turned into a massacre that would be memorialized in Euclides Da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1905).
Da Cunha’s journalistic novel is key in establishing the Sertão as central in the formation of national identity finding in it the perfect location for the national subject. If
Brazil’s flag predicates “ordem e progresso”, the implication is that both order and progress are missing and the place that lacks them most is the most Brazilian. As such, the Sertão has recurrently provided the setting for cultural productions as these myths of nation are placed within its boundaries (Bentes, “Sertões E Favelas No Cinema Brasileiro
Contemporâneo”; Sadek, “A <I>serto</I> of Migrants, Flight and Affect”;
Andermann; Xavier, Sertão mar). But these demarcations are not coincidental. In a socio- historical and geo-economic analysis, innovative geographer Milton Santos proposed a spatial remapping of the “four brazils.” Santos concentrated the bulk of the northeast into a region characterized for being the site of the first European occupations and having a natural division from the Amazon through the large desert-land of the Sertão. His proposal is an alternative to the changes that the Brazilian government has done in the political move to outline different regions according to perceptions of similarity and difference, be these economic, historic, or ethnic, as I pointed out in the past section.
Another important period in the region is known as the cangaço or the period of outlaws.
During it, bandits raided ranches and engaged in any profitable activity. Lampião, leader of a band of cangaçeiros (as the bandits are known) and Corisco, nicknamed the diabo 236 louro (blonde devil) married Maria Bonita and Dadá, respectively. The cangaço lasted from the late 1800s into the first half of the 1990s. It became one of the most iconic social phenomena and especially stereotypical of the Sertão and the northeast at large and provided the country with a Robin-hood-like Lampião as a symbol of positive lawlessness.
In BdB neoliberal subjects of capital in the Agreste substitute the northeast’s utopian coast of endless ocean and long-suffering sertanejos in the interior. The Agreste, namesake to the rich agricultural history of the area, is a space that lies in between the nearly extinct Mata Atlántica of the coast and the Sertão at the interior. Neither one nor the other, the Agreste exhibits qualities of both and as such functions as an uncertain and liminal space. Such liminality is reproduced through the uncertainty of the secas
[droughts] for which the area is known. Amanda Nogueira points out that the filmmakers of this contemporary neoliberal cinema from Pernambuco search for new representations that maintain the northeastern state as the source of Brazilian identity (Nogueira). The
Northeast of Baixio das Bestas goes beyond the dichotomy Sertão that opposes it to the
Atlantic Ocean. Neither the dessert nor the sea, the Northeast is not portrayed as expected. Gone are the images of endless oceanic water and crashing waves or the idyllic vastness of the deserted pure golden dust. Instead, the promises of modernity have given way to a nearly post-apocalyptic abject dystopia of poverty, mass production of sugar cane and violence at the bog. To a certain point this is a “new” northeast, a “new” Sertão.
A focus on this space, however, functions both as a look-back, and a look-forward to the northeast. The film begins with still worms-eye view shots that range from wide to 237 tight shots of the oxidizing leftovers of a sugar cane mill processing plant in black and white, and grainy. The clouds seem to move in some shots and are static in others, yet the dark and uninhabited metal structures lie still. While most images are of different locations through out the mill, the antepenultimate shot shows the open-gable roof of the large steel house whose metal shingles have fallen, rotten and make the sky visible through the trapezoidal holes. Over the images, in a voice-over, a narrator reads an excerpt from “O regresso de quem, estando no mundo, volta ao sertão” by Carlos Pena
Filho (1929-1960): “Outrora, aquí, os engenhos/ recortavam a campina./ Veio o tempo e os engoliu/ e ao tempo engoliu a usina.// Um ou outro ainda há que diga/que o tempo vence no fim:/um dia ele engole a usina/ como engole a ti e a mim” [In another time, here, the sugar mills/cut through the hills./ Time arrived and swallowed them/ and in time it swallowed the mill as well.// Still there will be some who say/ that, at the end, time wins: one day he swallows the mill/ as it swallows you and me]. The lines recall not only the original poem whose title speaks of a return to the northeast, to Pernambuco, and more specifically to the Agreste. The filmic epigraph also recalls Walter Lima Jr.’s
Menino de Engenho (1965), which is cited as inspiration in the credits of the film. Based in the eponymous 1932 novel by José Lins do Rego, Lima Jr.’s film utilizes the same epigraph. However, the films have nearly antithetical notions of the Northeast. Assis’ film follows the denial of the utopia of the plantation, the colony or the cangaço56 but instead provides the film with a contemporary dystopia. The story, nevertheless, traces
56 Lucia Nagib has written tomes in English and Portuguese about the search and loss of Utopia in Brazilian cinema. While Nagib does not talk about dystopias, we can surmise that one of the possibilities visible from Nagib’s prospect that new venues are pursuit to fill the “exhaustion” of the spaces of utopia could be filled with dystopia. 238 itself and the problems it shows back to the historic and socio-economic struggles of the
Sertão.57
In this version of the Northeast there are rolling hills and endless fields of sugar cane, wedged in between the litoral and the heart of the backlands. It almost seems to contradict Jens Andermann’s statement that the Sertão is an exhausted landscape
(Andermann). Speaking of Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo, Andermann notes that the film's particular engagement with the stereotypies of the landscape speaks of an exhaustion of the Sertão’s iconicity. Baixio das Bestas’ focus on the Agreste as an interstitial space could be thought to challenge the Sertão as iconic of the northeast and instead of re-embedding the northeast with value. In other words, it could be thought as sidestepping Andermann’s contention because the film looks to a different location, therefore it challenges the iconicity of the Sertão. However, a better look at Andermann’s argument shows that what is exchausted is not the land but its condition “as an iconic, historically layered and contested site of representation” (Andermann 53). This idea of historically layered and contested site of representations is only further emphasized in
BdB as it is framed within the genealogies of previous cultural products that look at the northeast, the Sertão, the coast and the Agreste as a continuum. This idea of continuation and fulfillment of Anderman’s ideas is clear when looking at the bodies of water referenced in both films. In the film that Anderman analyzes, Viajo porque preciso, the character freely moves across the sertão’s highways as he considers the opening of an
57 In fact, the perceptions of Pernambuco and its inhabitants could be traced through these four cultural objects in four different time periods: the colony, the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship of the 1930s, the Cinema Novo and post-World War II period of the 1960s and contemporary neoliberal Brazil. 239 artificial canal as irrigation for the region. BdB diverges and gives up on the rocky dry dessert but instead of contrasting with Viajo porque preciso, the film seems to compliment it as it represents an area that includes a manmade dam.
“EL OTRO TIJUANA” AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE MEXICO/GUATEMALA BORDER In Mexican cultural representations and in social, global, political and economic terms, the northern border with the United States has had a much larger historic influence. Along with the differences in language, Mexican-American war and with the contemporary existence of NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement), the northern border has served as official limit to the United States ambitions of empire. But bordering the United States has become a foundational aspect of Mexican identity. Mexico is unique in that it is the only country officially in North America that speaks Spanish and the only Spanish-speaking and Latin American country in North America. Much as Cuba and Puerto Rico’s closeness to the United States has shaped their identity and place in the geopolitical spectrum, ceding nearly half its territory in the aftermath of the Mexican-
American war along with the shifting US-Mexico border has also shaped Mexico.
This has not stopped the United States from affecting politics in the rest of Latin
America. The Monroe doctrine had traditionally served as an excuse for the Aglo-
American government to infiltrate, threaten and even negotiate with other colonial powers with the excuse of defending Latin America. As scholars have pointed out this doctrine effectively excused the United States’ neo-colonial aspirations through the
Americas, the Caribbean and the Pacific. As Pary Pat Brady argues, by citing Edward
240 Soja’s notion of Thirdspace,58 Doreen Massey and Sandra Cisneros’ border text Woman
Hollering Creek (1992), the US-Mexico border has been constructed as a site of breaking as a site of scars (Brady 111–36). Writer and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa also proposes such a reading of the border in the iconic Borderlands/La Frontera (1987).
While the Mexico-Guatemala border has also been disputed in the past, the historic and cultural value of Mexico’s northern neighbor has shaped the Mexico-Guatemala frontier as “the other border” (Isacson et al.). However secondary the value given to the southern border is also socio-historical and as such it is also in flux.
