New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
New Directions in Latino American Cultures Series

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.

1. Introduction: Visualizing Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Gender, Class and Politics (Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall)

Part One: Gender and Sexuality

2. Visual Displeasure: Adolescence and the Erotics of the Queer Male Gaze in Marco Berger’s Ausente (Geoffrey Maguire)

3. (Re)Pairing Adolescent Masculinities: The Neo-Fraternal Social Contract and the Penal State in Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho and Beira-Mar (Ramiro Armas)

4.Sensorial Youths: Gender, Eroticism, and Agency in Lucrecia Martel’s Rey muerto (Inela Selimović)

Part Two: Gender and Class

5. “Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande (Rachel Randall)

6. Young, Male and Middle Class: Representations of Masculinity in Mexican Film (Georgia Seminet)

7. Beyond Pink or Blue: Portrayals of Adolescence in Latin American Animated Film (Milton Fernando González-Rodríguez)

Part Three: Gender and Politics

8. Growing Pains: Young People and Violence in Peru’s Fiction Cinema (Sarah Barrow)

9. Tragic Adolescence in Michel Franco’s Heli and Amat Escalante’s Después de Lucía (Sophie Dufays)

10. From Girlhood to Adulthood: Colombian Adolescence in María, llena eres de gracia and La sirga (Carolina Rocha)

Geoffrey Maguire is a Junior Research Fellow in Latin American Studies at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK. He is author of The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (2017).

Rachel Randall is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Hispanic Media and Digital Communications at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2017).

Examines the political and narrative potential of teenage protagonists and acknowledges the distinct emotional registers at play throughout adolescence

Features chapters authored by country-specialists on a variety of national contexts and visual media, ranging from Mexico and Colombia to Brazil and Argentina; fiction film to documentary to animation

Presents innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives that are situated at the crossroads of Latin American Cultural Studies, World Cinema, Childhood Studies, and aesthetic theory