The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new faculty work in a dynamic and interdisciplinary setting.  Designed to promote ongoing conversation and multi-disciplinary investigation, these works-in-progress meetings offer faculty and advanced graduate students an informal venue for presentation, conversation, and ongoing collaborative exchange.

Viviana MacManus, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies 

This talk assesses the politics of gender, sexuality and betrayal within the necropolitical space of the prison in Latin American narrative cinema and literary fiction. I approach this controversial subject by engaging in close readings of the 1999 Argentinean film Garage Olimpo (dir. Marcho Bechis) and the 1969 Mexican novel El apando (José Revueltas). This paper centers on the gender politics presented in these fictional works and explores how the female characters are sexualized and policed by hypermasculine authoritarian regimes within a necropolitical space and castigated for not conforming to the state’s ideal neoliberal subject. Furthermore, I will explore the gender dynamics of survival and betrayal by focusing on the trope of the traitorous woman (Malinche) as an object of repulsion, desire, and shame to the masculine projects of both the leftist resistance movements and the authoritarian Mexican and Argentinean states.

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Memory and Memorialization in the midst of Colombia’s Armed Conflict

Felix Burgos, Ph.D. student, Language Literacy and Culture, Fall 2015 Dresher Center Graduate Residential Fellow 

Different studies have approached memory and memorialization as concepts that occur within specific temporalities, that is, doing memory work in the present about a finished past. In this talk, Felix Burgos argues that the work of memory in Colombia requires particular theoretical approximations as processes of memorialization occur while the country is still in the middle of an armed conflict.