Visual Dystopias from Mexico's Speculative Fiction
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Visual Dystopias from Mexico’s Speculative Fiction: 1993-2008 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Stephen Christopher Tobin Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese The Ohio State University 2015 Dissertation Committee: Laura Podalsky, Advisor Ana del Sarto Juan Ulises Zevallos-Aguilar Copyright by Stephen Christopher Tobin 2015 Abstract There exists a corpus comprised of speculative fiction texts written and published from the early 1990s until the 2008 that express an urgency regarding the way vision and visuality function in Mexico. Among other notable elements, these texts feature a male cyborg who repairs his lost eye by gaining an ocular prosthesis that becomes a signal of his warrior masculinity, a female cyborg whose lost eye becomes an emblem of her lack, ocular reporters whose vision is coopted by mass media corporations, cyborg rejects owned by corporations whose lives becomes a reality-show segment, and a cancer- riddled president whose multiple operations are made into media spectacles. Aside from a recurrent interest in the interface between human and machine, these fictions also appear particularly concerned with television as a device that contains enough gravitational force that sucks the viewer into it in the privacy of his own home, and a public sphere-turned- virtualized reality that visual manipulates the Mexican masses. The motif that recurs in these narratives expresses a kind of deep suspicion of vision, a profound deception in new media visual technologies and the forces that make them possible. Often, the protagonist loses his or her eye, frequently having it replaced with some kind of technology that ostensibly enhances the loss of visual perception. But in all of these cases, the enhancement ultimately carries with it an unanticipated form of subjectification to or control by some larger force. These forces trace back to either power embodied in ii the form of political figures or transnational corporations. These dystopian, allegorical literary expressions are responding to larger, complex changes occurring in the social, political, economic and technological realms within Mexico under neoliberal economic policies instituted by the state, all of which can be read in the construction of these imagined subjects. These narratives express a profound distrust in the contemporary situation of Mexico, the political figures that run it and the mediascape that dis-orders their lives. These narratives register how Mexico may be undergoing a larger transformation within its current (micro-)scopic regime, shifting from a modern visuality of photography and film toward a more postmodern one of the electronic/televisual and the cybernetic/digital. They also suggest how subjectivity in Mexico is coming to be affected and altered by these visual technologies, seeing them as invasive of the culture as they are as penetrating to the body. iii To Milo(vich): the being whose presence is always already there iv Acknowledgments This dissertation would not be in its current cohesive form without the help of my advisor, Dr. Laura Podalsky. Without her invaluable guidance and constructive suggestions during the development of this research work, this project would simply not exist. I would also like to thank Dr. Ana Del Sarto and Dr. Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar for being on my committee. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Patricia Arroyo Calderón, whose reassuring presence has proven time and again to encourage me to keep moving forward and to keep me grounded. Finally, I wish to thank my parents for their support and encouragement throughout my study. Last but not least, I would like to thank the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for their financial support during my time at The Ohio State University. v Vita 1991................................................................Northmont High School 1995................................................................B.A. English, Otterbein College 2009................................................................M.A. Spanish, Middlebury College 2010 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese vi Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................................... v Vita ................................................................................................................................................................. vi Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures ..............................................................................................................................................viii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Right to Fight, to Look, to Lack: The Hypermasculine Technologized Gaze and Female Cyborg as (Visual) Lack in Two Mexican Cyberpunk Texts from Gerardo Porcayo ........... 59 Chapter 2:Televisual Subjectivities in Pepe Rojo’s Speculative Fiction ....................................................... 97 Chapter 3: Writing to Fight the Visual Manipulation of the Masses: the Seductive, Empty State and the Ventriloquist that Controls It in Eve Gil’s Virtus ...................................................................... 160 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 203 Appendix of Figures .................................................................................................................................... 217 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 223 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Stairs made of televisions in Tijuana............................................................... 217 Figure 2. Tijuana artist Fernando Miranda in front of his art installation ..................... 218 Figure 3. Side view of Fernando Miranda’s art installation .......................................... 219 Figure 4. View from inside art installation, with Pepe Rojo looking in ......................... 219 Figure 5. One of the first “Tú no existes” urban intervention stickers .......................... 220 Figure 6. “Tú no existes” stickers placed atop a Mcdonald’s ad at a bustop ................. 221 Figure 7. A “Tú no existes” sticker placed alongside other advertisements .................. 221 Figure 8. “Tú no existes” billboard-sized posters at UNAM, Mexico City ................... 222 viii Introduction "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances.” Walter Benjamin “For the problem of the observer in the field on which vision in history can be said to materialize, to become itself visible. Vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification.” Jonathan Crary "There is now no longer any distinction between the medium and what is represented. Subject and object are fused, the illusion of direct apprehension made palpable, the boundaries between event and spectator, performer and audience, abolished through the instantaneous nature of the electronically produced message." Max Silverman Ten short years separate the publication of the following two Mexican science fiction short stories, yet what they articulate about the visual technologies and how such technologies have affected subjectivity could not be more divergent. Mauricio-José Schwarz’s “La pequeña guerra,” published in 1984, and Francisco José Amparán’s “Ex machina,” published in 1994, both utilize the television screen within their narrative structures—but to very different ends. Not only does this difference illustrate a larger shift occurring in the thematics of Mexican science fiction production from the 1980s to the 1990s, but it also signals other transformative socio-historical changes resulting from a complex interplay between the neoliberalism unleashed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican media industries and the proliferation of new media technologies, in particular that of television. While television has been in Mexico 1 since the 1950s, the qualitative and quantitative shifts that occur from the 1980s to the 1990s pierces through the second story to show how the visual technologies of television along