In this study, I examine representational strategies revolving around extreme violence and child/adolescent protagonists in films, literature, children’s drawings, and legal/political discourses in contemporary Latin American culture from an interdisciplinary approach. I analyze the mobilizing potential and uses of representations of child protagonists affected by violence and the cultures of impunity that facilitate its circulation. Within the works selected, I explore ways in which children can become sites of memory and justice through acts of witnessing, empathy, and the universal claim of natural law, with a primary focus on transnational and multidirectional depictions of violence (i.e. a violence in circulation) in extra-juridical, politicized, or aberrant environments in Latin American works. The historical periods contextualizing this study include the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) and its interconnectedness to the violence of WWII and the Holocaust in Reina Roff�’s “La noche en blanco” (Chapter 1), the impact of transnational trajectories of genocidal violence in Argentine South Patagonia in 1959-1960 as depicted by Luc�a Puenzo’s novel Wakolda (Chapter 2), Argentina’s transition to democracy (1990s) and the critical questions it raised regarding appropriated children and amnesty/justice in Dir. Gast�n Biraben’s Cautiva (Chapter 3), and the circulation of the traumatic in an orphanage in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s filmic interpretation of violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in El espinazo del diablo (Chapter 4, Part A). My research investigates inter-discursivities from a non-traditional approach to literature, film, and archival drawings, which include fictional (diegetic) drawings by Spanish children (in del Toro’s films) and non-fictional drawings made by Argentine children in exile in the Netherlands (Chapter 4, Part B).

I extensively focus on analyzing instances of children’s experiences with what I term “recycled violence.” This repetition of extreme violence is demonstrated in certain works in their trans-temporal and trans-spatial return to the pain and horrors of the Holocaust or to other unresolved periods of violence still resounding in the present moment. In the works analyzed, child protagonists are enormously affected by political decisions, wars, and the severe breakdown of law and order. Considering these extraordinary circumstances, it is important to justly address the traumas/wounds caused by the radical and systemic violence of those who should protect them – guardians who instead inflict violence. Injustices are approached in this study through an exploration of the concepts of spectatorship and witnessing, the imperative of the Good Samaritan or ethical responsibility, and possible connections of truth and testimony to justice. Finally, I postulate that child/adolescent protagonists may facilitate the establishment of a fortified empathy in an audience/readership numb from an incessant bombardment by violence, among other reasons for the use of children in works revisiting periods of extreme violence.

My dissertation explores the presence of the Gothic mode in two literary works connected to two periods of rupture in the Southern Cone: during the presence of Eva Peron in the Argentinean political ground, beginning in 1946, and throughout the military regime in Chile between 1973 and 1990. The novels Santa Evita, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, and Una Casa Vacía, by Carlos Cerda, each contain gothic forms of representation related to individuals who are repressed and excluded by authoritarian regimes. My analysis reveals these author's attempts to recuperate and unveil forbidden memories and seemingly buried periods of time, characterized mainly by the dissemination of terror.

In Chapter One, I explore, identify and develop the main historical and theoretical approaches to Gothic representations in literature in England and the Americas. I pay particular attention to the themes of death, gothic space and the dichotomies of reason and unreason, as well as the concepts of the uncanny and the abject from a psychoanalytical standpoint.

In Chapter Two, I analyze the novel Santa Evita, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, to better understand and illustrate the reasons that motivated the Argentinean government to "disappear" Eva Peron's body, and erase her image from the nation's collective memory, in addition to showing how these failed political maneuvers transformed her image into a haunting and lingering presence.

In Chapter Three, I analyze the novel Una casa vacía, by Carlos Cerda, emphasizing the return of the female Gothic figure who had been subjected to torture during the military regime in Chile. In this chapter, I argue that the return of this figure, as portrayed in this novel, restitutes and conciliates a memory that has been repressed in the Chilean society during the last four and a half decades.