Of the most important and recent historical processes that contributed in the framing of Mexico’s southern border were the 1980s civil wars in the Central American countries of what is termed the “northern triangle” (Guatemala, El Salvador and
Honduras), which caused a type of humanitarian crisis in southern Mexico. Mexico’s border area, as Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez represents in his novel El Retorno de los Mayas
(2013) became a site of refuge and survival for people and communities escaping the army’s genocidal actions. However, the violence that prompted the forced migrations can also be traced back to some United States intervention through the School of the
Americas’ (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) training of
Guatemalan Military during the thirty-six year conflict. As both the Guatemalan Human
Rights Commission and the School of the Americas Watch report, those trained in combat and warfare tactics would eventually turn to drug trafficking to utilize their
58 In a previous chapter have explored Soja’s notions of thirdspace both in the case o fthe US-Mexico border but also in how the notions of space and place owe to Soja, and Henri Lefevre’s conceptualizations in Thirdspace (1998) and The Produciton of Space (1991) respectively. 241 training (Legare; Human Right Comission). In 1990s Mexico, Los Zetas would recruit the GAFEs (Grupo Aeromobil de Fuerzas Especiales or Airborne Special Forces Groups, now called Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales) who were also trained at the school of the
Americas (Grayson and Logan; Grayson and Logan). As a result, both Guatemalan and
Mexican ex-Special Forces shape the economic and life politics of both the Mexican northern and southern borders. In 1994 as NAFTA’s first deregulations began being implemented, the Zapatista revolution took place in the state on Chiapas. Taking the imaginary of the North-Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the indigenous revolution in the south challenged perceptions of southern Mexico in a national and global perspective. This insurrection challenged local structures of power and in many ways peaked in 1997 with the Acteal massacre by a paramilitary group. Most recently it is the US-led War against Drugs that has played a key role in the militarization and creation of violence and socially constructed terror through the mobilization of modes and technologies of fear. It is within this process of social construction of space and fear through the presence of evermore violent groups that Dawn Paley notes that “terror plays a specific role in ensuring control over the population” (Paley 18). She does so noting the modes of instilling fear through the reproduction of evermore violent forms of death in the fight against and process of drug-trafficking have expanded the “accumulation through dispossession, which can include forcible displacement, the privatization of public and communally held lands, the suppression of indigenous forms of production and consumption” and as this text argues, disposability (Paley 18).
242 The idea that “Mexico es una gran fosa común” or a large mass grave belongs to an imaginary that sees both borders as linked through a continuum of violence and not separate (XHEPL, XEPL). The continuation of the two borders is clear in the expansion of armed groups’ and the paths of drug movement through both spaces. This is what some academics have named the “fronterization” of Mexico, which according to Cecilia
Sheridan Prieto is a historical process that goes as far back as the Spanish conquest
(Prieto). Within such a perspective, the entire country has become a symbolic and political border where the bodies that inhabit it are only seen in flux, in the process of transiting it. This does not mean that the entire country is always at the mercy of the violence of disposability enacted in processes of transit. Instead, it means that the act of disposability can be enacted if the conditions necessary are invoked. As I have pointed out in the previous chapters, the privatization of space, the abjection construction of the vulnerable being as disposable and the enactment of spectacle are central in this process.
In the social construction of Mexico as border its inhabitants are simultaneously constructed as vulnerable. After all, being and territory are mutually constructed notions
(Spíndola Zago 45–49).
This simultaneous construction of both borders, the privatization of space and the transit of bodies through Mexico for the Global-North59 consumption are present in SR in the Tijuanita, the brothel where Sabina is prostituted. In using the name to refer to that space as parallel to Tijuana, the specter of US-border-crossings is spread over Mexico.
59 I employ the complimentary concepts of Global North and Global South to differ between what traditionally has been denoted as the First and Third Worlds. 243 As the film begins, we are introduced to a clica or a local chapter of the MS13 gang. A skinny neophyte, whom we later learn he’s Jovany, Sabina’s brother, is initiated with a rite of thirteen seconds being beat by the other members. Only then is he admitted into the gang. This sequence sets the tone for the type of space that the film will be exposing, but also for the type of difficult images and intermediary spaces that the audience will see. The first shot is of the gang-members walking atop a gray cement aqueduct. As they walk across, the sunset behind them underscores the fact that the sun-lit part of Jovany’s life is over. The rest will be darkness. As the sun sets over the young man’s beaten body, the darkness, accelerated by a fade to black, falls over his future. This also primes the audience since everything that happens thereafter, that is, for the rest of the film, will be a continuation of the darkness. While we are expecting to be introduced to characters, we are not introduced to them. Instead we see their silhouettes: reflections, absences, and leftovers. They stop walking once in the marshes of what one can assume are the
Suchiate River’s shallows. After the leader of the gang exclaims “somos todos para uno y uno para todos: la única familia. Viva la clíca!” (We are all for one and one for all: the only family. Long live the gang!). Jovany’s second birth is a critical metaphor. He is born at, to and of the Mexico-Guatemala border with his violent family. Much like the cinematic prologue and epigraph in BdB, this sequence refers to the literature that inspired it: Rafael Ramirez Heredia’s La Mara. In beginning the film through this superimposing of the border as the dominion of the Mara and the lack of the rule of law, the film signals that the border and the spaces where we will transit will be sites where spectacular violence is in display. 244 FROM SITE OF TRANSIT TO INESCAPABLE WASTELANDS: THE SERTÃO AND THE ROAD MOVIE In the 1960s, Cinema Novo is known for its representations of the backlands recurring to Conselhero’s prophecy. In a palimpsest juxtaposition of the sertão’s different violent events, Glauber Rocha’s foundational film Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol
(1963)60 would return to the sertão. Rocha was following in the steps of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas (1963), which is traditionally understood to be the beginning of the Cinema Novo period. In “The Sertão in the Brazilian imaginary at the end of the millennium”, Luiz Zanin Oricchio notes that the harshness and hunger of Cinema Novo’s sertão is perceived as possibly solved through the implementation of modernity (Nagib,
Brazil on Screen 139–56). However, since the Cinema da Retomada of the 1990s, the panorama has undergone a transformation where modernity and technology and economic progress are perceived as failed. While still holding true to Oricchio’s assertion that the sertão is the space where “the country’s contradictions are expressed with the maximum intensity and impact”, contemporary films about the sertão reflect the affective formations that Laura Podalsky proposes referring to Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling (Nagib, Brazil on Screen 140). These analyses point to the changing of views on the Sertão and note that it is socially constructed and open new readings. When Williams proposes structures of feeling, he notes that these are “forms and conventions– semantic figures– which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming” (Williams 133).
60 Ismael Xavier points to this film by Rocha as well as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas (1962) and Ruy Guerra’s Os fuzis (1964) as the great inaugurating trilogy of Cinema Novo (Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment 237). 245 Comparing Baixio das Bestas and Árido Movie (2005), Marcel Vieira and Érico
Lima note that these pernambucano films continue Cinema Novo 1960-80’s pursuits of connecting the self, politics and ideology while also taking Cinema da Retomada 1990’s focus on the subject, their personal experiences and the aesthetic pleasure of looking at a
‘beautiful’ cinema61 (Vieira and Lima). Sara Brandellero, follows this same perspective in her study of Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (2009). Brandellero argues that landscape is key in enabling the blending of the affective and political realms to pursue both goals in concordance (Garibotto and Pérez 237–53). This perspective agrees with and reinforces the work of Jens Andermann where he explores landscape’s ability to function as both diegetic and historical space62 (Andermann). Moreover, Andremann notes, that during the 1990’s period of Brazilian filmmaking also known as the retomada, the rural landscape is considered to be exhausted; therefore it is a site of estrangement.
The rural is seen as distant from the modernity of the urban. In looking at the Viajo porque preciso as a road film, Brandellero confirms Andermann’s view as she explains that the aesthetics of the film mobilize landscape to convey the main character’s
“disconnection and his disengagement from the land” (Garibotto and Pérez 246).
For Brandellero, the focus on mobility points to the main character leaving modernity. Recognition of the failures of the ideology of progress pushes José Renato to
61 Vieira and Lima highlight that Assis focuses on a cinema that will be enjoyable aesthetically. This focus on what could be called Hollywood aesthetics, which Ivana Bentes criticizes as the Cosmetics of Hunger, is the largest differential they trace when comparing this film to Cinema Novo (and Third Cinema at large). Contrary Bentes’ argument, they do not note a lack of political engagement in the films notwithstanding the aesthetic practices. 62 As previously seen, landscape can be roughly understood as setting that becomes a character, or a focus on the space as much as on the characters. 246 exit his car and film a town on foot, contrary to the filming from his car as the rest of the film. Renato, a geologist native of Fortaleza in the northeastern state of Ceará maps the northeast at a distance but eventually procures a connection to the land and the people that inhabit it. At one point, he interviews a Patricia Simone da Silva, a dancer and prostitute. If Brandellero is right and the road film seeks to make landscape an intimal and personal terrain, it is the constant back and forth between the human and the landscape that is able to recast the rural landscape of the northeastern backlands as affective. This film's mobility, however, depends on the others’ stagnation. That is,
Renato moves contrary to the characters that embellish the landscape: the prostitutes, fruit sellers and the poor inhabitants of the northeast. This points to landscape as a frame for new structures of feeling– a socially constructed space. As shown, these are inherited and latest iteration of the extractive practices that have traditionally shaped the
Northeast’s socio-economic reality.
The footage of Viajo porque preciso was recorded about ten years before in 1999.
