Exploring the sphere of leisure and gender in contemporary Latin American cinema

JULIA KRATJE

Liverpool

Congreso; Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) Annual Conference; 2016

University of Liverpool

This paper aims at presenting my current doctoral research?s goals and methodological considerations, as well as the main questions it attempts to answer. The work analyzes a corpus of Argentine and Latin American movies from 2002 to 2014, with the goal of exploring fictional projections of the socio-sexual universe. The focus is a comparative study of the figures of women, which reveal changes in customs and everyday life. The specific goal is to analyze the construction of scenes and figures linked to various experiences of leisure. We ask: Which audiovisual and narrative procedures are used to show the various ways to represent the sphere of free time and cultural consumptions? How is that construction linked with aesthetic and socio-cultural images related to contemporary transformations of gender and sexuality relations?From a micro-social perspective, the premise is that, in order to analyze movies in terms of production and distribution, a detailed study of particular cases is necessary. The paper leverages a series of key studies to understand films in historical, political and aesthetic terms. Two main axes of analysis have been assumed: the first one takes into account the cross-disciplinary nature of film studies as regards the socio-cultural field of knowledge; and the second considers film and gender studies exploring the matter of the body and sexuality as a paramount location for the production of new forms of subjectivity.