Unconsummated desires and the fragmented nation: Contemporary Latin American film and fiction

This dissertation investigates how turn-of-the-millennium texts symbolically employ incestuous, illicit, and gay desire to pervert traditional representations of the nation. Focusing largely on post-PRI Mexico and twentieth-century Cuba, I analyze a series of films and novels that seem to present themselves as postmodern allegories that respond to the exigencies of the new millennium, resituating "national" imagery within a more globalized, problematized context and offering a glimpse of alternate (inter)national identities. I argue that the texts ultimately disallow the possibility of believing in the utopias they seem to propose, demonstrating instead discourse's limited imaginative potency in the present moment. Carlos Reygadas's film Batalla en el cielo (2005), for instance, employs the excess associated with the Golden Age to draw the spectator's attention to the meconnaisance, or misrecognition, that the screen provokes at both the individual and the national levels. Alfonso Cuaron's film Y tu mama tambien (2001) references nineteenth-century "foundational fictions," holding out momentary hope for a more inclusive nation; the film's virile voice-overs, which resemble those of New Latin American cinema, undercut this possibility, highlighting instead the limitations of past paradigms of national and continental identity. John Sayles's film Lone Star (1996) seeks to rewrite past narratives of incest as a crime best punished by death, and to critique the notion of national borders; the sheriffs, schoolteachers, and sergeants who serve as the film's protagonists complicate this endeavor, as does the film's Latin American intertext. And Zoe Valdes's novels La nada cotidiana (1995) and Te di la vida entera (1996) resemble the testimonio in their political use of the personal, offering a trenchant critique of the Castro regime even as they also attempt to forge a space out of time through symbol, song, and sex. Problematically for the project they propose, however, they resemble the Castro regime's rhetoric in this regard. Returning to images of transgression and to figures and texts central to national history, this dissertation suggests, turn-of-the-millennium tales of desire such as these render the nation as a fragmented entity, characterizing our desire for anything else as necessarily frustrated.