New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Geoffrey Maguire, Rachel Randall, Geoffrey Maguire, Rachel Randall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319893815
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume explores the recent 'adolescent turn' in contemporary Latin American cinema, challenging many of the underlying assumptions about the nature of youth and distinguishing adolescence as a distinct and vital area of study. Its contributors examine the narrative and political potential of teenage protagonists in a range of recent films from the region, acknowledging the distinct emotional registers that are at play throughout adolescence and releasing teenage subjectivities from restrictive critical and theoretical emphases on theories of childhood.

As the first academic study to examine the figure of the adolescent in contemporary Latin American film, New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema thus presents a timely and innovative analysis of issues of sexuality and gender, political and domestic violence and social class, and will be of significant interest to students and researchers in Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, World Cinema and Childhood Studies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall (eds.)New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American CinemaNew Directions in Latino American Cultureshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89381-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema—Gender, Class and Politics

Geoffrey Maguire¹ and Rachel Randall²

(1)

Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

(2)

School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Geoffrey Maguire (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Rachel Randall

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The term ‘adolescence’, which refers to the stage of life characterised by puberty and the transition from childhood to adulthood , comes from the Latin adolescere, meaning to grow or to mature. It is often most closely linked to the physiological changes that lead to physical sexual maturity in adults, but, as Ana Maria Frota argues, this association does not satisfactorily account for the multiple connotations that adolescence carries today (2007: 155). By contrast, in recent years, various studies have problematised the naturalisation of our modern conception of childhood as a period of innocence and dependence (Jenkins 1998; Goulart and Soares 2006; Bruhm and Hurley 2004). These critiques have emerged alongside the recognition of children’s capacity for ‘agency ’ (James 2009: 41), ¹ and a call for analyses that pay greater attention to the effects of race , class and gender on the experience of childhood (Hecht 2002). As Kristen Drybread has observed, impoverished minors , who are unable to conform to the standards of ‘normative childhood’, risk being denied recognition as children, and may be viewed as undeserving of the protections and privileges that this stage of life is supposed to afford (Drybread 2009: 333–334, 345). Furthermore, as Neil Postman argues, the distinction between childhood innocence and adult knowledge that was perpetuated by print culture has been blurred by ‘a new media environment, with television at its centre’ (Postman 1985: 286). The Brazilian documentary short A invenção da infância /The Invention of Childhood (dir. Liliana Sulzbach 2000) emphasises that children’s television viewing habits often expose them to the same scenes of violence , horror and sexual content seen by their parents , which supports the documentary’s assertion that ‘um mundo onde adultos e crianças compartilham da mesma realidade física e virtual é um mundo de iguais’ [a world where adults and children share the same physical and virtual reality is a world of equals].

Such an assertion may provoke questions surrounding the benefits of addressing ‘adolescence’ as another, separate category of study. However, it is also crucial to acknowledge the way in which our modern notions of adolescence have been socially constructed and have developed over time, just as Phillipe Ariès (1962) has argued that our understanding of childhood today only began to emerge after the end of the Middle Ages. A recognition of the ways in which adolescence has been socially determined, and is experienced differently by distinct subjects, engenders a healthy suspicion of approaches or representations that universalise, naturalise or capitalise on the experiences of teenagers . New Visions of Adolescence aims to account for the diversity and complexity of such experiences, offering readers a critical insight into the particularity and potentiality of this formative stage of life. Against the social and cultural backdrop of contemporary Latin America, the essays contained within this collection justify the formulation of adolescence as a distinct category of study, while at the same time demonstrating its inherent capacity to provide new critical approaches to regional and global debates over gender , sexuality , class and politics.

The Emergence of Adolescence

Adolescence and its contemporary connotations started to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century (Holt 2016), but these only began to thrive after the end of the Second World War, at a point when an increasing number of families disposed of incomes that enabled their offspring to remain financially dependent on them for longer (Frota 2007: 149, 156). The inception of modern adolescence is, thus, intertwined with increasing socio-economic privilege and the opportunities that this afforded for young people to ‘improve themselves’ (Driscoll 2002: 111). In other words, this amounts to the possibility of spending longer undertaking leisure activities, of dedicating more time to professional training and education ahead of entry into an increasingly competitive and technocratic labour market, and of ‘searching’ for their own individual identities (Frota 2007: 156–157).