If we placed somewhere in the beginning of the 2000s instead of at its 2009 release date, the film effectively motions to a transition in the representations of the backlands as depoliticized in the 1990s to a space imbedded with affect and emotion as academics have shown of later representations of the Sertão (Sadek, “A <I>serto</I> of
Migrants, Flight and Affect”; Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in
Contemporary Latin American Cinema). This is what Isis Sadek points out of the sertãnejo films Eu, tu, eles (Andrucha Waddington, 2000) and O céu de Suely (Ainouz,
2007), which resort to the tropes of flight, and migration. Simultaneously, Sadek notes, 247 the films establish an affective and social order through the use of landscape. Affective connection to the landscape is a shared quality between Eu, tu, Eles, Suely, and Viajo porque preciso. While the first two approach the sertão as a site of feminine self-affect and subjectification (Sadek), in Viajo porque preciso Renato’s trip allows him to reflect upon the landscape and his emotions simultaneously. Viajo porque preciso establishes the affective connections, abjection and landscape within the framework of a road movie as beneficial to the male character (Brandellero). This establishes continuity with the fact that migration was a key trope in the construction of the gendered sertão. In fact, the
Sertão is consistently depicted as an impossible place to inhabit in the Cinema Novo. In the 1990’s there was a return to the Sertão and the Northeast as films about the cangaço and the war of Canudos re-examined the past and others like Central do Brasil (1990) returned to find it static and stale, subsumed in pessimism (Nagib, The New Brazilian
Cinema; Nagib, Brazil on Screen). When Sadek notes that “these two characters’ return to the Sertão seems to open pathways for an auteurial cinematic return to the Sertão”, it is unclear if this return means a peaceful and fruitful inhabitation of it, or another mode of temporary and fleeting occupation (Sadek, “A <I>serto</I> of Migrants,
Flight and Affect” 71). For characters in O Céu de Suely and Eu, tu, eles the occupation is only temporary, however, for the characters in Baixio das Bestas, there is no escape.
In Baixio das Bestas, there are instances when Auxiliadora uses public transportation, similar to the sequence in O Céu de Suely, that Sadek analyzes to point to the movement and the affective energy transmitted between landscape and Suely/Hermila as a female subject. However there are key differences, in BdB, the buses that 248 Auxiliadora rides are small minivans that are used to move through the town and never a bus to leave the town. Moreover, where in Suely where the camera lets us glimpse into the sertão and juxtaposes the character and the space, in BdB, the camera looks up at the sky with the sun leaving only Auxiliadora’s silhouette. By denying the connection to the space, the film procures representing her denying the feeling of movement. In fact, locations connected to the idea of movement are coded as static locations of non- movement as I will later analyze in looking at the representation of the gas-station in the film. Actually, the film portrays the main characters with a lack of movement. Because has a broken leg, he cannot move freely and instead is often found sitting in his house.
While other northeastern films (especially those considered travel-logs or road movies) focus on the movement of its characters, in BdB it is the objects in the background that move. This is repeatedly seen in the shots when Heitor seats talking to Mario or simply waiting. Consistently in these frames a car, a bicycle, people on foot move across the frame while the old man remains seated. By inverting the order of movement, the film further emphasizes Heitor’s stagnation. And he is not the only one, although Auxiliadora is seen walking among the sugarcane fields, the sequences that proceed her walking are of sugar cane truck, trucks full of people going to work or machinery. Contrary to these active and working subjects, Auxiliadora’s inverse movement or stasis, as she seats on the side of the road and waiting for a minivan characterizes her as forgone, anti- or pre- modern. While perhaps framing her as “natural” or pure, there is yet another sequence when she is contrasted with the movement in her surroundings. Once she finishes washing clothes in the river, she stops, gets naked and lies there both being washed by the 249 river and unmoved. In contrast, two characters who are often seen inside a car are Cícero and Everardo who, while drunk driving run over a child on a bike. They do not stop and instead continue on their way to the brothel where Everardo will force one of the prostitutes to have anal sex with him. When Cícero rapes Auxiliadora, he forces her out of the car and in the middle of the road, rapes her. The sequence is only lit with diagetic light from Cícero’s car and such highlights again how she and her grandfather contrast with modernity. If in Suely she is looking to the city, to escape her town, in BdB
Auxiliadora is at the mercy of the objects of modern movement. This is even clearer when noted that she ends up prostituting herself at the town’s gas station. Our characters are, thus, stuck, unable to move, static and at the mercy of those with economic power to decide over their deaths.
As a lawless space in the period of the cangaço, the Sertão was understood as generally void of state presence and embodied a version of what Kevin Bales calls “the wild west syndrome.” In these spaces the state does not hold the monopoly on violence and instead relied on Volantes or Macacos– hired headhunters, for securitizing such a space. Cangaçeiros were equivalent of a cowboy in the old west. Through these battles, wars and the symbolism of the Sertão as a dry vastus it became a site for the disposal of wasted bodies. Even now days, because of the effects of global capitalism and the uncontrolled expansion of neoliberal capital in the region, the economic instability of the region has caused the expansion of contemporary forms of slavery. For Justin Guay
“rapid urbanization and restructuring of agricultural activities, upon which people have depended for centuries, has spelled disaster” and as such brought about what Bales calls 250 the new slavery. New Slavery is irrevocably, as such, connected to trafficking and the forced labor of sex-workers, which Bales explores in Thailand where traditional structures of family are used to keep women tied to the family-unit but past forms of survival have become ineffective. The very tradition of the Sertão’s symbolic construction has made it the site for the violent and spectacular locations for representations of sex trafficking. As I explore ahead, it is the breaking of tradition and traditional structures of power that allows the disposability through the establishment of new slavery. However, new slavery and sex trafficking are symbolically transmitted through the impossibility of transit and movement in what has traditionally functioned as a site of migration.
FROM SITE OF TRANSIT TO INESCAPABLE WASTELANDS: CROSSING MEXICO IN MIGRATION FILM While tradition is key in the construction of the Sertão in BdB, in SR, we only know of the characters’ past until the end of the movie– in a flashback. We catch up with our main characters already in the move but unable to go past the Mexico-Guatemala border. The southern Mexican border has been the site of some representations of migration and as such films about Central Americans migrating to the United States often spend some time in it. While the borders between El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are for the most part often, stay within Guatemala by El Salvadoran and Honduran citizens can be legalized. However, As Dawn Paley notes in Drug War Capitalism,
“controlling the flow of migration through Mexico is a key concern for Washington, and paramilitarized cartels are playing an increasingly important role in doing it” (Paley 142).
251 As Paley cites one of the workers of La 72, a mass grave in Tamaulipas named after the
72 bodies discovered in it, describing the relationship between paramilitary groups and the transiting migrants: “for them migrants are like merchandise” (Paley 151). Although I will not be focusing on the modes of subjectification that these films provide the characters that reproduce the spectacle of wasting, it is important to note that, much as the past chapters, endriago subjects are empowered through the death of disposable or wasted beings. These are fully neoliberal subjects who have taken to what Hector
Dominguez Ruvalcaba has explained as the business efficiency of social Darwinism
(Ruvalcaba 159). In other words, at the border and the locations of transit of (mostly)
Central American migrants through Mexico we find the neoliberal subjects in the migrant and in the subject of organized crime (Is not organized crime the most profitable business venture of the late twentieth and early twenty first century?).
There are many films that have represented the transit of migrants across Mexico.
However, as I have previously noted, they tend to focus on Mexico’s northern border. In framing this transition through Mexico as a continuum, the few films that explore the movement of bodies through the southern border tend to point out, the simultaneous modes of precariousness that are part of representations of the northern border. As such we can think of films of migration and the fiction road movie as the two genres that analyze the crossings through the country. As I have previously pointed out, these include
El Norte, Sin Nombre, La Jaula de Oro, and the iconic Diarios de Motocicleta (2004) or the US production Which Way Home (2009). The traditional reading of road films is one of character growth and in many ways parallel similar to the processes expected of a 252 bildungsroman or a coming of age story. In this light, as Jorge Perez and Verónica
Gariboto point out, Latin American road movies tend to build from U.S. productions and their standards. However, Sabina Rivas is perhaps more closely associated with other
Mexican films like Heli (2014) or Amarte Duele (2004) and not so much with Y Tu
Mamá También (2001) or Viaje Redondo (2014). That is because although Sabina Rivas is a film that takes place in a place understood as a simple stop-along-the-way, Sabina’s attempt to flee are recurrently thwarted and she is unable to leave. The same inability to flee Mexico is key in Amarte Duele where in the recreation of Romeo and Juliet, two characters that in love try to flee only for one of them to die attempting to escape.
A recent tome edited by Jorge Perez and Verónica Gariboto analyzes some of these films through the standards of the road movie. In it the films that I’ve mentioned before as both road and migration films are analyzed in different contexts. Nadie Lie, for example, notes how the form of the road movie alludes to modern forms of movement
(such as the car, motorcycle and the bicycle) speak of the limits and the limits and varied forms of entering modernity in Latin America. In a section titled “Global Expulsions:
From Non-Place to Non-Person” she notes that there is a series of films that perceive the road as “not a pleasurable experience, but quite the opposite: a necessary step through hell in order to get to a safe place” (Garibotto and Pérez 43). SR sets this type of standard but instead of being able to move, Sabina is stuck in hell. While in a traditional road movie the character’s movement takes him to face different challenges, changes and awakenings in the character, SR plays with those expectations. For example, Sabina escapes to live with other migrants. However, Doña Lita and Don Nico, the Mexican 253 consul in Tapachula, the two people who stand to benefit the most in Sabina’s return to the brothel, eventually find her. She denies their request to return with them. They promise her to take her to perform in Veracruz, the Mexican coastal state. “Se lo juro como que me llamo Sabina Rivas. Me voy con unos que salen pa’l norte” [I swear it or my name is not Sabina Rivas. I am leaving with some people who are going north].
