Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Body as Capital
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://vinodhvenkatesh.weebly.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://liberalarts.vt.edu/faculty-directory/foreign-languages-literatures/vinodh-venkatesh.html * http://www.aspect.vt.edu/people/venkatesh-bio.html * http://vinodhvenkatesh.weebly.com/research.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC is still down.
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, B.A., Ph.D.; University of Florida, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, assistant professor of Spanish.
AWARDS:Received grant from Virginia Tech, 2015; Award for Excellence in Research, Virginia Tech, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to Hispanófila, Letras Hispanas, Ojáncano: Revista de Literatura Española, Cuadernos de ALDEEU, Monographic Review, MLN, Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, Symposium, Hispanic Review, Hispanic Research Journal, Hipertexto, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Latin American Literary Review, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
Also contributor to Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto…, Cine andino: estudios y testimonios, Ensayando el ensayo. Artilugios del género en la literatura mexicana contemporánea, Asaltos a la historia. Reimaginando la ficción histórica hispanoamericana, The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Bolaño and After, and El secreto de la noche triste. Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico.
SIDELIGHTS
As a professional scholar, Vinodh Venkatesh specializes in the study of gender, sexuality, and writings and film produced by the Latin diaspora, among several other related subjects. Prior to his academic career, Venkatesh studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Florida, from which he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Venkatesh is aligned with Virginia Tech, where he works as a Spanish professor. His research has also earned him various accolades, including a grant directly from Virginia Tech and a research award. He has also penned several academic articles, as well as two books.
New Maricón Cinema
New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film is one of Ventakesh’s books. In it he chronicles the telling of LGBTQ+ stories through the lens of Latin American filmmaking. Venkatesh simultaneously explores cultural perceptions of queer individuals, and how current portrayals differ from opinions of past cultural generations. Venkatesh probes this topic further by investigating films from all across the Latin diaspora. He thoroughly explicates each film by drawing upon various scenes, inspecting their framing and what their artistic setup says about cultural perceptions through each film’s treatment of its characters.
“The most notable thing that we see here is that the trend is now to affective relationships between viewers and homo/trans/intersexed characters,” remarked Amos Lassen on the self-titled Reviews by Amos Lassen blog.
The Body as Capital
The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction is Ventakesh’s debut book. The book serves as a chronicle of gender expression and perceptions of virility across the Latin diaspora, with particular focus resting in its portrayal in the works of various fiction writers. Ventakesh covers eleven writers in all, mixing in the works of more obscure authors alongside more notable figures. Ventakesh also explores the history of Latin America’s relationship with the notion of virility, how perceptions have changed over time, and what these perceptions say about Latin American culture as a whole.
The Body as Capital is made up of twelve chapters, all of which involve detailed analyses of each featured author. Ventakesh also identifies several theoretical movements pervading these authors’ works. He then defines these movements, and goes on to explain what roles they play in the sociopolitical dynamics of Latin American culture. Each chapter of the book falls under one of three larger categories, all of which address masculinity within Latin America through a specific geographical angle.
Ventakesh starts off his work by creating a timeline of masculinity in Latin America. He details how various cultural, historical, and political elements came to influence Latin American perceptions of what masculinity means, and exactly how these definitions changed through these various shifts.
The next category turns the concept of virility and its effect on culture into something more abstract. Here the use of music becomes Ventakesh’s predominant motif. This portion of the book also presents one of Ventakesh’s central themes: masculinity from a literal, physical standpoint.
Ventakesh shapes geography into another theme of The Body as Capital. One of its sections views masculinity from a more globalized perspective, as reflected by the modern era. In the process, gender, economics, and government become closely intertwined. Ventakesh devotes particular attention to how immigration, socioeconomic positioning, and masculinity intersect and impact one another through two distinct written works. Choice contributor J.S. Bottaro, called The Body as Capital “a valuable contribution to the literature on recent Latin American fiction and on masculinity more broadly.” In the Masculinities Journal, Joseph Jay Sosa expressed that The Body as Capital “is a compelling analysis of neoliberalism and gender roles in the contemporary era.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, J.S. Bottaro, review of The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, p. 1173.
ONLINE
Masculinities Journal, http://masculinitiesjournal.org (April 5, 2017), Joseph Jay Sosa, review of The Body as Capital.
Reviews by Amos Lassen, http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com (September 19, 2016), Amos Lassen, review of New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film.
Vinodh Venkatesh Home Page, http://vinodhvenkatesh.weebly.com (April 5, 2017), author profile.
Virginia Tech, http://www.aspect.vt.edu/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.
Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, http://liberalarts.vt.edu/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.
Books
New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film.
Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.
