UC Davis

My dissertation explores contemporary Chilean cultural products (literature, music, and performance) in the context of the 21st-century neoliberal society. From a destituent point of view following a tradition started by Walter Benjamin and most recently, Giorgio Agamben, and the Invisible Committee, I examine how class, race, and gender representations have changed since the nineties to adapt to the global market and political demands while hiding the structural violence that supports the neoliberal paradigm imposed in the last dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). I aim to examine the dynamics of power (and counter-power) that class, race, and gender have in the continuation of the neoliberal hegemony in Chile, and how subjectivities struggle to present alternatives to “el modelo” (as Chileans colloquially call the neoliberal model), carrying a pitfall to the liberal rhetoric of rights used by the State to control our citizenship.