| This dissertation brings together feminism and postcolonial theory with critical prison studies to theorize what I call the psycho-affective economies and counter-economies of neoliberalism. Arguing that gendered and racialized modes of punishment lie at the heart of the neoliberal project, it posits that one of the major consequences of neoliberalism has been the attempted unmaking of subjects anchored within collective revolutionary aspirations, and the recalibration of highly privatized, self-governed subjects fit for the new world order. The first portion of the dissertation is dedicated to defining the specific forms that racial and imperial violence take under neoliberalism. Beginning in Chile---which served as a "test case" for neoliberalism during the seventeen year Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990)---I analyze the collective emotional consequences of the dictatorship, which so violently shattered the Popular Unity movement, creating a culture of fear and despair, and a tension between memory and forgetting that persists today. Reading this history in relationship to the United State's consolidation as a major protagonist of neoliberal globalization under Reagan, I also consider the rise of the prison-industrial-complex and the new forms of unfreedom that accompanied the United States' emergence as the leader of the so-called free world. Within both contexts, I posit that beyond its economic or political dimensions, neoliberalism becomes an affective project, premised upon the routinization, banalization and normalization of violence in the very moment it is enacted upon the subject. Accordingly, I trace the disappearance of hope, arguing that one of the major legacies of terror and confinement is a melancholic impasse in which the loss of revolution appears immanent, the future of historical transformation, impossible.;The production of the neoliberal subject has entailed the gradual shutting down of memory, intuition and a marginalization of critical capacities of the imagination. Subsequent chapters treat the contemporaneous emergence of Chilean and North American feminist cultural productions, which help to counter these dominant forces of subjectification. Specifically, I examine the call to remember violence that compels the writers Diamela Eltit, Gayl Jones and Dorothy Allison. In their daunting stories of racial, sexual and state violence, they resist the amnesias and disappearances that are a major impulse of the neoliberal imperative. Additionally, their texts render complex subjectivities that carry with them previous structures of feeling, forms of social struggle and modes of collectivity. As such, they produce insurgent subjectivities that reach beyond the totalizing scripts of domination, upsetting prevailing affective economies of loss and despair.;In conclusion, I juxtapose these narratives against recent social movements, which centralize the role of memory in their articulations of justice. Specifically, I turn to recent student mobilizations against the privatization of schools in Chile and the movement to abolish prisons in the United States. Highlighting undying legacies of historical violence, these formations turn to the past to work through injustices that endure. Locating these practices within a broader continuum of dissidence, I close with questions about what these "movements of emotion" portend for a politics of the future. |
