Minors and Homebound Violence

  • Inela Selimović
Chapter
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Abstract

Desire, violence, and emotionally claustrophobic spaces rest at the heart of most of Albertina Carri’s cinematic production. Carri’s recent film, La rabia (2008), reflects these thematic pillars from a seemingly oxymoronic standpoint—that is, from an autistic child’s observations of and impacts on her immediate surroundings. The autistic child’s presence manifests, above all, affectively, even as La rabia brims with emotional outbursts. As the film unfolds, the child’s affective presence grows more complex, particularly if affect “is not about empathy or emotive identification,” but more about “interruption,” or “a potentially infinite series of submovements punctuated by jerks” (Massumi 2002: 40). The little girl’s forthright—yet reflexive—uneasiness with the oppressive familial dynamics, set in a village of the Argentine interior, ultimately engenders an autistic ethnography of retributive affects. The child’s ethnography is a process of defiant observation by means of screaming fits, sexually explicit drawings, as well as other transgressive social conduct toward and within the patriarchal structures of domination. The protagonist’s autistic presence constantly materializes as a complex social jolt, rupturing the continuity of patriarchal control at home and beyond unexpectedly.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Inela Selimović
    • 1
  1. 1.BostonUSA

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