Marena Lear, Comparative Literature, “Their Bodies, Our Selves: Posthuman Embodiment in Latin American Speculative Cinema.”

Summary: Lear’s project argues that “the ‘monstrous’ or cyborg bodies within a recent archive of Latin American and Latinx cinema critiques essentialist notions of race, gender, sexuality, and social identity, while providing avenues for audiences to see and feel otherwise, in ways that circumvent hegemonic forces,” she says in the project abstract. “In Western thought, female bodies, and in particular Afro-descendent and indigenous women, have often been represented as objects under the control of (masculine) rationalism. Yet, rather than merely reclaiming subject status under patriarchal and colonial terms by reifying the opposition of body and mind, these films imagine different worlds in which identities are more fluid and bodies interconnected, underscoring the importance of embodied knowledge as a strategy for anticolonial liberation.” Lear’s dissertation “examines speculative genre cinema conventions (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) and how they refract broader trends in the representation of national socio- political identities” to argue that these films “revise global genres for a local context in order to connect more effectively with audiences while foregrounding the spectator’s sensorial responses.”