Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Doctoral Theses
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Item Queer performance and activism in Cuba: strategies for resisting exclusionary dynamics in feminist spaces(University College Cork, 2024) Geraghty, Clare; Broderick, Céire; Garrido Castellano, Carlos; National University of IrelandThis research examines the potential of art, activism, and scholarship to challenge the perpetuation of discriminatory patterns within feminist movements by studying, among other works, the performances of queer feminist hip hop duo from Cuba, Krudxs Cubensi. It takes a multimodal approach, including interview data as well as my lived experience of fieldwork to examine how the exclusionary dynamics addressed in Lxs Krudxs’ work are challenged by others working on the same issues. This thesis challenges the hierarchization of knowledge perpetuated by the academy by valuing knowledges that are gained by doing. 2020, when the project began, marked the start of a renewed global rollback on the rights of queer people, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic (Reid, 2021). My research is moved by these injustices to find out why movements that claim to address patriarchal oppression instead perpetuate the same phenomenon. This thesis asks how we can create more inclusive feminist spaces, in a context where some feminisms entrench exclusionary relationalities, such as transphobia and racism. This question is grounded in the Cuban context and uses the work of Krudxs Cubensi as a point of departure, arguing that members Odaymar Cuesta and Oliver Prendes challenge exclusions within feminisms with their ‘fierce feminist hip hop and Afro-Cuban flavours’ (Krudas Cubensi, 2013). I contend that performance art can resist a cultural and political climate that is increasingly hostile to marginalised people and offer an alternative framework for navigating oppressive systems.Item A convergence of bodies in the Anthropocene: post-dictatorship memory in Patricio Guzmán’s triptych (2010-2020)(University College Cork, 2024) Helin-Long, Sara; Levey, Cara; Broderick, Ceire; Irish Research CouncilThis thesis focuses on the most recent filmic triptych (Chauvin and Wilson, 2020) by Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán: Nostalgia de la luz (2010), El botón de nácar (2015), and La cordillera de los sueños (2020). The three documentaries engage with the intentional acts of violence committed during the Pinochet dictatorship on three natural landscapes (the Atacama Desert, the Patagonian waterways, and the Andes mountains). It argues that, when read together, the documentaries lend themselves to an interdisciplinary analysis of how we might remember state violence committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in natural landscapes. It develops a filmic analysis that argues for the dictatorship memories as remembered in/by these landscapes by contextualizing the documentaries with recent Chilean socio-political history (Chapter 1) and establishing a framework of the convergence of Environmental Humanities – specifically in relation to its current interest in the Anthropocene - and Memory Studies (Chapter 2). For now, I note an understanding of the Anthropocene as a geological and social time where human actions have irrevocably altered and affected the earth’s composition. In Chapter 3 (Nostalgia de la luz), Chapter 4 (El botón de nácar), and Chapter 5 (La cordillera de los sueños), The thesis situates Guzmán’s reflections on the dictatorship within the deeper ecological and cultural histories of the three natural landscapes within three core tenants of anthropogenic readings on Memory Studies: the body, time, and space. The chapters include ethnographic research- carried out between February and March 2023- of the three landscapes to provide a bridge between the visual/narrative landscapes found in the documentaries and those encountered by the researcher. The thesis grounds the filmic analysis of the documentaries’ visual, textual, and cinematographic aspects in the three landscapes’ additional past and present violent environmental and social realities, therefore calling on an anthropogenic reading of memory in the filmic and non-filmic landscapes. Thus, it offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between filmic bodies (human and non-human) and contends that this is only possible through the deep consideration of natural landscapes found in Guzmán’s work, which expands the bodily, spatial, and temporal boundaries of who and where remembers.Item Animal-Woman journey(s): posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales(University College Cork, 2024) Niewadzisz, Roksana; Buffery, Helena; O'Gorman, Roisin; Irish Research CouncilDiverse folktales passed down across the generations in different languages tell of Seal Women, Selkies, Mermaids, Dove Girls, She-Wolves, Swan Women: all zoomorphic or semi-zoomorphic beings able to remove their animal coats or skins and take on human shape. Liminal creatures capable of transformation, they embrace the wild and the civilized, animal and human, aquatic, aerial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, archetypal and individual. They have the ability to move between worlds. Across a vast range of stories, these creaturely women are deprived of their animal skin; losing their integrity and ability to transform, they are doomed to incompleteness, foreignness, otherness and longing. They get “stuck” in human form and are forced to function according to imposed human rules. They are trapped somewhere between subject and object, “I” and “Other”, between their body and its image. Such tales offer rich territory for performative exploration of the normalized processes of oppression underpinning both human exceptionalism and the environmental crises associated with the Anthropocene, as well as compelling alternative formulations of our relational co-existence with non-human others and “othered” humans. This thesis re-imagines these tales, in and through processes of carefully researched and documented performance practice, not as warnings to instruct women to behave, but as sites of remembrance, mourning and even liberatory enactment of other ways of being. Adopting