Preliminary Programme

Dating from General Pinochet and the Chicago Boys’ restructuring of its economy and reaching its zenith in the 1990s, Chile has been the darling of neo-liberal ideologues and technocrats. This paper deals with the question of counter-memory in looking at the legacies of Chile’s 1970-1973 experimental revolution: a democratic path toward socialism. Foucault’s concept of counter-memory deals with the inability of subordinate actors to tell the bourgeois subject’s life story as one of forging a coherent path through intentional action. Counter-memory reveals the fissures of lives rent by violence and injustice. Building on nearly three decades of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, in this paper, I first present the stories of four women whose family histories have been torn by political violence, I then turn to a exploration of the first subject’s photographic and poetic chronicle of her own emergent political activism. Critic Andrea Noble notes that for Marianne Hirsch, as a feminist scholar, family ---and the religious doctrines and cultural frameworks that can define family in particular cultural contexts-- tends to be a constraining factor for memory work presenting baggage that must be “worked-through.” Yet, this frame precludes serious engagement with cultural contexts where kinship and religion are central to social and political organization. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou offer the concept of dissposession as a way of looking at the intersection of capitalist exploitation and defiant inter-subjectivity. While documenting the importance of kinship narratives in the resiliently revolutionary narratives of kinship and anti-capitalist struggles of leftist women, my research suggests that dispossession becomes a stronger frame for emancipatory agency in poetry and photographic chronicles. (Show less)

The rags-to-riches narrative comes often to mind when describing typical film and soap opera plots from the most popular cinematic traditions. Pretty Woman (1990) is an emblematic case of a modern Cinderella: a prostitute who, the film suggests, marries up. The most common rags-to-riches narrative is the Cinderella tale, in which a woman of poor origin climbs up the social ladder thanks to the help or the love of a man of higher position. This narrative is the most popular tale in history, argues cultural scholar Wuming Zhao, and has been found in almost all cultures as early as the 9th century. Interestingly, however, this narrative has not been as pervasive in Mexican cinema as it could be assumed.
Mexican telenovelas have been popular in Mexico, Latin America, the United States and some countries in Europe, Asia and Africa for many decades now. In telenovelas the rags-to-riches narrative has been commonplace, from the early El derecho de nacer (1951) to La gata (2014). Mexican cinema has often been considered a forerunner of the telenovela, in particular the films produced during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (1930-1955). Cultural scholar Jesús Martín Barbero argues that the popular identification put into motion by the 40s and 50s cinema in Latin America entailed a process of sentimental integration, which was used to the advantage of the telenovela. The success of the telenovela, he suggests, was possible thanks to the film and radio industries. If this were the case, we would assume that the most popular telenovela narrative, what we call here: rags-to-riches, comes from Mexican cinema, and therefore, it would be expected to be present in early Mexican cinematic tradition. Mexican cinema, conversely, has been characterised not only by the lack of this narrative line but for the prevalence of the complete opposite narrative: class permanence.
Thus, what we do know is that ever since their emergence of the Mexican telenovela, the rags-to-riches narrative has been prevalent; that the rags-to-riches and more specifically, the Cinderella narrative have been common in most cinematic traditions from the early 20th century and onwards; and that this narrative has been virtually absent from Mexican cinema, particularly from the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema period.
So the questions I am attempting to answer in this paper is why is the rags-to-riches narrative absent from Mexican cinema during the Golden Age? When did it become commonplace? Under which conditions did the rags to riches narrative become possible in Mexican cinema?
I argue in this paper that the class permanence narrative is fed by a strict gender structure that determines the female and male roles that are compatible with class mobility. At some point in the second half of the 20th century, it became more acceptable for men to seek class mobility through work and education and for women to do so through education but more commonly, through marriage. In this paper I explore the causes and the conditions behind this major transformation of both class and gender structures. (Show less)

1. The starting point is the assertion that the native Russian tradition (especially literary) did not provide for a woman nothing but a projection of man, leaving no room for "self-practice." At the same time, construction of gender continues to happen today thanks to various technologies: cinema, art, photography, performance, scenarios of television’s "hyperreal" conventions, and satellite channels.
2. The examples of post-war cinema show the evolution of the image of Soviet women. Presented images of heroes and heroines not only reflect the prevailing gender order (in these images people find themselves), but also set new desired gender roles, which can be taken as a model and followed. It is concluded that, in spite of the professional success, career and social recognition, true feminine happiness can be attained only in a family with beloved man, whom the woman is ready to comply. Even if a woman achieves outstanding results in science, her performance is assessed by a man who reserves the leadership role.
3. It is shown that in modern Russia with the advent of the Internet and new practices of everyday life the old gender order coexists with the new traditionalism in the public and official spheres. Gender roles are complementary. In addition, a powerful myth of a woman born in the Soviet Union still subsists there. Under cover of this myth (as we have shown above) the power used a woman as the object of the nationalized product and total violence (of the society, the workforce, men, and children), declaring at the same time universal love and respect for women's rights.
4. Until now, the "equality" with the man has for woman the taste of identification with him. Perhaps this explains the cultural hybridity of modern Russian television. In the discourse of television series is traced the collision and mixing of new Russian, Soviet, European and American cultural models. Today “Soviet positive” becomes a demand for the construction of the identity of Russian TV viewers. They are invited to think of a happy, though difficult life in the USSR. Codes of Soviet culture broadcast nostalgia as symbols resource that could bring people together based on shared memory.
5. Manufacturers of paintings and advertising intuitively guess the expectations of the audience. It remains an open question whether there are "really" those whose "portrait" is presented in the films, and the extent to which viewers are willing to identify themselves with the proposed samples. The Russian society's underestimation of its own multiplicity, of cultural roles, meanings and languages diversity is one of the reasons for the lack of TV programs and films, which would have constructed new models of society and its heroes. In practice, visual products are created based on the desire of the audience to see the familiar. (Show less)