Childhood, Youth, and the In-between: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza

Abstract

This article examines Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 film La mujer sin cabeza, taking childhood and youth as its main category of analysis and discussing the relationship between the film’s uses and portrayals of these, and the categories of gender, race, and class. The article explores the film’s dialogue with discursive constructions of Argentine youth and proposes that the film figures female adolescence both as political redemption and means of escape from sexual and social stratification. The relationship between childhood and ghostliness is theorised in relation to Agamben and the figure of homo sacer. These figures are understood as ‘in-betweens’ or remnants of binary structures, and the film’s ethical project is to focus on thematically, and embody aesthetically, this interval. This project also extends to a detailed analysis and exposure of the mechanisms of exclusion and separations associated with the systems of domination depicted.