1st Edition

Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas

    224 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    222 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas rethinks the intersection between violence and its gendered representation.

    This is a groundbreaking contribution to the international debate on the cinematic construction of gender-based violence. With essays from diverse cultural backgrounds and institutions, this collection analyzes a wide range of films across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The volume makes use of varied perspectives including feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory to consider such issues as the visual configuration of power and inequality, the objectification and the invisibilization of women’s and LGBTQ subjects’ resistance, the role of female film-makers in transforming hegemonic accounts of violence, and the subversion of common tropes of gendered violence.

    This will be of significance for students and scholars in Latin American and Iberian studies, as well as in film studies, cultural studies, and gender and queer studies.

    Preface by Leticia Sabsay

    Screening Counter-Violence: An Introduction to Giving Account Beyond Memories of Trauma, Rebeca Maseda García, María José Gámez Fuentes and Barbara Zecchi

    PART I: Memories of gender resistance against violence

    Chapter 1 - Female Bodies on Lisbon’s Margins: Space, Embodiment and (Dis)Possession in Alda e Maria (Pocas Pascoal, 2011), Katy Stewart

    Chapter 2 - Women’s Memories of Political Violence in Brazilian Cinema, Tatiana Heise

    Chapter 3 - Violence, Resistance, and Female Agency in Filmic Representations of the Franco Regime, Cinta Ramblado-Minero

    Chapter 4 - Renouncing Violence: Terrorism and Feminisation in Basque Cinema, Ann Davies

    PART II: Gender violence and agency: beyond binarisms

    Chapter 5 - Sexykiller (Miguel Martí, 2008): Female Psycho-killers and Post-feminism in Contemporary Spanish Horror Film, Irene Baena Cuder

    Chapter 6 - Horror, Gender Violence and Latin American Heteronormative Rhetoric as Mechanisms to Invoke a Queer Subjectivity in La memoria del muerto (Valentín Javier Diment, 2011), Gustavo E. Subero

    PART III: The chiaroscuros of witnessing gender violence

    Chapter 7 - Torture, Masculinity, and Resistance in Chilean Documentary Film: Patricio Guzmán and Marcela Said, Lisa DiGiovanni

    Chapter 8 - War, Women, and Post-hegemonic Representations in Magallanes (Salvador del Solar, 2015), Erika Almenara

    Chapter 9 - Troubling Gender in Cuban Cinema: From History to Story, Brígida M. Pastor

    PART IV: Gender violence across geographical borders: femicide as a global issue

    Chapter 10 - The Poetics of Affect in Documentary Film-making about Feminicidio in Ciudad Juárez, Nuala Finnegan

    Chapter 11 - From Cinema to the Live Regime: Pedagogies of Cruelty and Social Anesthesia in Two Latin American Movies, Sayak Valencia Triana, Sonia Herrera Sánchez

    Biography

    Rebeca Maseda García is Professor of Spanish at the University of Alaska Anchorage (U.S.A.), where she teaches on gender violence and cinema in Spain, historical memory and the Civil War, and contemporary Latin American and Iberian cinemas; her most recent work focuses on alternative ways of representing female trauma in cinema that respond to an ethical witnessing paradigm. Publications include Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture: From Vulnerability to Accountability (2018), Ensayo sobre la contradicción: Virginia Woolf en pantalla (2006), "Mood, Silence and Ghostly Words: Female Trauma in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words", and "Songs of Pain: Female Active Survivors in Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow". She is an associate investigator on a project on the re-signification of women as victims in popular culture.

    María José Gámez Fuentes is Professor of Gender and Media at Universitat Jaume I of Castellon (Spain), and member of the Institute of Feminist Research and the Interuniversity Institute of Social Development and Peace at her home university. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, among others. Her work focusses on feminist theory, cultural violence, and communication towards social change; her publications include Re-writing Women as Victims: From Theory to Practice (co-edited with S. Núñez and E. Gómez, 2019) and Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture: From Vulnerability to Accountability (co-edited with Rebeca Maseda, 2018). Currently she is the principal researcher of research and development projects on the resignification of women as victims and on ethical witnessing.

    Barbara Zecchi is a professor and Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (U.S.A.), and Associate Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Spain. She has published and lectured widely on European and Latin American cinemas, feminist film theory, film adaptation theory, gender studies, aging studies, and video-graphic criticism. In addition to video-graphic essays and journal articles, she is the author or editor of numerous volumes including La pantalla sexuada (2015), Desenfocadas (2014), and Tras las lentes de Isabel Coixet: cine, compromiso y feminismo (2017). Zecchi is vice-director of the international research network "CinemAGEnder", and founder of "Gynocine", a digital humanities project on the production of women filmmakers around the globe.

    "This timely and well-coordinated collection of essays offers a set of politically urgent and highly original readings of important films from Portugal, Spain and Latin America that make us readers re-think what we thought we knew about gender and violence, or its depiction on the screen."

    - Santiago Fouz Hernández, Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University

    "This is an important book written and edited by leading experts in their field. The rich edited collection examines film and gender violence within specific systemic cultural contexts privileging female agency and resistance."

    - Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies, University of Portsmouth