Taking “gobernar es poblar” as a key mandate to Argentine women, this doctoral thesis will trace the centrality of motherhood to women’s citizenship and to the Argentine national imaginary writ large. Specifically, this project is based on an array of cultural productions, including novels, poetry, artwork, and film, along with archival documents, cultural artifacts, and theories from several fields, pertinent to the main topic of this thesis: the way post-mortem maternal/female bodies are notably depicted and reproduced around the model of sacrificial motherhood as a central site of reference for national identity building in Argentina. Among the analytic objectives that guided the direction of this dissertation are the following assumptions and hypotheses: 1. Women’s citizenship and participation in the public sphere was dictated by maternity, as defined through Republican Motherhood; 2. Through foundational narratives’ depictions of mothers, this exemplar was disseminated and reproduced as a model to be followed, or in a similar vein, narratives of “bad” mothers were circulated as cautionary tales, as in the case of La Cautiva; 3. As motherhood determined citizenship, rewriting these maternal archetypes can serve as a means of exploring the gendered, racialized, and class-based constraints this citizenship entailed; 4. Depictions of la Difunta Correa and Eva Per�n can be considered examples of these reinterpretations due to their reliance on maternal tropes and the subjects’ relevance to women’s civic engagement, and therefore prove useful as vehicles for examining the limiting of women’s political status; 5. The situating of la Difunta’s and Evita’s narratives beyond their original historical moments allows the author to recontextualize the original constraints on women’s citizenship and thereby highlight the continued exclusionary practices of defining a citizenry via identitarian categories, including gender and sexuality. I argue that by reading these modern and contemporary cultural productions depicting la Difunta and Evita through the framework of motherhood and queer theory, the artists are reconfiguring the parameters of citizenship and reimagining the nation.

My dissertation examines from an interdisciplinary approach the construction of new identities based on the models of female artists working in the Industry of Entertainment since the second period of Yrigoyenist Presidency (1928-1930) until Peronism (1946-1952). It argues that in these historical contexts, coincidental with the enlargement of the middle class and massive integration of women in the public sphere, the female cultural agency becomes a key process that paves the way for the emergence of a female political identity embodied by Eva Perón in the 1940s, founder of the Female Peronist Party (1949) and promoter of the Female Suffrage Law (1947). By examining the significance of popular culture opened up by the Industrialization of Argentine Cinema in the 1930s, my research aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of nation formation and identity in Peronism, a field traditionally dominated by polarizing interpretations of its sociopolitical and cultural components.

This work explores the intersection of capitalism, nationhood, and female sexuality in late 19th and early 20th century Argentine discourses of prostitution. It traces how the female labor force in the first wave of industrialization, specifically how sexual labor, underlines male state insecurities at the turn of the century. It analyzes how cultural texts create narratives that dialogue with and contribute to the dehumanizing cultural imaginary surrounding the prostitute. Finally, it proposes a counternarrative using the life of Raquel Liberman as a contradiction to that cultural imaginary.

This dissertation provides an analysis of the representation of violence in contemporary Mexican and Argentinian literature, with emphasis on works depicting gender crimes. This study focuses on what I call “ficciones especulares,” a literary category defined by embedded texts that perform as notional configurations, in which connectedness replicates the construction of collective memory after traumatic events. In these narratives, Mexican writers (David Toscana, Fernanda Melchor) and Argentinian writer (Selva Almada) explore femicides or violence against queer people, unresolved due to impunity, by organizing and confronting discursivities from assorted literary genres and archives. The method of inquiry involved in the analysis stresses a search for internal relations within and between narrative units. My project argues that twenty-first century Mexican and Argentinian literature promotes the deconstruction of patriarchal ideology while foregrounding sociocultural frames that regulate affective and ethical responses to violent phenomena.In Chapter One I examine the excess of violence reverberated in the several novels abridged in David Toscana's El �ltimo lector (2004). Focusing on the impaired emotional involvement of the main characters, Lucio and Remigio, I outline the pedagogy of cruelty (Segato 2018), a process aimed at the removal of human qualities, attributes and rights. In examining a scene of animal sacrifice, I underline violence as a bonding element of hegemonic, toxic masculinity. In Chapter Two I continue the survey of representations of violence through the analysis of Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes (2017). In this chapter, I repurpose the concept of embeddedness (Sassen 2017) to connect the multiple cases of gender violence portrayed: child sexual abuse, femicide, compulsory prostitution, rape, sexual assault, and violence against queer people. Based on this violence network, I emphasize the devaluation of the human body in neoliberal capitalism, an epoch I characterize by the production of performance-oriented subjects and a surge of pleonexia, a Greek philosophical concept related to insatiable, materialistic desires. In Chapter Three, by comparing Selva Almada's Chicas muertas (2014) with its fictional precursor, “Chicas lindas” (2007), I scrutinize the social forces or institutions in charge of concealing gender violence, in specific during the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983). On the other hand, I highlight the recent efforts to give visibility to the problem within academia, social movements, and law amendments. Moreover, I contemplate Almada's posture towards the revision of collective memory, as well as the methods used to choralize the voices of the victims. The main contribution of my dissertation is the identification of polyphonic narratives which multi-layered design provides supplementary perspectives to gender violence, from its origins to its perpetuating factors. I recognize in the selected works a hermeneutic construction that extends to the sociopolitical sphere, which contextual symbolic economy functions as a tool to interpret the triggering cycles of subordination, emotional and physical abuse.

