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

Abstract

This introduction situates contemporary cultural representations of adolescence in Latin America within their filmic and socio-historic contexts. Attention is paid to recent developments in cinematic theories concerning child protagonists, before productive distinctions are drawn between the emotional registers and epistemological possibilities of childhood and adolescence. The introduction places particular importance on the role of gender in the formation of on-screen teenage subjectivities, and discusses how cinematic portrayals of teenage protagonists have often conceived of adolescence as a period of both creative transition and threatening unknowability. The introduction concludes with an overview of the structure and scope of the book.