Although this migration has been set up since the moment we know that the film takes place in Tapachula, the plot consistently prevents Sabina from leaving. The song that
Sabina performs through out the film notes this as she repeats: “y nunca mas, y nunca mas me iré” [and I will never, and I will never ever leave]. As such, the film is not a film of movement but one of non-movement.
Lie proposes that in this type of films “the road has more tragically become a ‘non place,’ which turns travelers into non-persons” (Garibotto and Pérez 43). Although I will further explore the characters’ performance locations as non-places, the road and the movement itself does not particularly seem to rob Sabina of her personhood. In fact, when Sabina claims her desire to leave Tapachula she does so recalling her personhood.
Indeed mobility does function as a mode of increasing vulnerability in subjects as
Teresita Rocha Jimenez notes of Mexican sex-workers who are dissuaded out of her town and away from their family connections (Rocha-Jimenez et al.). However, contrary to sex-workers who are turned into disposable beings and abused, migrant characters are in legal terms (as I pointed out in the previous chapter) outside the state. Thus, Lie believes that migrants are “ ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben) [who] travel in and on vehicles” (Garibotto and Pérez 43). I would, however, contend that in the case of female sex-workers and 254 especially of underage sex-workers it is the notion of illegality frames them as abject turning them not into homo sacer but into wasted and disposable. In sociological and ethnographic research with sex-workers in the Mexico-Guatemala border Rocha Jimenez and Rebecca Galemba point to a an absence of the state through the absence of regulation and the presence of discourses of illegality. While Galemba notes that “Illegalization is inherently linked to the marginalization, neglect, or criminalization of the space, its residents, and crossers” and that “states may also benefit from blurring the official– unofficial and legal-illegal” (Galemba 278, 281). The same can be said of sex-work in the
Guatemalan side of the border, where the film takes place. Rocha Jimenez has noted that the use of health card, known as the cartilla, as a mostly symbolic form of regulation,
“showed mostly positive impacts on women’s health, not only in HIV prevention and sexual education but also in condom use negotiation and increasing women’s agency in a long-term period” (Rocha-Jimenez et al. 87). In this perspective, it is the illegality of migration that produces precariousness and regulation a way to combat it. In light of this, and of the fact that Sabina and the rest of the girls in the brothel are underage, they are not directly affected by the state (and thus not homo-sacer), instead they are ignored and outside of state-space considered disposable subjects (being purposefully ignored, as Don
Nico’s presence makes clear).63
63 In fact, the participation of the government and the structures of power not in preventing but in allowing this type of violence cannot be understated. In SR the character Burrona embodies what seems to be a contradiction. Burrona/Don Chavita is at once a border agent and a trafficker of underage sex-workers. To do this, he moves in different spaces, and uses different names. Domingues-Ruvalcaba has pointed out in Nación Criminal, that in Mexico “el uso de la fuerza pública para propósitos criminales pone en cuestión la posibilidad de aplicación de la ley en los diferentes modelos de Estado que se han ensayado en la historia independiente del país [México]” [the use of public force for criminal purposes questions the possibility of 255 TRANSITION SPACES OF DISPOSABILITY OR THE SPATIAL CONDITIONS FOR NEW SLAVERY If in SR the in between-space lies at the political delimitations of the Mexican and
Guatemalan states, the border swallows the town of Tecún Umán, including the Bordello where Sabina seeks refuge. In BdB, the border to Brazil is the Ocean and it is at the edging marshes where the interstitial non-state abject space, the wasteland appears. In both cases the films depict young teens who must face the horrors of physical and sexual violence beyond in the privatized spaces where the only rule is survival. Although neither one of these characters enjoys the situations where they are placed, at the end of the films they find that they cannot escape– they have already be casted as wasted beings. The films symbolize this by trapping them and not allowing them to leave but also showing that in these spaces not even their bodies are theirs. Thus Sabina and the border and
Auxiliadora and the town are simultaneously constructed as sites of waste and disposability. When Kevin Bales refers to the modes of disposability he calls “the new slavery” he says it is enacted on those perceived as embodying “weakness, gullibility, and deprivation” (Bales 11). In other words, when the market is let loose, even people are only worth the price they command in the market. The power to inflict death upon the other is the only act of subjectification available to these endriago subjects, as Valencia contends in Gore Capitalism (Sayak Valencia 213–21).
the application of the law in all different models of Statehood that have been previously tried in the history of the independent country] (Ruvalcaba 212–13). As Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva note of pimps in Rio de Janeiro, “everyone involved in the commerce of sex agrees upon is that the true ‘regulators’ of prostitution in Rio are the police and their allies in the extralegal militias” (Horning and Marcus 40). The same type of relationship between the police the trafficking of children is highlighted in Elena Azaola’s research into the sexual exploitation of children (Azaola). 256 In the border or the bog, both of these films find fertile ground for new slavery.
Bales notes that “the new slavery flourishes where old rules, old ways of life break down” (Bales 121). While Bales does not directly refer to it, “old ways of life” could be understood as the breakdown of the social fabric64. By social fabric I understand the structures of power that maintain subjects bound within more or less fixed systems. Such instability is a product of rapid expansion of socio-economic changes and the lack of state security brought about by neoliberal reform. Since at the end of the film both Sabina and
Auxiliadora choose to continue a life of prostitution this only means that existence as prostitutes provides them a settled and non-altering way of being– a stable form of relating. In this act, our characters are engaging in the same search for stability and belonging that Rossanna Reguillo notes most youth pursue. In a small section titled
“Anclajes” or anchors, Reguillo notes:
Con relación a las rupturas de las formas de vida socialmente legitimadas, entre los jóvenes, resulta fundamental no perder de vista las diferencias y similitudes ancladas en la pertenencia a una clase y a los diferentes estratos socioeconómícos. Las generalizaciones siempre resultan peligrosas y en sociedades tan jerárquicamente clasistas como las nuestras, este componente sigue jugando un papel clave a la hora de la conformación de las identidades sociales. De qué jóvenes estamos hablan- do, dónde están sus anclajes profundos y sus anclajes situacionales. [In relations with the ruptures of the socially legitimated forms of living, among youth, it results fundamental not to loose sight of the differences and similarities anchored to the belonging to a class and the different socioeconomic strata. Generalizations are always dangerous and in societies as hierarchically classist as
64 “El principio de la cohesión social busca, desde la perspectiva de la justicia social, la igualdad, la integración de los ciudadanos y la lucha contra la exclusión social: políticas activas de empleo, protección del paro, protección social, intervención social al margen de la rentabilidad económica del gasto, etcetera” [The principle of social cohesion seeks, from the perspective of social justice, the equality, the integration of citizens, and the fight against social exclusion: active policies of employment, protection to the right to strike, social protection, social interventions at the margins of cost effectiveness, etcetera] Casal 316).
257 ours, this component continues playing a key part at the moment of the formation of social identities. Note what youth we are talking about, where are their deep and situational anchors]. (Cruz 152)
Although Reguillo does not explore the idea of the social anchor alludes to the lack of socio-spatial structures that may provide stability for such the characters and the inhabitants of such spaces. If, as Bales notes, it is the breakdown of these structures that makes certain people and spaces susceptible to the violent structures of disposability and contemporary slavery, the disappearance of such structures can be traced back to the socio-economic factors that have caused displacement, poverty and precariousness in
Central America, Mexico and Brazil.
These changes are problematized in BdB through the constant complaints of Seu
Heitor, Auxiliadora’s grandfather. The second time we see the old man, he is walking over to talk to Mario who seems to be either his neighbor or his friend who is cleaning a stick. The conversation is the first time we hear Seu Heitor. He starts a small monologue:
“Mas sabe Mar’o, sobre aquela conversa que a gente teve. Eu ‘teve pensanu’ não a honra que não seja ferida, e nem moral que não seja traida. Além do mais com a putaría que anda hoje no meio do mundo, vix. Sei não” [But you know Mario, about that conversation that we had. I was thinking. There’s no honor that cannot be hurt nor moral that isn’t betrayed. Moreover now with all the craziness in the world today, dang, I don’t even know]. Mario continues the conversation to give an example of a television hostess with scant clothing. Mario’s tone lies somewhere between an admiration for her behind and a complaint that her body was too visible. Seu Heitor continues “É meu filho.
258 Acabou-se o respetio. Mas sabe o que é Mario? Falta de homi. Falta de homem que tenha moral, que tenha reboa, que grite alto, que tenha autoridade. Mas hoje, hoje tem só os cueca melada” [that’s right. Respect is done with. But you know what Mario? It’s a lack of men. Lack of men that have morals, that roar, that speak loudly, and have authority.
