Abstract
Manuel Puig’s Pubis angelical creates a curious temporal frame around Argentina’s Dirty War. The novel was published in 1976 as the Videla Junta took oppressive control of the chaos of Isabela de Perón’s failed government, and Raúl Torres’s film adaptation appeared in 1982 as the chaos of the junta’s failed government drew the dictatorship to a close. The narrative centers on the body of a woman that is repeated through various points in time from 1970s Argentina backward through 1940s noir Hollywood and forward into a science fiction dystopic world. In all time periods and with each female character, the woman’s body is presented as traumatized, ravaged by illness, by heartbreak, by surgery; all these traumas are represented symbolically in an artificial heart that ticks like a clock within her. The film draws especially upon science fiction tropes as it presents a series of scenes in which the mechanism of her heart is viewed in conjunction with larger machinery even as it rests on her incised flesh.
Chapter PDF
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Rights and permissions
This chapter is published under an open access license. Please check the 'Copyright Information' section either on this page or in the PDF for details of this license and what re-use is permitted. If your intended use exceeds what is permitted by the license or if you are unable to locate the licence and re-use information, please contact the Rights and Permissions team.
Copyright information
© 2010 J. Andrew Brown
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, J.A. (2010). Posthuman Porteños: Cyborg Survivors in Argentine Narrative and Film. In: Cyborgs in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109773_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109773_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28835-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10977-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)