Unruly Bodies: La rabia and El último verano de la boyita

Abstract

In the 2000s and 2010s, global arts cinema has seen a cluster of films which question gender and sexual ideologies through the non-conforming child-figure, and Latin American cinema has been no exception to this trend, with important examples emerging in countries such as Venezuela and, especially, in Argentina. This chapter examines the theme of ‘unruly child bodies’ in recent Latin American cinema, arguing that since the mid-2000s, such representations have made of the child-figure a significant means by which Latin American cinema communicates feminist and queer political thought. This recent development can be linked to the changing production and funding landscape, as well as to the changing political and legal contexts of Latin American countries. This chapter starts with a brief survey of films with related themes, before moving onto examine in depth two Argentine films from the late 2000s, Albertina Carri’s La rabia (2008) and Julia Solomonoff’s El ultimo verano de la boyita (2009) in which the child is linked to the animal as a way of imaging corporeal, sexual and gender non-conformity. The chapter shows how both films challenge post-Enlightenment imaginaries of childhood which emphasise the child as locus of innocence and purity, and image a revolt from established corporeal, gender and familial regimes through the animal connections of their child protagonists. This becoming is also elicited extra-diegetically, through the films’ appeals to embodied spectatorship, their production of a spectatorial ‘becoming-other’.