But today, today there are only those with honey-smeared briefs]. As the film continues,
Heitor’s discourse remains stagnant. These changes produced by the influx of global and neoliberal capitalism is at the source of the changes and vulnerability that Heitor defers to his granddaughter’s body. What the film also makes clear, however, with the presence of
Cícero and Everardo, the agroboys. Lusvarghi notes that these are characters who, although considered modern (as an example Cícero seems to wear an American Eagle shirt when first appearing), are alienated from the community and location and constitute and demonstrate their power by torturing prostitutes and using drugs (Lusvarghi 22).
Sabina also nearly finds such a community and spatial anchor once she decides to leave the Tijuanita. After Burrona finds her, she leverages her knowledge of Burrona’s sex-trafficking persona “Don Chavita” to have the Mexican migrations officer take her out of southern Mexico. However, after Burrona delivers drugs for General Valderrama, who later sets up for to be killed by the Gang. In other words, the Mara serves as the enactors of violence in spaces where they state cannot act. On her way to figure out what to do, Sabina seats at the Mexico-Guatemala border as Añorve, an indigenous man who crosses the river in a floating platform and accepts migrants who want to stop by his property convinces her. There, they pray and organize as they speak against the gang, the police and the army. However, a space that was previously simply ignored by these 259 enactors of violence becomes a target once it is found out that Sabina is there. In other words, the space was not worthy of attention until the object of desire/desire itself enters that space. This not only speaks to desire being a central characteristic of abjection but also that in the wasteland, violence trumps all other forms of empowerment– even the creation of community. Now, with Sabina occupying this space, it becomes the target of violence and it is doubly attacked, first by the army and secondly by the Mara– against whom Añorve has been speaking. According to Bales, new slavery is a resolution to increased vulnerability that arises in the spaces where previous forms of power were established and have been erased. In SR such structures indeed have either been broken or have never existed.
The motivations for Sabina and Jovany to leave Honduras remain hidden from the audience until the latter’s death towards the end of the film. In a flashback, as Sabina runs away from the migrant encampment lit on fire by the Mara Salvatrucha, the traumatic memory is replayed. In it, Sabina and Jovany are in bed when their father discovers them.
The implication is that, as in previous sequences, they were having sex. Discovering their incestuous relationship, their father beats them and curses them. Sabina tries to move out of the way while Jovany is being hit but her father grabs her. The young man, then, turns around grabs a knife and as the father hits them, Jovany stabs him repeatedly. The mother tries to intervene but he turns around and stabs her as well. The crammed wooden hut filled with reused items, and two beds catch fire after in an act of desperation the thin young man throws a gas-lamp in the floor. The young man stares at the burning house.
The two teens are forced to flee. Because of the situation of violence and danger of being 260 caught by the police, the two teens flee their town. It was likely that they lived in an unregulated settlement because of the precariousness of their house, much like the encampment where Sabina tries to escape. Although the space of the Mexico-Guatemala border is traditionally just a space of transition, she still cannot escape. Instead, she returns to the Tijuanita. Whereas Sabina leaves Honduras in panic after her parents’ deaths and her house is set on fire, her new living quarters are again lit on fire but she is unable to leave. She now lacks the self-empowerment to leave that she has sporadically shown throughout the film.
Sabina’s Honduran life is only present in the film through a flashback. Although the same instability and change that produces neoliberal subjects and precariousness are present, the results are different. While she leaves Honduras, she is trapped in Guatemala.
This is perhaps the one development in Sabina’s character: the loss of her innocence.
This change has been sparked by the absolute breakdown of the social structures that in both places push for migration. Hector Leyva points out that there are groups that want “a simpler” life, not so complicated with the flows and realities of the “outside.” Thus Leyva points out that there are:
…otras minorías que, temerosas del caos y sintiéndose desamparadas por esas mismas leyes que consideran demasiado permisivas, claman no solamente por una vuelta a un pasado idealizado de orden y moralidad, sino por castigos ejemplares que en no pocos casos practican por su propia mano [Other minorities that, scared of the chaos and feeling forgotten by the very laws that they consider allow too much, claim not only for a return to an idealized past of order and morality, but to exemplary punishments that in more than one case they take on their own hands]. (Leyva 196)
261 Thus in the Honduran social escape Sabina and her brother would have been at risk had they decided to stay. In fact that Honduras (but the entire region of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) is known as some of the most dangerous countries for women (UNAH).
Whether at home in Honduras, or at the migrant encampment, in both cases it is both the entrance of violent actors and the absence of the rule of law that produces such instability. But the interstitial construction of the Mexico-Guatemala border places her outside the state. If in Honduras she was at least a citizen (even if an homo sacer) in this border, she is outside the state and she recognizes that she is more vulnerable, and disposable.
Both in BdB and SR, the changes to which Heitor refers and that push Sabina and
Jovani into precariousness can be traced to economic inequality and factors of the breaking of the social structures that conditioned social relations. These changes can be traced to the socio-economic structures of modernity and capitalism.65 Although these structural changes promise to open up space for the empowering politics of self- representation, they also deny such modes of subjectification to those considered disposable or wasted. In these spaces that “don’t matter” where people are represented as abject, characters like Sabina and Auxiliadora embody abject-desire and disposability. It is the fact that they embody the abject’s contradiction that permits their spectacular wasting.
65 I have pointed this out in the past chapter and especially highlighted when exploring citizenhip in Estamira and Backyard/El Traspatio. 262 NON-SPACE, DISGUSTING NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTS OR THE CONDITIONS OF THE WASTELAND The audience is introduced to the main characters in each film in the second sequence. In them, in both cases the ways in which space and character are represented set the tone for the rest of each film. While SR introduces the main character within the brothel, smiling and performing (apparently) willingly, in BdB Auxiliadora is noticeably uncomfortable with the situation. The tones of each sequence seem to oppose one another. While in BdB the tone is somber, and dark with not much lighting and the characters are mostly serious, in SR the characters smile, dance, and sing while mostly red lighting illuminates the stage and the gazing characters. However, both sequences produce the same effect of discomfort, desire and disgust by representing the onlookers, a parallel to the audience, as depraved. In many ways, the spaces of performance by the characters are not necessarily containing sizable amounts of material waste, instead, the abjection of the film happens through the conceptualization of poverty, otherness, kitsch into a general sense of disgust, what Rocio Silva Santisebastián has termed “asco.” Next, we will explore these beginning sequences and the escalation and other places where the characters are presented as performers. This mobilization, as we have just seen, causes vulnerability and this is reflected in the characters surrendering to the situations of violence into what they perceive as the best possible outcome.
Sabina Rivas formally starts in the following sequence where the sound of the street gives way to the sound of a saxophone and congas, and then to the voice of the presenter whose face reflected on a mirror look scary, deformed. Kitschy yellow, red and
263 white bulbs line the stage although it is red lights that provide most of the lighting but for a spot like that now shines on the host as he exclaims “Bienvenidos al Tijuanita, templo del erotismo y el placer donde más de cincuenta bellezas internacionales nos hemos reunido para hacerle pasar una noche inolvidable” [Welcome to the Tijuanita, temple of eroticism and pleasure where over fifty international beauties have gathered to let you have an unforgettable night]. “¡Venga!” [Come!] he exclaims as the short plaid skirts and long white knee socks begin walking unto the stage and perform a choreography of swaying hips and raised arms that slide down their long hair. “Ellas, todas ellas tienen etiqueta del sur.” Finally his voice changes tone to a more serious resentful tone: “Aquí no hay mexicanas majaderas que nos puedan meter en problemas con las autoridades”
[Here, there are no whiny Mexicans that get us in trouble with the authorities]. The last to come in after the lot is Sabina who is distinguishable from the rest through her wavy hair and her head held proudly high. An old man (whom we later learn is the Mexican consul in Tapachula) looks at her from a distance. The host then explains that none of the girls are authorized to tell anyone their true age and that at least one of the visibly-scared girls sitting at the front has not yet “received her monthly visit” –euphemistically referring to her not yet menstruating. And as Jovany enters the establishment:
Si alguno de nuestros clientes require servicio extra-muros, no hay ningún problema porque nuestras chicas cuentan con el permiso y la autorización de las autoridades migratorias porque usted como cliente del Tijuanita merece simplemente lo major. [If any of our clients requires services outside our establishment, there is no problem since all our girls have the permission and authorization of the migratory authorities, because you as a client of the Tiujuanita deserve simply the best].
264 The camera moves with Jovany as if entering together, such a conclusion of participation is further emphasized as the camera (which would normally be uninhibited placed as to capture the entire scene) is partially blocked and unfocused because people walk between the camera and the stage. As the teenagers continue dancing, the camera looses focus.
And as we continue being introduced to the main characters, it is Sabina who, sitting in the middle of the stage is introduced as “La Perla del Tijuanita.” Sabina begins dancing and singing as the Mexican consul looks over. She loosens her top as Jovany recognizes her voice and begins walking over in shock, and looking at her from behind wooden bars.
