This thesis is an investigation of representations of Mexico in twentieth century American and British literature. Drawing on various conceptions of biopolitics and biopower (from Foucault, Agamben and other theorists), I argue that the development of American pleasure tourism post-World War II has definitively transformed the biopolitical climate of Mexico for hosts and guests. Exploring the consolidation in Mexico of various forms of American pleasure tourism (my first chapter); cultures of vice and narco-tourism (my second chapter); and the erotic mixtures of sex and health that mark the beach resort (my third chapter), I posit an uncanny and perverse homology between the biopolitics of American tourists and Mexican labourers and qualify the neocolonial armature that links them together. Writers (from Jack Kerouac to Tennessee Williams) and intellectuals (from ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson to second-wave feminist Maryse Holder) have uniquely written contemporary “spaces of exception” in Mexico, have “founded” places where the normalizing discourses, performances of apparatuses of social control (in the U.S.) are made to have little consonance. I contrast the kinds of “lawlessness” and liminality white bodies at leisure and brown bodies at labour encounter and compel in their bare flesh, and investigate the various aesthetic discourses that underwrite the sovereignty and mobility of these bodies in late capitalism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OGU.10214/3149 |
| Date | 25 November 2011 |
| Creators | Rashotte, Ryan |
| Contributors | Nandorfy, Martha |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/ |
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