a broadly eco-critical perspective sensitive to place, resilience and relatedness, this thesis attends to post-human-animality through a process of literal and figurative interrogation of skin and language, translating these stories of Animal-Woman transformations as markers of otherness and vehicles of change. Alongside careful attention to the ethno-linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental specificity of these tales, the core of this thesis explores performative research modes capable of weaving an alternative post-humanistic discourse into embodied practice. It employs an original iterative methodology, deployed across each of the tales and their psychic, social and environmental territories in a spiral journey that interweaves reading, theoretical reflection and different forms of artistic research and performance practice. In the process my/the performer’s body becomes both a potent site of multiple identities and an experimental laboratory for exploring affective, relational and political processes of othering, introducing polyvocality through interdisciplinary arts practice, and traversing bodily, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical borders.Item Resistance and solidarity through feminist craftivism; a comparative study of Ireland and Mexico(University College Cork, 2023) Mondragon Toledo, Brenda; O'Keefe, Theresa; Finnegan, Nuala; Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías; CONAHCYTThe proposed research is a comparative study of feminist textile practices between Mexico and Ireland with the purpose of establishing transnational solidarity (Mohanty, 1991). From a feminist standpoint, this research used a feminist Participatory Arts-Based Research methodology to enable conversations between participants from both countries. This research proposes using textile-making practices as a methodological tool to encourage reflexivity and collective knowledge creation. The data-gathering consisted of a series of online workshops with women living in Mexico and Ireland in which, by using embroidery, patchwork and doll-making, we encourage conversations around different topics related to experiences of gender-based violence. As a result of the COVID pandemic, this research hat to shift into an online format. During this unique period, amid the pandemic, I had the opportunity to observe a heightened interconnection of craftivism on the Internet. The research involved conducting textile workshops on Google Meet over an eight-month period, with activist groups serving as facilitators for each session. These groups included the Puebla feminist collective Refleja, Mexico City’s textile activist Agujas Combativas, and the West Cork-based The Bábóg Project. There was a strong engagement over the entire eight months from six participants, evenly distributed between Ireland and Mexico. Each workshop session was meticulously recorded and transcribed, the acquired data was analysed through a reflective thematic analysis. Photographs of each textile piece have also been gathered and are part of the data. The thesis showcases the effectiveness of a PABR methodology in facilitating comparative discussions across diverse scenarios, overcoming language and distance barriers. The ability to engage collectively allows us to expand physical and linguistic frontiers to weave together participants who are geographically distant from each other and across language differences. Therefore, this study shines light on how women navigate the complexities of post-colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal societies throughout their lives, leading to the development of a feminist consciousness evident in their textile practices and activism. Finally, the research aims to highlight the connections and unique experiences of women in both the Irish and Mexican contexts, illustrating how they construct a feminist identity as a form of resistance against normalized and extreme manifestations of gender-based violence, which I call ‘crafting a feminist self’.Item Constellations of conflict: violence, war and writing the nation in Daniel Ferreira's Pentalogía (infame) de Colombia(University College Cork, 2024) Davies, Rhys; Finnegan, Nuala; Levey, CaraThis thesis analyses the different representations of violence in contemporary Colombian author Daniel Ferreira’s Pentalogía (infame) de Colombia. Using a broad palette of theoretical approaches to violence, I read critically the first four novels of the Pentalogía to examine how Ferreira narrates different periods of twentieth century Colombian violence, looking specifically at how the Pentalogía works to explore the cracks (grietas) in official accounts of history. In the introduction, I begin by setting the scene to the Pentalogía and situating Ferreira’s novels within the long tradition of fictional narratives on Colombian violence, arguing that his work could best be understood as a continuation and renewal of Figueroa’s concept of novelas de la violencia. In the first chapter, which focuses on La balada de los bandoleros baladíes, I analyse manifestations of violence that have been mainly unexplored in previous fictional accounts of the conflict such as paramilitary massacres from the perspective of the perpetrator, ‘social cleansing’ and intra-family violence. My second chapter examines Ferreira’s second novel, Viaje al interior de una gota sangre, and looks at cyclical violence and palimpsestic memory in the novel, analysing particularly how violence from previous eras haunts the present and future, like the writing on a palimpsest. In the third chapter, I examine the violence of a land conflict of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Rebelión de los oficios inútiles, and through dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, I explore the way the novel’s peripheral voices resist official versions of history. In the fourth chapter, I posit that Ferreira adopts a Bildungsroman structure in El año del sol negro to narrate different representations of gendered violence in the Colombian civil war, La Guerra de los Mil Días. In my thesis, I argue that Ferreira’s Pentalogía could be read as constructing various counter-histories around different periods of twentieth century Colombian violence.