We are introduced to three of Baixio das Bestas’ main characters’ Heitor,
Auxiliadora, and Celso in what is properly the first sequence and along with them the audience glimpses at the main plot. Two bright spots in the darkness, as if in a theater these lights concentrate the gaze over the yellow ground and overgrown greenery on the left, and what looks like a tree and an elevated cement platform on the right. Among the sound of crickets, the dragging sound of a wooden cane and steps coming from the left appear Seu Heitor and Auxiliadora. He holds her arm firmly with his left hand while pressing her forward. Auxiliadora’s crossed arms let go and fall to her sides almost as if defeated. The old man turns her around after leaving his walking stick resting on the cement platform on the right. The man cannot get her shirt off so the girl helps him. He drops it on the ground. The crickets and the sound of the man now fidgeting with the buttons and zipper of her skirt are still the only sounds. He lets her skirt fall to the floor, and slips her underwear to her knees. The colors are only barely distinguishable as a pinkish red shirt, a green or blue jean skirt and her white undergarments. Heitor places 265 his left hand on his granddaughter’s hip and with his right hand moves her hair out of her face, in a sort of caress. He turns around and sits on the lit spot on the right and looks at her face while she looks away and then lowers her face. The grandfather now holds his walking stick on his right hand while sitting almost as if indicating that even at his old age he would stand up to defend Auxiliadora. The camera pans out and we can hear the steps of people approaching. Now we see that the young girl stands in front of a dirty wall and that the two are surrounded by many men and debris. A single yellow light bulb at top center of the image purports to light the frame but the light that shines over
Auxiliadora is outside the frame. The men do not seem to only be looking at the ashamed girl up front as the arm of at least one of them is bend slightly towards his pubic area.
One man appears especially close to the camera, standing up while the rest are sitting.
His green shirt contrasts with the darkness of the rest of the frame that continues widening. He turns away from the girl to make sure no one sees him, shivering loudly and shows the camera his green shirt with the word "eagle" across it (American Eagle brand perhaps?). As he crosses his arms across his chest, a large silver watch on his left hand is now visible. The camera quickly pans up and the boy’s face is now discernable.
Cicero, as later will be learned is his name, is mumbling curses at the girl up front. The camera fades to black while his cursing remarks are still heard.
In both introductory sequences the audience is presented with space of waste.
Whether this waste is embodied in the poor bodies of the audience and the unkempt scenery (SR) or the material presence of left over wooden planks and random pieces of furniture (BdB), the space’s abjection is simultaneously constructed through the 266 recognition that the naked bodies on screen are those of teenagers. As we later realize when Sabina fights the Tijuanita’s host, her place of precedence and even her name are often changed. Similarly, while Auxiliadora stands there she is not only stripped of her clothes but of her humanity and personality. In fact, although Cícero desires her and eventually takes her by force, whenever he refers to her, he never says her name. The only people that call her by her name are Maninho and her grandfather, at home. In this space, however, she is no one. Marc Auge calls such spaces non-places. He defines such a space that is never complete (Auge 78). The absence in this space is perhaps that of the modern and of Auxiliadora as subject. Instead non-places are “spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle.
As the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle” (Auge 86). In Debordian terms this is the core of the spectacular as Debord notes that the pure spectacle is spectacle for the sake of spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, The Society of Spectacle Thesis 4).
In this way the relation established between the audience that looks at the teen performers and the audience that looks at the film is established as parallel spectacles. The only differentiation between the two audiences is the perception of the abject by the film’s audience. Such expectation of a critical gaze appears in the camera’s movement and focus.
As I described above in the sequences, in SR the camera, unlike it would be expected is blocked by passer-byers and at times out of focus. These disruptions have the 267 simultaneous effect of placing the audience inside the brothel and in reproducing these instances of imperfection in film increase such realism. In this way the spectacular relationship between audience and performer is emphasized. The out of focus camera makes it seem more veritable. This has the same effect that the handheld camera has in the sequence when Juana is raped in Backyard/El Transpatio. As a reminder, Lydia
Huerta has proposed that the inclusion of the camera during the rape as onlooker as it moves with the characters and the van they are riding. BdB seeks the same effect by forcing the audience to recognize themselves as spectators as the camera pans out of the frame and discovers the rest of the onlookers. In procuring self-recognition the films mobilize spectacle against its alienation. Since the abject space reproduces both desire and disgust the conflicting relationship is called into question by the camera. Instead of shying away from the immoral parts of the films (the desire of child/teenage bodies) they highlight them. This is further emphasized in the later performances. When Sabina goes to Mexico for a private party with Licenciado Cossio, for example, she is first sitting on an old man’s leg until he asks her to sing for him. As she performs not only does the cocaine she was given initially (by Burrona) start affecting her, she realizes for the first time that her performance does not matter and instead she is only there to have sex with
“the clients.” That is why after this realization when she goes to the bar to sing, she is no longer enchanted nor does she charm her audience. As the magic of spectacle breaks down, so does the abjection in the screen. The latter sequence, in Mexico, lacks the presentation by a host, the red lights and the show of El Tijuanita. The same process is highlighted in BdB as Heitor tells Auxiliadora to go by herself to the gas station. In this 268 later sequence, the owner of the restaurant explains that now they will be able to touch her for the right price. There is no difference now between just looking at her in the distance or touching her. As the camera closes-up on the men’s hands and faces as they touch Auxiliadora, the audience is not meant to feel just desire for her young body but disgust at the men’s abusive touch. The fact that this happens in spaces of performance allows the films to focus on the necessity to break with the alienating quality of spectacle.
BdB is perhaps bolder and clearer in challenging the audience as Everardo breaks the fourth wall and defies the audience saying “no cinema você pode fazer o que quiser”
[In film you can do whatever you want]. This connection of performance, spectacle and audience as spectator is even further abjected as the abuse represented on screen reaches its limit in the theater scene with Everardo, Dora and two nameless Agroboys. In the sequence, Everardo and the two other boys begin playing sexually with Dora, the willing prostitute who believes will be paid enough to leave the town. They pick her up in the town plaza where she waits with her packed bags. In the following sequence she goes on top of the stage where the characters begin caressing her and ripping off her clothes. As her moans turn to screams, the camera moves away and focuses on their shadows. The shadows move as if Everardo sticks a wooden stick into her. Either dead or passed out in pain, Dora falls facedown and Everardo proceeds to lick her anus. Everardo and Cícero’s reappearing anal desire is both a critique of the notions of masculinity at play and a way to frame them, their desires and their actions as abject. These two use the closed quarters of an abandoned theater where waste, abjection, performance and spectacle intersect
269 precisely because this space is a space of waste. The Tijuanita itself reproduces these qualities.
AGE OF TRANSIT OR YOUNG FEMININITY AS VULNERABILITY
When thinking of the border, be it a political one as in SR or a geographic/natural one as in BdB, it is constructed as a space of intersection, of differences. Whether the differences are political or symbolic, they are both constructed and depend upon their discursive construction as solid different entities. The disappearance of the difference, as
Kristeva points out, is what reproduces abjection as affective and bodily response and as discourse. Many of these differences are created within the psyche of the modern self and depend on the creation of an “Other” that in Lacanian terms serves to embody and receive the weight of a subject’s despondence and desire. Historically such otherness has been reflected onto those whose identities can be easily differentiated. Silvia Federici explores the creation of women as the Other of the masculine during the middle-ages in her Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998). In this text she astutely notes that the beginning of capitalism was not only an accumulation of capital in terms of material and economic outcomes. Federici notes that the transition to capitalism also produced “an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, become constitutive of class rule, and the formation of the modern proletariat” (Federici 63).
Eventually pointing out that the female body would come to signify otherness, barbarism.
270 The same anti-modern quality was further embodied in youthful and racialized bodies, evermore sensual. Tania Cruz Salazar’s research into what she calls “cultural racism” of migrant female workers in Chiapas concludes that Mexicans conceive Salvadoran and
Honduran women as hypersexual so that sex-work is their only effective venue of employment in the Guatemala-Mexico border-state of Chiapas (Cruz Salazar 147–52).
Lucy Lea Blaney-Laible’s dissertation work analyzing Mexican and Brazilian representations of prostitution and sex work concluding that these films “seek to deal with the ‘problem’ of prostitution, or to deal with other problems through the representation of prostitution, all within the context of rapidly- changing economic and social policies” (Blaney-Laible 171). Interestingly, the films that Blaney-Liable analyzes all focus on the northeast: Suely, BdB and Deserto Feliz (Caldas, 2007). Blaney-Laible’s reading of BdB maintains that a sexist heterosexual male perspective, although hoping to criticize the type of violence to which Auxiliadora is subjected, only reiterates and makes that violence available to the audience (Blaney-Laible 109–12). This, in her perspective, limits the liberatory claims of the film. Certainly, in a reading of Laura Mulvey’s notions of the male gaze, the representation of male pleasure provides power to that perspective only. However, her views forgo the negative value that the reproduction of the spectacle of wasting as such pleasure is characterized as abject. The film, while not denying its male authorship, does critique such a masculine gaze as reproducing the abject and its violence. Thus Bell Hooks’ proposal for a feminist gaze, as I have discussed in the previous two chapters, is the critical engagement that challenges the denouement of simultaneous pleasure and disgust, desire and rejection. I would, thus, contend that unlike 271 previous modes of gazing, in these films the spectacle is not meant to produce desire alone but to simultaneously reproduce abjection.