This dissertation considers theory from the field of Memory Studies to compare the relationships between transitional justice, cultural production, and discourses on state terror and human rights. The most recent civic-military dictatorships in Brazil (1964-1985), Uruguay (1973-1985), and Argentina (1976-1983) remain unresolved histories in the collective imaginaries of each country. The fields of literary and media studies often point to the cultural production that represents this period as contributing to the construction of memory, and, therefore, against impending oblivion. My dissertation moves beyond the binary logic of remembrance and oblivion to analyze the ways in which cultural production shapes our understanding of the dictatorships and their aftermath. Chapter 1, “The Survivor on Screen: Film in Post-dictatorship Brazil,” focuses on the films Que bom te ver viva (L�cia Murat, 1989), A��o entre amigos (Beto Brant, 1998), and Hoje (Tata Amaral, 2011) to understand the extent to which they reinforce or reject the notion that the only people affected by the dictatorship were the militants who took up arms against the regime. Chapter 2, “Unfinished Stories: Film in Post-Dictatorship Uruguay,” analyzes the films Zanahoria (Enrique Buchichio, 2014), Matar a todos (Esteban Schroeder, 2007), and Secretos de lucha (Maiana Bidegain, 2007), which all depict the past as unresolved. Each of these films has an inconclusive ending, implying that Uruguayan transitional justice is yet to come. Chapter 3, “Towards Inclusive Victimhood and Memory: Post-dictatorship Film in Argentina,” analyzes Cautiva (Gast�n Biraben, 2003), Los Rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), and Buenos Aires Viceversa (Alejandro Agresti, 1996) as examples of works that challenge the canonized memories of the dictatorship as well as the widely accepted notions of victimhood, pushing for the consideration of traditionally excluded subjectivities. This chapter addresses the intergenerational struggle over memory and the victims of economic crises in the post-dictatorship. This dissertation investigates the impact that political and legal frameworks have on filmmaking, on storytelling, and on how the past is remembered, contributing to research on the intersection between memory studies, transitional justice, and the cultural field.

This dissertation rigorously examines the transformative potential of Social Impact Entertainment (SIE) within the Brazilian audiovisual sector, focusing on the work of Maria Farinha Filmes as a pivotal case study. It interrogates the integration and efficacy of social impact messages across cinematic productions and evaluates the nuanced receptions by what is termed the 'contemporary spectator.' These individuals are characterized not merely as passive consumers but as active social participants, whose interactions with media are deeply informed by their diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, and the surrounding social realities. A core aspect of this investigation is the profound influence of technological advancements on SIE, particularly how these innovations have reshaped both the production mechanisms and distribution strategies of content. The analysis delves into the ramifications of such shifts for audience engagement and content accessibility. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines content analysis, theoretical exploration, and empirical data, the study maps the thematic trajectories and social resonances embedded in the body of work of Maria Farinha Filmes. Notable productions such as The Beginning of Life (2016) and Aruanas (2019) are scrutinized for their thematic depth, narrative strategies, and impact effectiveness. The dissertation advances the discourse on SIE by articulating its capacity to act as a catalyzing agent for social awareness and change, both within national borders and on the global stage. It posits SIE not only as a reflection of societal issues but as a proactive participant in societal transformation. This is achieved through a structured examination of the interplay between filmmaker intent, narrative execution, and audience interpretation, supported by a comprehensive review of secondary literature and primary case studies. Ultimately, this study aims to elevate the academic understanding of SIE, proposing a nuanced framework for assessing its impact on contemporary social issues through the lens of Brazilian cinema, thereby positioning SIE as a critical tool in the arsenal of social innovation and public pedagogy.