Duplicity and posthegemony in Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa and Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa

Abstract

This article employs the concepts of duplicity and posthegemony to analyse intimate and social interactions in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa [The Holy Girl] (2004) and Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (2005), focusing in particular on the personal and social development of each film’s female protagonist. By viewing the films through the psychoanalytic concepts of duplicity as defined by Harold Kelman and posthegemony as defined by Jon Beasley-Murray, we distinguish how each female protagonist strives toward posthegemonic status while adopting opposite approaches to duplicity. This is to say that Amalia entirely eschews duplicity while Madeinusa plays upon the liminalities of moral doubleness. In elaborating this argument, we will also demonstrate that both films represent a feminist critique of hegemony in which the emergent and emancipative subject liberates herself from the patriarchal apparatuses of the family, religion and community.