Research Talk: "Desire and Democracy..." (full title below)
MLLI Guest researcher - Jodi Eisenberg
Location
On Campus
Date & Time
February 11, 2015, 10:45 am – 11:45 am
Description
Desire and Democracy: Gender, sexuality, and solidarity in television and audiovisual testimony of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship
Ms. Jodi Eisenberg
Spanish soap opera Amar en tiempos revueltos, set in the time of the fascist dictatorship, aired from 2005 to 2012 onTelevision Española. The highest ratings for the telenovela correspond with the climax of its lesbian romance plot, a love story between wealthy mogul Ana and working-class Teresa.
From 2007 to 2010, the University of California’s Spanish Civil War Memory Project conducted over one hundred open-format interviews with survivors of the Civil War and dictatorship to construct an audiovisual archive of streaming digital testimony. Many of these witnesses highlight the impact of state violence on their intimate lives. Through an analysis of viewer engagement with both of these digital representations of the memory of the dictatorship and the fight for democracy, this talk posits that desire functions differently in those texts that move beyond marginality as mere spectacle, and instead facilitate a politicized critique of the status of Spanish democracy today.