CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Vilchez, Jennifer |
|---|---|
| Title | The Body, the Abject and Horror in Claudia Llosa's 'La teta asustada' (2009) |
| Summary | Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa's award-winning film 'La teta asustada' (2009) centers around a troubled young woman, Fausta, who suffers from "la teta asustada"—the belief that her raped mother's trauma was transferred to her through her mother's breast milk and blood. The film is a fictional drama inspired by medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon's 'Entre Prójimos' (2004). Theidon focuses on over a decade of research in Quechua-speaking communities in rural Ayacucho and how these inhabitants were impacted by Peru's bloody civil war. Theidon's research on wartime rape and its trauma is a foundation for Llosa's film about postconflict Lima and the displaced peasants that live in the surrounding shantytowns. I consider Llosa's film in relation to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in order to discuss how abjection and the abject in the cinematic narrative can provide accessible mediums for the discussion and portrayal of violent trauma. Using the horror film genre to approach the horror in this drama, I discuss how traumatized women are understood as monstrous, through their relation to the body, the abject and the maternal. Llosa is able to convey the trauma of wartime rape and its various ripple effects in often unrealistic, abstract and abjective ways, demonstrating a figuratively complex vision of how life may continue after violation and violence. In 'La teta asustada', the horror that the audience may experience is directly related to the horrific and traumatic in real life. Although Llosa's film does not explicitly apply horror film genre elements, it approaches these conventions to subversively portray the memory and experiences of life after wartime rape and violence. I argue Llosa's depictions of the mother-daughter relationship and the body, through storytelling and metaphor, make it possible to approach such difficult and controversial histories and memories as those of war. |
| Supervisor | Lukic, Jasmina; Sanchez, Adelina |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/vilchez_jennifer.pdf |
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