RESUMEN

Esta tesis investiga la escritura femenina testimonial de tres obras latinoamericanas. El testimonio de Asunta Quispe Huamán, publicado en Gregorio Condori Mamani. Autobiografía (1977), producido por Ricardo Valderrama y Carmen Escalante; Ese infierno: conversaciones de cinco mujeres sobrevivientes de la ESMA de Munú Actis, Cristina Aldini, Liliana Gardella, Miriam Lewin y Elisa Tokar (2001); y La distancia entre nosotros (2012) escrito por Reyna Grande. Los testimonios han sido analizados a través de diversas premisas teóricas compuestas de las ideas sobre la heterogeneidad latinoamericana de Antonio Cornejo Polar y teorías sobre el territorio, espacio y geografía de Henri Lefebvre, Rogerio Haesbaert, Edward Soya, Gilles Deleuze que nos han servido de plataforma para nuestro estudio. Asimismo se ha recurrido a escritos sobre el cuerpo y la frontera con teoristas feministas como Lucia Guerra, Nelly Richards, Jean Franco, Gloria Anzaldúa y Rosi Braidotti, entre otras. Este estudio se ha propuesto demostrar que estos testimonios Latinoamericanos en su polifonía social y cultural emplean discursos de dimensión multifocal que les permite reterritorializarse desde las márgenes a través de tácticas de resistencia en un proceso de permanente descolonización. Esos cuerpos nómades han sido hablados y programados por el discurso legitimador para desterritorializarlos pero ellos vuelven a reterritorializarse como “líneas de escape” que se transforman creando interconexiones de supervivencia creadora.

Consecuentemente, a través del nomadismo de los sujetos analizados se forma una resistencia política que representa nuevos horizontes que son los proyectos en variados ámbitos: de género, raciales, culturales, de justicia del espacio y ambientales. Todos éstos en contrapunteo con el discurso hegemónico.

Coming out from under the shadow of sight, blindness has a story to tell. From Tiresias to The Miracle Worker, literary and visual representations of blindness are cornerstones of compelling tales of loss and overcoming. In support of the inherent value of sight, these conventional narratives overshadow the stories and lived experiences of blind people themselves. In light of this misrepresentation, I explore what it means to read, write, and see blindness, as well as consider the implications of being blind in present-day Latin America. I achieve this through a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of novels, short stories, film, and photography by blind and sighted artists and writers whose work has been published or exhibited after the year 2000. In this context, I will demonstrate how blindness can serve as a lens through which the production and reception of narrative and visual culture can be critically evaluated from a blind person’s perspective. Most importantly, this dissertation showcases the critical and creative work of blind people in order to demystify stereotypes and contextualize anxieties surrounding blindness, perception, and identity.

This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme (1994), and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994). Each film is narrated by a female voice who juxtaposes her personal and transnational identity with history to tell her migration story before and after returning to her country of origin. An objective of the study is to demonstrate how the film directors vis-á-vis their female protagonists, configure a United States Latina transnational imaginary to position their female protagonists and themselves as female directors and as active social agents. Further, the dissertation explores how the filmmakers construct, utilizing the cinematographic apparatus, specific forms of resistance to confront certain oppressive forms. The theoretical framework proposes that transnational documentary filmmaking offers specific contestatory representations and makes possible the opening of parallel spaces in order to allow for a transformation from multiple perspectives. Through the utilization of specific techniques such as archival footage, the three directors focus on historical biographies. Further, they make use of experimental filmmaking and, in particular, the transnational documentary to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. Lastly, transnational cinema is valued as a field for cultural renegotiating and as a result, the documentary filmmakers in this study are able to reconfigure a transnational imaginary and propose an alternative discourse about history, sexuality, family structures, and gender relations. In sum, my dissertation contributes to Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o, American Literature, and other Ethnic Literatures by focusing on migration, acculturation, and multicultural dialogue.