The research project 'This is my Face: Audio-visual practice as collaborative sense-making among men living with HIV in Chile' is an interdisciplinary project that explores 'collaborative mise en-scène' as a method to further understand the sense-making processes around the biographical disruption caused by HIV. It combines Anthropology and Arts methods as part of the PhD in Anthropology, Media and Performance, a practice-based program that fosters interdisciplinary approaches to the production of original knowledge, based on self-reflexive and critical research practices (The University of Manchester, 2018). Relying on the specific competences of photography and film and the co-creation of an ethnographic context based in hermeneutic reflexivity, the collaborators on the project created and explored representations of critical life events, in order to make sense of the disruption HIV brought to their lives. The collaborators were highly stigmatised individuals living with HIV, which hindered their possibilities for sharing narratives and for reflection, and as such, made it more difficult for them to come to terms with a diagnosis they described as a 'fracture' in their lives. This project analyses the creative process of 'collaborative mise-en-scène' as a way to provide further opportunities for reflexivity and sense making, a method that departs from their everyday face-to-face encounters as means of understanding what they are going through. Representations of life events emerged from our practice, as well as evocations, which provided a means by which to understand their experiences with HIV, and opened up ways to resignify their past experiences and projections of the future. Photography and film offered their specific expressive competences to the project, but also gave the possibility of making visible the collaborators' experiences in order to promote a dialogue with others, moving beyond our creative encounters. Therefore, their evocations became 'statements' of what it means to live with HIV in Chile, and at the same time, by taking part in its creation, it provided access to the particularities of the sense-making process in which those images were embedded. This collaborative creative process opened up ways to highlight the relevance for sense-making in face-to-face encounters, demonstrating that hermeneutic reflexivity as a practice-based form of mutual questioning can promote a critical engagement with life trajectories and with others beyond our practice.

No description available.

This thesis interrogates García Márquez’s representations of sexualities in the following selected novels: Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Sad and Incredible Tale of Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother (1972); and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). It is argued here that García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif enables him to delve into many worldwide current concerns such as the irrelevance of some socio-cultural sexual practices; commercial sexual exploitation of children; the different manifestations of prostitution; and female powerlessness under autocratic rule. Earlier literary critics have tended to narrowly interpret García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif as just a metaphor for colonial exploitation of the colonised. The study also explores the writer’s artistic role and concludes that García Márquez speaks against commercial sexual exploitation of children as he concurrently speaks on behalf of children so exploited. Similarly, the writer speaks on behalf of prostituted womanhood by showing how prostitutional gains do not seem to cascade down to the prostitutes themselves. García Márquez also invests female sexual passivity as a coping mechanism against a dictator’s limitless power over the life and death of his citizens. However, the writer also constructs female agency that grows from the rejection of an initial victimhood to develop into an extremely flawed and corrupt flesh trade that co-opts and indentures children into sex work with impunity. Thus the study breaks new ground to show that García Márquez’s representations of different sexualities are not merely soft porn masquerading as art. His is a voice added to the worldwide concerns over commercial sexual exploitation of children in the main and also the recovery of a self-reliant female self-hood that was previously inextricably bound to male sexual norms. Quite clearly, García Márquez demonstrates that female prostitution is driven by a lack of social safety nets, a lack of other economically viable options and also a distinct lack of educational opportunities for female economic independence, hence the flawed female agency. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

No description available.

OF THE THESIS: The novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service introduces the second period of Mario Vargas Llosa's literary production, which is caracterized by the simplification of the narration and the discovery of humour. The thesis focuses on the formal and thematic analysis of the novel with the objective to prove that despite the novel is in general humorous and parodic, there could be found some constant topics, known to the readers from Llosa's previous novels, which he had always treated very critically, and he also did so in this erotic and humorous work. Therefore, apart from the analysis of humour the thesis also examines the critical approach to the social problems present in the novel. The analysis also shows that the narration is slightly simplified in comparison to the author's formers works, but it still perfectly demonstrates the unconventional narrative techniques, which Vargas Llosa has used since the 1960's, since the period of the new hispano-american novel. KEY WORDS: Mario Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, The Time of the Hero, The Green House, Latin American boom, Hispano-American new novel, total novel, experimental narrative techniques, types of humour and irony, humorous prose, parody, erotic novel, libertine prose, rainforest, criticism of the...