The imbrication of increasing leisure time with a consumer culture that capitalises on individuals’ desires to establish an authentic, individual identity (and to belong to a recognisable social group) leads to another key element at the core of contemporary understandings of adolescence: the emergence of specific popular cultural phenomena in the 1960s and 1970s, which have had a huge impact on how we conceive of, and relate to, young people. As Frota argues, the hippy movement in the 1960s, the student protests of 1968, and the expansion of youth counterculture throughout the 1970s, contributed to discussion about the nature of adolescence, instituting middle-class, masculine adolescence as its most privileged paradigm (2007: 165). In various Latin American countries, youth counterculture became associated with resistance to the repressive military regimes that were sweeping across the region. Laura Podalsky emphasises that in Argentina, for example, rock music and youth became synonymous with ‘lo sospechoso’ (the suspicious) in the 1970s and that, during the years following the institution of a hardline military junta (1976–1983), the rock scene became ‘the dominant discursive site through which young people could construct and negate their identity as youth’ (2011: 106).

Nonetheless, by the 1980s, youth movements had fragmented; in Brazil, for instance, Helena Abramo suggests that the student movement lost its expressiveness as it simultaneously began to gain greater visibility (1994: 55). Popular youth figures were reduced to the circulation of their image and the consumption of specific goods (Abramo 1994: 55). Similarly, by the mid-late 1980s in Argentina, ‘rock was no longer necessarily an alternative cultural space and, as big producers made inroads, many bands turned their attention for the first time to the “body, pleasure, and entertainment”’ (Podalsky 2011: 106). At the same time, cable TV access increased, and mall culture became increasingly prominent (Podalsky 2011: 106). Ivany Nascimento argues that the images and discourses propagated at this time, principally by the media, did not encourage adolescents to reflect on the ways that they could alter or overcome their circumstances, but rather were designed to promulgate stereotypical models of behavior that would fulfill the demands of consumer-driven societies (2002: 71). As Podalsky notes, commentators viewed these developments as ‘contributing to the depoliticization of young people’, who were seduced by ‘post-modern culture’ and rendered vulnerable to ‘the unfettered power of the marketplace’ (2011: 107).

In recent years, the diversification and proliferation of teen entertainment across different media, including on the internet, has culminated in the figure of the adolescent frequently being employed as a cipher for the social changes and for the alternative forms of cultural production and consumption that have been instituted by digital platforms (King 2015: 47–71). In his analysis of the Brazilian transmedia comic Turma da Mônica Jovem, whose narratives revolve around the adventures of a teen gang in São Paulo, Ed King observes that the comic signals current anxieties both surrounding excessive forms of consumption and hyperconnectivity, which are linked to youth culture (2015: 55–56), and regarding the ‘immaterial labour’ resulting from young consumers’ propensity to be active in contributing to the development of the comic’s characters and plot lines via online fan communities (2015: 53). Within traditional economic models, this shift towards ‘immaterial labour’, and ‘immaterial’ (digital) consumption may be viewed as threatening because it enables individuals to consume in ways that are not clearly ‘productive of capital’ (2015: 53). A detailed consideration of the practices of distribution, reception and the fan communities that are associated with youth consumer markets, particularly within the digital sphere, is beyond the scope of the present study, however it is significant that the unstable, potentially ‘threatening’ figure of the adolescent has, in several of the films analysed in this volume, been ‘contained’ within cultural products that shore up traditional modes of production, distribution and consumption. Nonetheless, the haptic and affective dynamics at play within the films addressed by Geoffrey Maguire , Inela Selimović and Ramiro Arm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema—Gender, Class and Politics
• Part I. Gender and Sexuality
• Part II. Gender and Class
• Part III. Gender and Politics
• Back Matter