The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction.
Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2015.
Edited Journal Issue
"Masculinities, Latin America, and the Global Age."
Special Issue of Letras Hispanas 11 (2015) with Introduction
"Neoliberal Spaces: Going Beyond the Global City."
Special Issue of Romance Notes 54.1 (2014) with Introduction.
Articles
"The Ends of Masculinity in the Urban Space in Ana Clavel’s Los deseos y su sombra."
Letras Hispanas 11 (2015): 158-70.
"Of Bodies and Memories: On Pathways Towards Reconstitution in Contemporary Colombian Cinema."
Cuadernos de ALDEEU 29 (2015): 267-90.
"Queerying and Locating Pedro Almodóvar's ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!"
MLN 129.2 (2014): 352-66.
"Malaysia Boleh? Carles Casajuana and the Demythification of Neoliberal Space."
Romance Notes 54.1 (2014): 67-74.
"Outing Javier Fuentes-León's Contracorriente and the case for a New Queer Cinema in Latin America."
Journal of Popular Romance Studies 4.1 (2014). Special Issue on Love in Latin American Culture, Edited by David William Foster. Web.
"Yo no estoy completo de la mente: Ethics and Madness in Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez."
Symposium 67.4 (2013): 219-30.
"Mirrors, Lipstick, and Guns: Performing Revolutionary Masculinity in La mujer habitada."
Hispanic Research Journal 14.6 (2013): 496-504.
"Challenging Global Masculinities in Jaime Bayly's El cojo y el loco."
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 37.2 (2013): 279-96.
"La hermana perdida de Angélica María: Enrique Serna Writes the Lost Decade."
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 47.1 (2013): 103-25.
"Going Beyond the Salitrera: Locating Spaces and Subjects in Hernán Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrección."
Latin American Literary Review 80 (2012): 7-27.
"Towards a Poetics of the Automobile in Contemporary Central American Fiction."
Letras Hispanas 8.2 (2012): 66-80.
"Perspectives, Problems, and Processes in Contemporary Spanish Adaptations."
Hipertexto 16 (2012): 41-53.
"Growing up in Sanhattan: Cartographies of the Barrio Alto in Alberto Fuguet and Hernán Rodríguez Matte."
Hispanic Review 80.2 (2012): 313-28.
“Androgyny, Football, and Pedophilia: Rearticulating Mexican Masculinities in the Works of Enrique Serna.”
Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 49 (2011): 25-36.
“Gender, Patriarchy and the Pen(is) in Three Rewritings of Latin American History.”
Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 11.2 (2011): 95-107.
“Archetypal Madness in José de Espronceda’s El estudiante de Salamanca.”
Monographic Review 26 (2010): 249-63. [Volume published Oct 2011]
“El triángulo de deseo y su representación en Siete domingos rojos de Ramón J. Sender.”
Ojáncano: Revista de Literatura Española 37 (2010): 41-62.
“Rewriting Mexican Masculinity: Stereotyping / Countertyping Men in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar.”
Explicación de Textos Literarios 36.1-2 (2008): 52-64.
Chapters
"Epistemologías del armario peruano cinematográfico. Sobre Lombardi, Fuentes-León y de Montreuil.” Cine andino: estudios y testimonios. Ed. Julio Noriega, Javier Julián Morales Mena. Lima: Pakarina, 2015.
"Asaltos al cuerpo tiránico: nuevas novelas del caudillismo." Asaltos a la historia. Reimaginando la ficción histórica hispanoamericana. Ed. Brian Price. México: Ediciones Eón, 2015. 227-53.
"Fiction, History, and Geography: Colonial Returns to Mexico City in Héctor de Mauleón's El secreto de la noche triste."
Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico. Eds. Oswaldo Estrada and Anna Nogar. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2014. 60-82.
"Enrique Serna."
The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Bolaño and After. Ed. Wilfrido Corral, Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 77-80.
"Xavier Velasco."
The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Bolaño and After. Ed. Wilfrido Corral, Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 84-7.
"Andróginos, futboleros y pederastas: la crisis de la masculinidad en Giros negros de Enrique Serna."
Ensayando el ensayo. Artilugios del género en la literatura mexicana contemporánea. Mayra Fortes and Ana Sabau, Eds. México: Ediciones Eón, 2013. 279-301.
“Transgresiones de la masculinidad: ciudad, género y revolución en Nadie me verá llorar.”
Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto… Oswaldo Estrada, Ed. México: Ediciones Eón, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill y UC-Mexicanistas, 2010. 135-53.
Reviews
“Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba.”
Hispanófila 162 (2011): 95-7.
