Géneros contingentes. Luchas por el reconocimiento en contextos de crisis social.

Abstract

“Contingent Genders: Recognition dispute in context of social crisis” proposes a theoretical and empirical model for gender study in relation to social interaction performativity in the context of social crisis in Argentina around 2001, with the purpose of investigating about gender normativity consistency and fragility, and its consequences over subjects life in relation to survival and social recognition. The question is what happens when those foundational social categories of our social being lose social structure support and significance, and leave the subject alone in relation to both material existence and social recognition. If, until now, those social categories circumscribed to subject´s predictable life, does that spectrum narrows or expands as a result of the crisis and its consequences over social life? _x000D_ Facing social settings as mentioned, usually it is clear to see the sense emptiness of certain social and gender categories. If social rules cannot be dissolved or at least thought in other terms, to continue holding on to them may undetermine the subject´s capacity to guarantee himself a comfortable life. However, the vestige left by the argentine crisis of 2001 on the citizen´s biography did not prevent the generation of interstice where imperant gender and social rules discontinuities and fissures were manifested. This allowed an original field of possibilities at the level of both colective and personal practices. This ambivalent subject place, in relation to submission and also to agency, allow us to inquire about social transformation processes at the level of gender performativity in a social context where, somehow, it remains naked the social rules arbitrariness._x000D_ In empiric terms we take cinema as reference, as an artistic and also politic discourse that enable us to access to gender actions tensing through dialectical relationship, between fiction and reality, as two sides of the same coin. Two Argentine movies have been selected for such purpose, produced around the 2001 crisis in Argentina, whose scripts also take that historic moment as a temporal selection: El Cielito (María Victoria Menis, 2003) and Cama Adentro (Jorge Gaggero, 2004)._x000D_ This movies as well as the in-depth interviews to directors (María Victoria Menis and Jorge Gaggero) and co-scriptwriter (Alejandro Fernández Murray) are approached through discourse analysis, in special post-structural feminist, attending three key analytical dimensions that structure the investigation in both theoric and empiric terms, related to: (a) action, discourse and performativity obedient and/or gender transgressive; (b) social recognition, combining discourse, corporeity and emotions, at the level of the dialogic meetings; and finally, (c) life maintenance in terms of material survival as social existence, at the level of labor and care relationships in the crisis context.

Date of Award	12 Jun 2014
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Maria Jesús Izquierdo Benito (Director)