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Francis, David Stewart

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Francis, David Stewart

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    Moving Sensibility: Sex Work and Economies of Desire in Latin American Literature and Visual Cultures
    (2016-01-28) Francis, David Stewart; Epps, Brad; Sommer, Doris; Delgado, Sergio; Jordan, Mark
    This dissertation surveys diverse contexts in which sex and migratory labor are sold and conceptualized in, on, and across border zones since the 1990s. It examines texts by Pedro Lemebel, Fernando Vallejo, and Roberto Bolaño in conjunction with the museum installations of Teresa Margolles and films by Ishtar Yasin and Luis Mandoki. It concludes pointing to further research on works by Luisa Valenzuela, Beatriz Flores Silva, and Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva. The filmic narratives and rhetorical constructions I discuss mark what historian Brodwyn Fischer has called Latin America’s recent union of “dystopic terrors” and “deep optimism” or what I propose to be the discourse between a dystopic present and utopian dream. Engaging with narratives that concern a variety of border zones—in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, the Southern Cone, and Spain—I consider what Mary Louise Pratt describes as “a new phase of empire [that] unfurled across the planet,” concomitant with neoliberal economic policies like NAFTA and Mercosur at the end of the 20th century. Following representations of regional and international migratory movements, the thesis homes in on the predicaments of poverty and exploited labor at national dividing lines and in marginal urban spaces. Therein, I note an ongoing flux in literary and visual discourse not only about sex work, trafficking, and modern slavery, but about how the terms used to present migratory labor arise, often in contestation, at sites of intense political, economic, and ethical debate. Recognizing recent theories of love and violence in the so-called Latin American post-national imaginary, this comparative work suggests the need to understand Latin America’s migratory and marginal populations as ethically implicated in both national and transnational literary, visual, and economic discourse.