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The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The 'Feminine' Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla

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Abstract

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a 'space of innocence' in the Sertao could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a 'feminine' responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Gutierrez-Albilla JD

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Bulletin of Latin American Research

Year: 2010

Volume: 29

Issue: 2

Pages: 141-154

Print publication date: 01/04/2010

ISSN (print): 0261-3050

ISSN (electronic): 1470-9856

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-9856.2009.00332.x

DOI: 10.1111/j.1470-9856.2009.00332.x

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