Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures

Advisor

Paul Julian Smith

Committee Members

Isolina Ballesteros

Magdalena Perkowska

Isabel M. Estrada

Subject Categories

European Languages and Societies | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature

Keywords

15M, Spanish Film, Activist Documentaries, PAH, Crip, Indignados

Abstract

Anti-Modern Alliances: Studies of Spanish Cinema of the 15M Process mobilizes decolonial theory to shed new light upon the politics of the 15M (or Indignados) movement and its visual culture. It tackles anti-modern critiques as embodied in film characters who have been traditionally relegated to the margins of modernity’s grand narratives. The research corpus encompasses a diverse body of works –documentaries, fiction films, activist video essays and their paratexts, which I critically interrogate in dialogue with contemporary feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, anti-neoliberal and anti-ableist debates. Thus, the dissertation examines the methods by which audiovisual works from the past ten years have represented new spaces of solidarity and community in Spain. While the majority of scholarship on post-15M culture focuses on its challenge to neoliberal policies, the films include in the texts propose a more radical attempt to unthink and undo the deep structures of colonial modernity.

The dissertation groups the different films according to their themes and their politics of representation. The first chapter analyzes several documentaries produced in the wake of the 15M movement, right after the occupations of the squares. It revolves around the decolonial concept of comunidad nosótrica (we-centered community), a fundamental lens to think and analyze the relationship forged during the encampments. The second chapter focuses on the housing movement, where families facing eviction occupied buildings and worked collectively to resist the power of the banking sector. It analyzes a set of films that depict the activities of the desahuciadas and the daily life in occupied spaces, demonstrating how participants in the movement broke down the concept of the nuclear family as the centerpiece of private poverty and forged new forms of cohabitation. The third chapter takes a look at the relationality between characters with different experiences of precarity—in particular, domestic workers fighting for social recognition and queer-crip collectives advocating for a radical collective notion of pleasure. The chapter examines dialogism and corporality in the mise-en-scene, and how these forms of knowledge enable alternatives to heteropatriarchal, capitalist, and ableist modern structures.

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