Such abjection is reproduced in the young female body exposed in spaces that are characterized as dirty, abject. Remembering that the space and the bodies are simultaneously constructed, the films represent spectacular violence by categorizing both body and space as abject (in Kristeva’s sense that it reproduces disgust and desire, that it is enticing and rejecting). In framing Sabina as desirable within a space of abjection, ethno-racially as “la Hondureña” and in terms of her age and gender, the film clearly outlines her vulnerability. These characteristics and the dangerous spaces (where gang- members can transit freely) signal her position as disposable. Not only is she desirable
(thus being the pearl of the brothel) she is also disposable. But this disposability is only seen when she interacts with someone who understands their position in the rungs of power: the US migration officer stationed in Mexico. Otherwise the film recurrently informs the audience of the characteristics of vulnerability that she embodies and the interstices where she transits. Melissa Wright describes the myth of the disposable third world woman is based on “a young woman from a third world locale—who, through the passage of time, comes to personify the meaning of human disposability” (Wright,
Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism 2). In theory, young and gendered bodies (Wright) perceived as weak, gullible and deprived (Bales) are symbolically denoted as vulnerable to be used in non-state spaces to create a state of terror. Wasted youth are a vulnerable population, and their wasting denotes certain spaces as wastelands. These wastelands are constructed symbolically through politics of death 272 that mobilize the spectacle of wasting, abjection and reproduce abjection, fear, and create an aura of terror. For Sayak Valencia the violent spectacle of waste is aesthetically defined as gore. Within these interweaving notions of vulnerability, desire and abjection both Auxiliadora’s and Sabina’s young bodies are coded not only as consumable and disposable but what happens to them once they become wasted.
GIRLHOOD, SPECTACLE AND THE SPECTACLE OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE
As I have noted, both SR and BdB go out of their way to construct the spectacle of wasting through the bodies of the young protagonists. Catherine Driscoll or Carolina
Rocha and Georgia Seminet have explored such representations in global and Latin
American cinema respectively. A key component in much research about children, and which Driscoll and Rocha and Seminet explore is a child’s or a teenager’s ability to think and speak for themselves. As Alejandra Josiowicz, (in Rocha and Seminet’s edited volume) notes “the speechless child, achieves visibility and agency, as she enters the realm of language and symbolic social interaction” . In fact, the question of representation takes Rocha to question: “Can children speak in film?” Therefore she explores “children’s paradoxical position as subjects with limited means of expressions– besides their need to learn a language, they are dependent on the perceptions and actions of their caretakers, a fact that impinges on their autonomy” (III et al. 5). The result, for
Rocha is that filmmakers attempt and “avoid representing young characters as objects of the spectatorial gaze” (III et al. 16). In this sense, Rocha associates a disempowered child protagonist with spectacle and its representation with consumption. This critique is
273 similar to Blaney-Liable’s that films who represent prostitution in the Northeast and in
Mexico do so by limiting the prostitutes actions and providing only a modest “incomplete resistance” (Blaney-Laible). While I have expanded upon her reading in terms of the audience, in this section I question what are the limits of resistance for the characters with respect to the limits imposed to them by their age.
In Rocha and Seminte’s edited volume, the section “Coming to Voice on Scree” explores how children are empowered and that such empowerment is represented to the act of speech – by speaking for themselves. Rocha herself shows that in two Brazilian films children appeal to an Afro-Brazilian identity and mobilizing it empowers them to speak. In a different chapter of the tome, Sophie Dufay notes that it is the forced growing-up of the children that turns them into “teenagers” and allows them the act of speech. In Josiowicz’ chapter, it is the awareness of the sexual experience that pushes the child into the act of speaking for themselves. Even in a later chapter by Sarah Thomas titled “Yo No Soy Invisible”, she notes that in Las Malas Intenciones (Rosario García-
Montero, 2011) it is the child’s ability to appeal to the founding discourses of nation that empowers and enables it as subject. The general pattern that these chapters outline is that to speak children must appeal to pre-established identity formations. In Sayak Valencia’s notion of Gore Capitalism, however, endriago subjects may only become subjects through the violence of death. While BdB follows this by representing Auxiliadora as consistently quiet and submissive– we only hear her speak to Maninho and Heitor, and at the end of the film when she enters sex-work. In contrast, in SR, Sabina performs, sings, dances and even demands to be called her own name, and fake papers to leave 274 Guatemala. Even though Auxiliadora is quiet, and Sabina is loud both characters end up disempowered and choose sex-work as their only mode of survival at the end. Because both characters inhabit the wastelands, they do not have access to any other modes of empowerment and subjectification.
Although identification is central in the processes of empowerment within the state, in the wastelands that are represented in these films, these types of subjectification are outside the grasp of the characters. Instead, spectacle, while also making them more vulnerable, provides both Auxiliadora and Sabina with the only modes of empowerment.
In the case of Auxiliadora this is represented in her ability to speak and choose sex-work for herself (instead of tying herself to yet another man, as Maninho suggests in a conversation with Mario at the end of the film). This is why once her grandfather dies, and although she scarcely speaks throughout the film, she performs the walk, dress, makeup and speech expected of sex-workers. In her conversation with an older man she explains “agora vou ficar por aqui” [in the meantime I will stay around here]. Although the conversation is responding to the man’s questions, she speaks into the future, which denotes her ability to choose to be elsewhere and eventually do something else if she wanted to do so. Although SR does not tell us how Sabina is received in the Tijuanita after she decides to return to it, the return to the brothel signals the defeat of her dream to go to the United States. Although by now she has been replaced as the crown jewel of the bordello (such a title is given to the girl that commands the highest price) within that business she is better protected than elsewhere in the wasteland that the border represents.
In other words, her performances across the film are indeed a sign of a power that she 275 holds because of her assigned value. In the instance when she demands to be called by her name, she does not care if her nationality or origin are altered, as long as her name remains intact. Sabina’s recognition of her own self, name and presence means that she realizes that existing is the form of power she holds. It is her body (selling it, not selling it, etc) that provides her with even the most minimal mode of subjectification. Although she does not take others’ lives, as an inhabitant of the wastelands, she can very well sell her own. This is what sex-work means, after all.
The French feminist activist group Tiqqun propose in their Raw Materials for a
Theory of the YoungGirl that the young girl “is all the reality of the spectacle’s abstract codes” (Tiqqun 12). The entirety of this chapter supports that Sabina’s and Auxiliadora’s are identified as ethno-racial young girls who embody spectacle. Catherine Driscoll generally supports this idea by noting that “girls are systematically disenfranchised”
(111) when represented and that the very construct of “feminine adolescence is certainly proper to capitalist late modernity.” This makes capitalism and female adolescence inseparable. Moreover, Driscoll notes that “the girl is an obstacle in relations to which the figure of womanly maturity emerges in opposition to the dominant narrative of women’s immaturity” (Driscoll, “The Mystique of the Young Girl” 133). That is, while the Girl critiqued as an immature woman, she the model of desire and pleasure (187). In other words Girlhood is the becoming-woman, which in Deleuzian terms of machines and ensembles. When I explored the feminized body as desiring machine in relation to the films Malos Hábitos and Cheiro do Ralo, I noted the spectacle of the wasting-body as a form of empowerment in the face of the inability to survive the wastelands without 276 violence. This is why, when Driscoll proposes to conceive a non-modern mode of becoming, she returns to “Deleuze’s ideally reversible universal becoming […] a series of events continually transforming the embodied self in which they adhere,” much in the same way I read the feminine bodies of Lourenço, Matilde, Elena and Linda before
(Driscoll, Girls 200). This is perhaps why both Sabina and Auxilidora return to performance and the spectacular of the Young Girl’s body for subjectification. If they do not wish to participate in the violence that sujetos endriagos mobilize as subjectification and reification of the self, then perhaps they can become themselves through a recurrent return in the process of becoming through the spectacularization of the girl’s (their own) body– not yet encapsulated by the woman identity. This process of becoming requires, much like Estamira’s redefinition of the relationship between self and nature, a redefinition of the self to the self. If the source of abjection, as Kristeva points out, is the self’s recognition of its own otherness, then the process of becoming girl in the wasteland is the constant recognition of its non-being.
CONCLUSION OR SOME REMARKS ABOUT THE SPECTACLE OF WASTE
In this chapter I suggest that the construction of interstitial spaces of disposability or wastelands in spaces of transit intersect with the young female bodies of the main characters to co-produce the abjection that enables the wasting or disposability of these characters. The wasteland then is the conceptualization of the sites that appear intermittently when these factors give way to the possibility of spectacularly wasting characters. Spectacular wasting refers not only to the fact that these acts are represented
277 on film for the entertainment of the audience, but that they also are meant to provide a spectacle for the characters. In spectacle, the commodity is unquestioned and left to exist unaffected. Spectacular wasting, however, incorporates Debord’s fifty-third thesis that the “consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity.” Moreover, the project of Spectacular wasting does not solely focus on desire since it necessarily complicates the desire of the abject with its characteristics of rejection. In this perspective, desire and rejection are modes of critiquing vulnerability and its effects. The spectacle of wasting reproduces the acts of disposability in a hegemonic manner so that audience engagement is not demanded but possible.
