Date Thesis Awarded
5-2009
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Modern Languages and Literatures
Advisor
Jonathan Arries
Committee Members
Silvia Roxana Tandeciarz
Jennifer Bickham Méndez
Abstract
In what follows I analyze three cultural products made in response to Fuentealba's assassination: the documentary made by Carlos Fuentealba's former students, Un modelo de vida, un estado de homicida, the piquete in which Fuentalba lost his life, and the Album para no Olvidar in which news clippings, essays and art commemorating the fallen teacher and reflecting on this moment are compiled. The study of cultural products is important to the study of neoliberalism because representation is one of the key methods used to both legitimize dominant discourse and to repress dissenting voices in the struggle for interpretative power and hegemony. The repression executed by neoliberal discourse includes both the physical and ideological suppression of resistance and the deliberate distortion of reality. The motivation behind this distortion is to undercut resistance and to mask even the needs for its existence. Cultural production, then, is a battlefield for contestatory power. The students of CPEM N°69 and teachers in solidarity (as piqueteros and members of ATEN) in the making of a documentary and an Album pose important challenges to the neoliberal discourse in Argentina that has permeated all aspects of life, including education. Like the piquete- a public performance of resistance- they undermine the hegemony of neoliberal discourse as supported in the mainstream media and create spaces for new political and social imaginaries. I argue that these cultural products represent resistance to neoliberalism in the ways that they expose its failures and contradictions.
Recommended Citation
Corbett, Allison C., "Un Modelo de Resistencia, un Estado Neoliberal: Teacher and Student Responses to the Death of Carlos Fuentealba" (2009). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 870.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/870
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.