Bodily Injuries: Violence, Gender and Representation in Latin America

3 units

The course will focus on the definitions, uses and languages of violence in Latin America, particularly during the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Students will be introduced to philosophical, ethical and political issues related to the existence of structural violence and to the problems connected to the symbolic representation of this phenomenon in literature, fictional/ documentary films, and visual arts. One of the course's objectives will be to problematize the conceptualization of violence and to promote critical thinking about its emergence, significance and effects on local/global societies. Some of the topics to be analyzed are the body in its multiple manifestations (the body politic, the social body, the individual body, the treatment of the corpse, etc.), the narrativization of violence (violence as discourse, documentation and fictional elaborations, violence and the media, violence and ideology, etc.), violence and the city, citizenry and otherness, bio-politics, etc. Finally, violence will be presented in different contexts and associated to different activities (ordinary crime, narco-cultures, maras, political movements, domestic environments) and different situations (e.g. violence in rural areas, violence in the borderlands, violence and migration). In all cases the course will call for a reflection on the interrelations between private/public spheres, gender politics, ideological/aesthetic values, and individual/ institutional levels. The role of memory and emotions will be emphasized as a crucial element for the construction /mobilization of subjectivity and for the elaboration of agendas that challenge the State's monopoly of legitimate violence and propose alternative and often perverse forms of association and mobilization at the margins of institutional configurations.