Claudia Llosa's controversial Madeinusa (2006) has inspired unprecedented debate in the Peruvian media and blogosphere. Despite being the most awarded film in the history of Peruvian cinematography, it was disparaged by local left-leaning critics and intelligentsia, who accused Llosa of perpetuating racist colonial stereotypes of primitive and perverted natives. This essay examines the highly politicized debate surrounding Madeinusa and re(views) the film within a postcolonial feminist framework. In this reading the murderous impulse of the young indigenous protagonist is seen not as a sign of an evil and abject native but as a radical act of self-realization.
for reading earlier versions of this article.In his two collections of chronicles, La esquina es mi coraz6n (1995) andLoco afan: Cr6nicas de Sidario (1996), Pedro Lemebel describes a Santiago not depicted in news bulletins and in the discourses of the Chilean economic &dquo;miracle,&dquo; a Santiago populated by beings marginalized as much by their socioeconomic position as by their sexual orientation. From his perspective as the homosexual &dquo;other,&dquo; Lemebel redraws the map of Santiago from its margins, revealing and redefining sites and subjects that have been neglected by both high culture and the communications media: the buses, the football stadiums, the B-movie theaters, the parks, the lower-class suburbs, the locas (queens), the most vilified and disparaged group of Latin American homosexuals, and those living with HIV and AIDS.'In La esquina es mi corazón, Lemebel's gaze sensualizes the city it observes and colors it with a homoerotic textuality:Despite the tickling heat that sends drops of sweat sliding from their burning crotches, despite the stickiness of bared torsos, excitedly wet, the boys embrace, squeezing tremblingly together after the forward's cannonball shot rips through the hymen of the anus-goal. (1995: 27) La cueca is a dance, a reenactment of the Spanish conquest, performed by the queenly-mannered peasant in his flamenco outfit, a two-piece, button-laden suit which goes so well with the tassled, wide-heeled boots. A laborer on a latifundio, the peasant dolls himself up coquettishly, his jacket cinched at the waist the better to display his little butt.
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