Both SR and BdB speak of locations of vulnerability and vulnerable characters but the anti-hegemonic space is not left to the characters, instead it is nearly required from the audience. In this case the goal of the films that represent the politics, performances and acts of spectacular wasting is not much different from the goals of societal awareness and concern that the 1960s new cinema proposed. In these two films the characters are presented as existing in helpless situations. In neoliberalism it is the individual who has the ability to act and it is personal identity and modes of subjectification that empower them. Being neoliberal, these films project the same ideology, however, they look at the failures of such an idea. Not only are the characters’ personal choices consistently thwarted by structural factors, outside actors also limit their possibilities for empowerment. The representation of these realities appears because at the wastelands 278 they are disposable and already-wasted beings. In other words they do not have the possibility for action and self-empowerment because they are not subjects of modernity.
Existing outside modernity– the lie in the wasteland, the anti-modern space where such personalized politics of identity are inapplicable. Instead, because both characters have already been wasted, abjected, or pushed outside the state, they must turn to their own bodies and social death.
279 In-Conclusion or The Product is Waste
“cheio de flor e de sono meu corpo-galáxia aberto a tudo cheio de tudo como um monturo de trapos sujos latas velhas colchões usados sinfonias sambas e frevos azuis” Ferreira Gullar, Poema Sujo
This thesis analyzes three Brazilian films and three Mexican films produced in the recent neoliberal period of economic policies and ideologies. It has explored what I have termed the “wastelands” or the spaces where waste and bodies interact to reproduce abjection. In looking at each of these films, the text traces the violence of the act of wasting that appears in three different spaces: the private space of the restroom, the public space of the landfill/backyard and the space of transition in the Agreste in Brazil and the Mexico-Guatemala border. By mapping the wasteland in these spaces, the dissertation notes the establishment of discursive and spatial violence upon intersectional othered bodies. By simultaneously mobilizing the concept of spectacle and noting the difference between disposable and wasted bodies, the text notes that there is a violence of
Spectacular Wasting exerted by sovereign entities upon intersectional vulnerable bodies.
My approach draws from the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja to trace the cartography of the wastelands through genealogies of representations of the spaces in each film. In terms of Spectacular Wasting, I recall the Guy Debord’s critical notion of spectacle as process, relationship and mode of capital to outline the effects the films expect to have upon the audience. Moreover, by pulling from Sayak Valencia’s
280 notions of endriago subjects and their empowerment through a body-politics of death
(thanatopolitics) I was able to expose the differences between the term disposability, as used in Melissa Wright’s and Kevin Bales’ sociologic research and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of Wasted Lives (Bauman; Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global
Capitalism; Bales; Sayak Valencia). Most importantly, however, by tracing the limits of the wastelands the text exposes the relationship between modernity and the absence of the state an absence produced by neoliberal policies.
I following on Hector Dominguez Ruvalcaba’s effort to trace the historical creation and convergence of criminality and the Mexican state to oust the systemic aspects that produce violence in the country (Ruvalcaba 212). As such in my effort to map of the wastelands I hope to expose the spatial dynamics of vulnerability and the discursive creation of peripheral subjects as precarious. By exposing the social and discursive creation of the spectacle of wasting and the wastelands this text hopes to have outlined the structural forms of violence that provide the space of waste as sites of impunity for the extermination of those marked by female, racial, ethnic, age-related otherness. Thus, it this texts suggests a suspension of processes of modernization and a re-establishment of modes of governance and safety that can be enacted in situations when the absence of the state, the presence of abjection, waste and vulnerable bodies converge. As long as the contemporary nation-state continues searching modern progress, advancement or any other euphemism for “becoming-modern”, it will need to establish waste-zones. Thus, Backyard/El Traspatio (Carlos Carrera, 2009) and La Vida Breve y
Precoz de Sabina Rivas (Mandoki, 2012) point to Mexico as modernizing with respect to 281 the Central American countries and people that are wasted at its southern border while its own nationals are dejected at the northern border and wasted there.
This project highlights what are timely and necessary objects of study as it especially focuses on the disposable and vulnerable –– The precarious. It is precariousness precisely what connects this project with other research areas that deal with contemporary and necessary subjects. Thinking of the initial analysis chapter, questions of labor arise in the processes of self-construction, empowerment and wasting at the center of this, the second chapter. For example, the question of labor and value when thinking of both Lourenço’s (in Cherio do Râlo) affluence or Gustavo’s (in Malos
Hábitos) work as an architect. Other questions around emotional labor, however could illuminate Elena’s and Matilde’s inward turn, or even Viciada or Bunda’s place in
Lourenço’s personal economy. Although I motion towards the question of labor by subtitling a section “Sacrificial Capitalism” in a further study it would be productive to expand upon the connection between labor and spectacular wasting. This same concept appears again through the rest of the project. In my analysis of Estamira and Backyard/El
Traspatio, for example labor is key in the processes of vulnerabilization for the main characters. In the case of Estamira, not only does she leave the state behind and lives in the wasteland, she also leaves formal work for what could be considered a type of post- labor. In this light, Juana’s move to El Paso to work at a maquiladora and leave her home and father (for whom she cared) also highlights the simultaneity of precarious labor and vulnerabilization as a pathway to the enactment of wasting. Finally, the last chapter only glosses over the idea of labor when looking at prostitution as sexual labor. This last 282 chapter however, may provide some insight at the limitations and eventual denouement of this question of precarious labor, vulnerability and spectacular wasting. After all, in both La Vida Breve y Precoz de Sabina Rivas and Baixio das Bestas represent instances of child labor and child prostitution. The telling marker of difference in these two cases is that both characters are children. Through a broad generalization that points to the need for further research one may see that for children not to work and for children not to be sexually active not only is there a ethical and moral basis but also one of sovereignty. In other words, this is a turn to look at those who are now surplus people (as Bauman calls them), or those “condemned not to create” whom Zizek, taking from Jameson recognizes.
In their case, these wasted beings, their human ability to create, to labor, to participate in community-making may be denied as they are pushed out through social death (as in
Estamira), modern-slavery (as Kevin Bales exposes on Disposable People) or through migration as a way of strengthening other economies (as Bauman notes). What this project uniquely notes, however, is that there is a process of vulnerabilization and a benefitting party in every interaction of wasting an-Other.
This situation, however, also requires us to look at the wastelands for the answers that those within them have already established. To look for the type of structures of governance and community-building that might be able to prevent the enactment of spectacular wasting, a further study could look at other films and cultural productions that represent spaces where abjection, waste, vulnerable bodies and the state absence are represented. Some of these could be, as I pointed out in the introduction, the spaces of transit between the Global South and North, the everyday spaces of the migrant within 283 the Global North and autonomous communities spaces in Latin America. This is a location from which a critique of the contemporary structures of governance, especially the nation-state and its efficacy in dealing with the flows of labor and capital may be questioned. Thus the place of the nation-state in relation to these autonomous community constructions of the wastelands may be a productive way of engaging certain spaces, some of which may prove to have post-labor structures and even non-citizenship modes of relation with the state. This form of afterlife to abjection from the state may point to an actually established schizologic space that breaks with the violence of capitalist production and consumption.
A return to look at wasting as a necessary and complementary process of capitalism and its processes of production and consumption, takes us to questions of eco- critical engagements with the planet, the non-human, the post-human and even questions of the anthropocene and its effects on nature. Modernity, in the sense that we take it in this text is the long-standing challenger of nature. The act of designing, as I consistently cite from Bauman throughout the text, points to a need to understand better this process.
Some of its implications are outlined in this dissertation but this is short of exhaustive.
Processes of wasting are not all spectacular and not all of them may be visible through the type of dystopian neoliberal filmic representations I analyze in this text.
Thus an exploration of the discursive and symbolic construction of locations of catastrophe could also prove beneficial in outlining the dynamics through which the state re-enters spaces that are considered lands of waste. Although I did not approach the idea of ruins and ruination in this text, a close study of the spectacle of ruination and its 284 differences to the spectacle of wasting could elucidate other aesthetic and discursive concerns about the representation and poetics of waste and ruin. Another possible are of grown for this project might be to go beyond the paradigms of state violence and turn to the field of post-humanist studies where the study of the decaying body and its survival, revival and post-human life could produce lucrative critical engagements and enrich the conversation around the act of spectacular wasting. Perhaps Ferreira Gullar understood that the body is the beginning and end of these cultural discourses as it creates and reflects the discourses of abjection when it interacts with waste and space when he notes in his Poema Sujo [Dirty Poem]: “meu corpo-galáxia aberto a tudo cheio/ de tudo…”
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