Latency, biopolitics and the reproductive arena : an alternative masculinity in Ricardo Larraín's 'La frontera' (1991)

Thakkar, Amit (2013) Latency, biopolitics and the reproductive arena : an alternative masculinity in Ricardo Larraín's 'La frontera' (1991). Bulletin of Latin American Research, 32 (4). 438–450. ISSN 0261-3050

Abstract

In the Chilean film La frontera (1991), the dissident Ramiro is condemned to internal exile (relegacio ́ n) under Pinochet’s regime. My reading of the film is informed by three theories: I argue that this punishment is an act of Johan Galtung’s ‘structural violence’ against Ramiro’s masculinity, that strategies of ‘hiding’ individual bodies for the sake of the ‘social body’ are relevant to biopolitics (Michel Foucault), and that La frontera exploits the formal potential of latency to reveal how Ramiro rebuilds his masculinity within what Raewyn Connell would term the ‘reproductive arena’. Ramiro’s resulting, alternative masculinity represents a challenge for the reconstruction of post-Pinochet Chile.