Narrative subjection and familiar emotions

About El silencio es un cuerpo que cae by Agustina Comedi

Abstract

The interest in examining a documentary such as El silencio es un cuerpo que cae by Agustina Comedi (2017) is not limited to the analysis of the author's biographical record of her father's sexual past. It also allows for the mapping of past and present forms of homosexuality that may be unrecognizable in a present GLBT marked by greater public visibility and acceptability. In this sense, Comedi's work is not only an “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich, 2018) in which the emotional responses - personal and collective - that from the absence of familiar and public recognition built a gay culture at the end of the last century are exhibited. It is also an “affective map” (Flatley, 2008) that provides an experience of self-estrangement that defamiliarizes us from our own affective attachments and allows us to reorient the emotional grammar to which we are subject. In this archive of images that tells of a conjectural and fragmentary past —the secret homosexual drift of his father—, not only is a “heterobiography” composed (Boero, 2017). It also reveals in an opaque way the sentimental drift of a dissident body —his father's, that of many other fags of that time— in the midst of the problematic fabric that makes up the family emotions.

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ARK: http://id.caicyt.gov.ar/ark:/s22504524/olchp9x7v