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Cuerpos (In)Visibles: Relaciones Transnacionales, Tecnologías Culturales y Narratividad en México y la Península Ibérica

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Abstract

This project explores intersections between cultural technologies, narrativity and the diverse dynamics enacted between and within the concepts of visibility and invisibility, in three different spaces that rely on the interconnectedness of transnational alliances. In Chapter One I approach this subject through the examination of the photojournalistic work of Gerda Taro during the Spanish Civil War, and its relationship with the iconography of the Mexican Revolution. I concentrate on the analysis of two figures generally understood as marginalized in the study of these two armed conflicts: Mexican soldaderas and the Peninsular milicianas. In this first section I focus on the understanding of photography as a process that creates a new event between the actant and its reproduction, which projects a dynamic that embodies the visualization of a possibility, rather than a mechanical reproduction of reality. In Chapter Two I review the work of two peninsular authors from the so-called Spanish Generation X, José Ángel Mañas and Ray Loriga. I explore an aesthetic that elaborates a textual performance of the audiovisual world of the 1990’s transnational scene in Madrid within two of their novels: Historias del Kronen (1994) and Caídos del Cielo (1995), respectively. This chapter examines the usage of antiheroes and unreliable narrators as actors of disidentification, whose apathy or lack of sympathy forces the reader to explore the marginal figures or aspects of the novel, which is where the political, economic, and social criticisms are performed. In Chapter Three I analyze two transmedia novels: La muerte me da (2007), by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, and Alba Cromm (2010), by Spanish writer and poet Vicente Luis Mora. In this section I explore the dynamic between visibility and invisibility that obtains in an aesthetic intersection between software and narrativity, which creates a third space where systemic forms of violence are problematized and critiqued. Both works demand the intervention of an active reader, who shares responsibility with the author by being a witness, rendering the act of seeing as a conscious political choice with real consequences.

Throughout this project, I maintain an understanding of technologies, such as the photographic camera, television, and word processors, as cultural forms that embody the social, economic and political interests that encompass their development— hand in hand with human agency. Furthermore, I sustain the importance of exploring these intersections through transnational alliances that emulate economic and cultural exchanges, especially those between Mexico and Spain. For this reason, I assert the need to incorporate interdisciplinary readings in order to understand the enactment or configuration of that third space, between those (in)visible bodies

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