Vinodh Venkatesh
Vinodh Venkatesh is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech. His research is primarily centered on issues of gender, subjectivity and the urban space in contemporary Hispanic narratives. A secondary area of research concerns the cinematic production of Spain and Latin America. He has published articles in such journals as Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and Ojáncano, in addition to several chapters in critical editions. He is the author of two forthcoming books: The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Arizona, 2015), that bridges the fields of masculinity and literary studies; and New Maricón Cinema: On Outing and Feeling Latin America (Texas, 2016), an archaeology of representations of sex-gender difference in Latin American film through the optic of phenomenological film analysis. He is currently researching the ethics of madness in recent Latin American cultural production.
Vinodh Venkatesh
Associate Professor of Spanish Department Membership
Download CV
Office
339 Major Williams Hall
220 Stanger St.
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Phone
Office: 540-231-5362
Email
vinodhv@vt.edu
Research Interests
Latin America Spain cinema gender literature
Awards and Honors
Award for Excellence in Research, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, 2015
Selected Publications
Books
The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015)
New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016)
Sponsored Research
Niles Research Grant, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, $4,000, 2015.
Articles
"Yo no estoy completo de la mente: Ethics and Madness in Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez."
Symposium 67.4 (2013): 219-30.
"Challenging Global Masculinities in Jaime Bayly's El cojo y el loco."
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 37.2 (2013): 279-96.
"La hermana perdida de Angélica María: Enrique Serna Writes the Lost Decade."
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 47.1 (2013): 103-25.
"Growing up in Sanhattan: Cartographies of the Barrio Alto in Alberto Fuguet and Hernán Rodríguez Matte."
Hispanic Review 80.2 (2012): 313-28.
Additional Information
Current Research: An analysis of the intersection between ethics, politics, and spectacle in Spanish cinema.
Expertise
Latin American Literature and Cinema
Spanish Literature and Cinema
Masculinity Studies
Urban Studies
Queer Theory
Professional Activities
Director of Graduate Studies MA-FLCL
Education
Ph.D. UNC Chapel Hill
M.A. University of Florida
B.A. UNC Chapel Hill
Associate Professor
339 Major Williams Hall
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg VA 24061-0225
vinodhv@vt.edu
Fall 2016:
MW 4-5
and by appointment
Venkatesh, Vinodh. The body as capital: masculinities in contemporary Latin American fiction
J.S. Bottaro
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1173.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
Venkatesh, Vinodh. The body as capital: masculinities in contemporary Latin American fiction. Arizona, 2015. 184p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780816500697 pbk, $24.95; ISBN 9780816532216 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3427
PQ7081
2015-5389 CIP
Venkatesh (Virginia Tech) examines discourses and depictions of masculinity through 11 Latin American novels published after 1990. He includes three internationally famous writers (Mario Vargas Llosa, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, and Sergio Ramirez) and eight writers who are less familiar: Mayra Montero, Cristina Rivera Garza, Pedro Lemebel, Franz Galich, Rodriguez Matte, Gioconda Belli, Enrique Serna, and Jaime Bayly. In focusing on representations of the male body, the author argues that this contemporary literary corpus reflects and critiques the market (social and economic) underlying forces of "neoliberalism" in Latin America. Venkatesh builds on R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity to argue that masculine gender portrayals in the works examined are renegotiated in controversial and plural literary structures to challenge patriarchal roots and the "neoliberal economy" gender order as a system of oppression. In what sometimes seems to be an unfriendly critical narrative, the author explores how contemporary male gender systems and formations came into play and how these depictions relate to nation building and identity configurations. A valuable contribution to the literature on recent Latin American fiction and on masculinity more broadly. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.--J. S. Bottaro, Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York
Vinodh VenkateshThe Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American FictionUniversity of Arizona Press, 2015, 184 pp. ISBN978-0-8165-0069-7ransformations in the labor and familial orders, propelled by neoliberal restructuring, have placed Latin American traditional, hegemonic masculinities in crisis. In The Body as Capital, literary scholar Vinodh Venkatesh examines these emerging masculinities-in-crisis through a series of innovative interpretations of novels recently published across the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. In each of the twelve short chapters, Venkatesh preforms close readings of one or two novels per chapter, where he focuses on scenes of evolving masculinities. Demonstrating contemporary Latin American literature's continuation of classic registers--e.g. tropicalism, caudillismo[strong-man ideologies]--Venkatesh convincingly argues for the need to rethink these legacies as they are being reinterpreted in contemporary novels. Neoliberalism and its attendant transformation of political and intimate life, as well as its shifts in aesthetic and discursive representation, have fundamentally reoriented these categories. Venkatesh proposes a new conceptual topography for Latin American masculinities, while each chapter grapples with remapping the coordinates. Latin Americanists will find The Body as Capital to be a refreshing reworking of classical frameworks around gender and power. Scholars of gender or masculinity may have trouble with the untranslated Spanish passages in this mostly English-language text. Nevertheless, they will gain insight as to how global changes in political economy and state power are transforming Latin American lived relations. T
