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DENATURALIZING THE MARKET, REVALUATING THE BODY: NEOLIBERAL BIOPOLITICS IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1990-2010 A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish and Portuguese By Ashley B. Caja, M.S. Washington, DC April 26, 2016 Copyright 2016 by Ashley B. Caja All Rights Reserved ii DENATURALIZING THE MARKET, REVALUATING THE BODY: NEOLIBERAL BIOPOLITICS IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1990-2010 Ashley B. Caja, M.S. Thesis Advisor: Adam M. Lifshey, Ph.D. ABSTRACT During the last three decades of the twentieth century, neoliberalism was the dominant political economic discourse in Latin America, as many countries implemented a series of reforms to promote free markets and free trade. Yet neoliberalism is more than merely a set of economic practices; it is an ideology that generalizes economic principles to all aspects of life. This dissertation analyzes a selection of Latin American novels and films, produced over a twenty-year period from 1990 to 2010: Central do Brasil, directed by Walter Salles; Morena en rojo by Myriam Laurini; Cronicamente Inviável, directed by Sergio Bianchi; María llena eres de gracia, directed by Joshua Marston; 2666 by Roberto Bolaño; La Virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo; and O Matador by Patrícia Melo. All of these texts use depictions of the commodification of the human body as a way to contest neoliberal ideology. They portray certain bodies as contemporary manifestations of the homo sacer, the figure developed by Giorgio Agamben to describe human life that has no value in any social sphere, and thus is disposable and may be eliminated with impunity. This study argues that these texts utilize the concept of disposable life in order to signal to their audience how neoliberal capitalism makes certain segments of the population vulnerable to bodily harm, thereby denaturalizing neoliberal assumptions about human behavior. Furthermore, these texts emphasize how ordinary people contribute to creating iii an atmosphere of disposability through seemingly benign acts such as consumption. In this way, these texts force their audiences to recognize the ways in which they are complicit with the neoliberal system. iv The research and writing of this thesis is dedicated to everyone who helped along the way. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Adam Lifshey, for his support during the entire process, for his feedback on my writing at various stages, and for all of his words of encouragement. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Gwen Kirkpatrick and Dr. Laura Demaria, for their invaluable feedback. I am also especially thankful to Dr. Joanne Rappaport, for her assistance and kind words of support, and to Dr. Patricia Vieira, for her feedback on early stages of this study. I would also like to thank my graduate student colleagues. A special thanks goes out to Maureen Russo and Anthony Perry for their solidarity during different stages of the writing process, and to Ana Maria Ferreira, Monica Simorangkir, and Maisha Mitchell for their moral support during my entire time as a graduate student at Georgetown. Lastly I must thank my family and friends who supported me on this long journey. I am especially grateful for my parents, my sister Allison, my grandparents, and all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles. I’d also like to thank my friends, who encouraged me throughout this process, among them Claire, Paula, Christina, Margaret, and Mike. Many thanks, Ashley B. Caja v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I Organ Trafficking and Neoliberal Governmentality in Central do Brasil, Morena en rojo, and Cronicamente Inviável ................................................................. 19 Chapter II The Denaturalization of Neoliberal Discourse in Maria llena eres de gracia .............. 55 Chapter III Las muertes cinematográficas: The Production and Consumption of Disposable Women in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ............................................................................... 87 Chapter IV Las muertes habituales: Disposable Men in La Virgen de los sicarios and O Matador........................................................................................................................ 125 Afterword ..................................................................................................................... 171 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 173 vi INTRODUCTION Starting in the 1970s, neoliberalism, a school of thought that argues that the free market is the best guide for social organization, began to dominate the political economic landscape of Latin America. The first experiments in neoliberal state formation occurred in Chile and Argentina, as authoritarian regimes supported by the United States implemented economic reforms to create free markets. After these early efforts, other Latin American nations soon followed, as governments privatized industries, signed free trade agreements, and deregulated markets. Yet neoliberalism is more than just a set of economic practices meant to increase and protect market freedoms. Neoliberalism is a hegemonic mode of discourse that structures how individuals understand the world around them. At its essence is the generalization of market principles throughout the social body. Applying market principles to all aspects of human life has dangerous consequences. Giving the market free reign gives way to economic practices that treat human beings as objects, as can be summarized by Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s warning about the nature of markets, which are: “[b]y their nature, […] indiscriminate, promiscuous and inclined to reduce everything, including human beings, their labor, their bodies, and their sexual and reproductive capacities to the status of commodities, things that can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen” (“Commodity Fetishism,” 43). The neoliberal worldview, in judging everything according to a calculus of supply and demand, reduces human bodies to exchange value. Consequently, a human being is only valuable so long as she is perceived as having value in a strictly commercial sense. At the same time, neoliberal discourse privatizes social problems such as poverty. According to the neoliberal worldview, those who have not succeeded simply have not been effective 1 “entrepreneurs of self.”1 Thus, neoliberal discourse devalues certain individuals and concurrently displaces blame onto those same individuals. The most insidious aspect of neoliberal ideology is that it presents its understanding of human behavior, grounded in the market, as common sense, as the natural order of things. If this worldview remains uncontested, it limits one’s sense of what is possible. Jason Read discusses this aspect of neoliberal ideology when he writes that it is not that neoliberalism prohibits certain actions, rather “they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals” (36). As neoliberal ideology has greater influence on the creation of subjectivities and the shaping of societies, imagining a future other than one dominated by market interests becomes increasingly difficult. Even as neoliberalism became a hegemonic force in Latin America, many questioned if neoliberal reforms were successful. In 2006, Paul Krugman suggested that “the perception of most Latin Americans is that ‘neoliberal’ policies have been a failure: the promised takeoff in economic growth never arrived, while income inequality has worsened” (Undeserving). Doubts about the effectiveness of such reforms may have increased opposition to neoliberal practice. But what can be said for opposition to neoliberal ideology? Several novels and films from Latin America, published or released from 1990 to 2010, point to one way of contesting the hegemony of the neoliberal worldview. These texts feature representations of the commercialization of the human body in order to denaturalize the generalization of market principles to all aspects of life. 1 “Entrepreneurs of self’ is a term employed by Foucault to express the relationship between work and the worker that neoliberalism seeks to promote. Instead of being a victim of alienation, the worker “[is] for himself his own capital, [is] for himself his own producer, [is] for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Birth, 226). The metaphor “entrepreneur of self” is an attractive one that encourages workers to buy into capitalism, transforming the worker from a victim to the author of his own success or failure. 2 They highlight the ways that neoliberalism makes certain individuals disposable. These bodies, perceived as having nothing to offer to the market and, by extension, to society as a whole, can be eliminated with impunity. Displaying how neoliberalism victimizes those who are not successful entrepreneurs of self is only the first step in countering neoliberal ideology. As Read indicates, it is not enough to reveal “the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various failings as policy” (36). Concurrently with illustrating how neoliberalism devalues and dehumanizes the poor, a discourse that seeks to oppose neoliberalism needs to alert

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