Prisons and Mental Hospitals in the Late 20th-Century Southern Cone: Experimental Place, Text, and Hermeneutic Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This dissertation investigates prisons and mental hospitals in cultural production in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between 1976 and roughly 2002, as experimental place, text, and hermeneutic. It focuses on Manuel Puig’s Beso de la mujer araña (1976), Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz’s Infarto del alma (1994), and a number of texts and events that emerge from the 1992 massacre at Brazil’s Casa de Detenção, colloquially known as Carandiru. Rather than an established chronology that divides neatly between the dictatorship-era and neoliberal democracy, it investigates continuities and throughlines in carceral practices in the late 20th-century and reactions to them in the cultural sphere. Using a combination of social and literary theory, it argues for carceral space as an experimental place where authors, prisoners, and the state probe the limits of the categories of citizen, subject, and even the racialized human. It is also a text, through which worlds can be read and new ones suggested. Those same actors use it as a hermeneutic for understanding the world ‘outside’ the prison or mental hospital’s walls, interpreting an increasingly carceral reality and its manifestations on the subjective, intrapersonal, and social level.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Penitentiary as Place, Text, and Hermeneutic

Chapter 1: Possibilities in The Prison Cell of Beso de la mujer araña: Manuel Puig’s Sexual and Political Laboratory

Chapter 2: “This Sick Person Acquires the Status of the Sacred:” Schizophrenia’s Experimental Promise in Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz’s Infarto del alma

Chapter 3: Carandiru as Utopian Possibility: Film, Song, and Violent Spectacle

Conclusion

Bibliography

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Spanish
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Latin American Studies
Palabra Clave	carceral studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Sergio Delgado Moya, University of Chicago Xochitl Marsilli Vargas, Emory University
Committee Members	Daniel LaChance, Emory University

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