Masculinities Journal135The Body as Capital is divided into three sections: new historical masculinities, lyrical and deterritorialized masculinities, and transnational masculinities. Each section contains four short chapters that delve into one or two specific texts. Venkatesh's analysis moves between interconnected sites of masculine power--industrial economy, authoritarian and democratizing governance, intimate care and awkward eroticisms. While at times the reader might wish for more explicit threads connecting one idea to the next, his interpretations of different literary scenes evoke a consistent set of questions: How is masculinity generative of modes of domination that it can no longer control? Has masculinity shifted from a source of confidence to one of anxiety? and, What do those anxieties tell us about transforming and co-constitutive regimes of political economy and meaning making? The first section, "New Historical Masculinities," most explicitly lays out the shift that Venkatesh proposes between traditional hegemonic masculinities and what we might call neoliberal precarious masculinities. Crucially, Venkatesh demonstrates these new masculinities with a sustained comparison between characters representing decadent forms of masculine power (and in particular the figure of "the dictator") with other characters who demonstrate emergent masculinities that will be detailed throughout the book. Thus, each chapter in this section foregrounds the relationship between these two figural positions as a way to capture a paradigmatic shift in the historical present. Particularly convincing in this respect is chapter four's analysis of Pedro Lemebel's Tengo Miedo Torero, a fictionalized historical account of a failed assassination attempt against Augusto Pinochet told through the eyes of a transvestite named la loca (the crazy one). Venkatesh draws illuminating comparisons between the revolutionaries opposed to Pinochet and the dictator himself. Calling attention to another man's semen stain that threatens Carlos's heteronormative masculinity and a second fecal stain on the sheets of the aging dictator, Venkatesh shows the maintenance of masculine insecurities even as protagonist and antagonist are motivated by destroying the other. This leads to the second major theme in the
Masculinities Journal136section: the body as index of changing political and economic regimes. Venkatesh shows how body parts become metonymic of the new economy (testicles as the site of production in the neoliberal order, or Pinochet's loss of anal control as the loosening grip of authoritarianism). The corporal imagery, Venkatesh briefly but provocatively suggests, has supplanted the phallus as the central image of the masculine imaginary. The second section, "Lyrical Readings and the Deterritorialization of Masculinities," turns to musicality as a rhetorical mechanism that rearranges bodies, and, consequently, reconsiders masculinities as objects that float between bodies rather than exclusively becoming attached to them. Chapter five "Defining the Literary OST," functions more as a methodological overture, where the author demonstrates how the songs referenced in the novel intertextually frame the mood of the narrative. This method is fully realized in chapter eight's analysis of Franz Galich's novels Managua Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) and Y te diré quién eres(Mariposa traicionera). Set in Nicaragua's capital city, Managua, the novels portray a cast of interweaving characters that negotiate the turbulent transitions of crisis capitalism that heighten already existing inequalities. Fans of Latin American music will quickly recognize the subtitles as a well-covered salsa standard and a ballad by rock-pop group Maná respectively. These songs set the mood for a city that is replete with new pleasures and dangers as the breakdown of hegemonic masculinity also seems to suggest the breakdown of the social write large. Venkatesh describes: "Money and its fain drive the characters within the market as they jockey for social and sexual position, even though they can never really escape belonging to an impoverished scavenger class that is maintained as the substrate for the rich bosses vacationing in Miami" (94). Plus ça change... Intertexual musicality here does not only deterritorialize bodies but also brings together intersubjective space on many levels--from the urban to the transnational. If the new historical masculinities analyzed in the first section were primarily framed by national imaginations then the masculinities depicted here are simultaneously globally underdetermined and locally vulnerable.
Masculinities Journal137The focus on transnational masculinities occupies the final section. New archetypes appear of masculinities transformed--characters attempting to reconfigure and reapproach hegemonic masculinity on an altered neoliberal field. In chapter nine's analysis of Rodríguez Matte's Barrio Alto, the businessman becomes the new figure of a reconstituted dominant masculine figure. Thriving on the performative enactment of success in a terrain where the market performs the same chimerical ruses, business becomes a new site of conservative male homosociality. Masculinity in the market gets a new life through conspicuous consumption expressed in sartorial aesthetics. Chapter ten examines Enrique Serna's La sangre erguida, a novel which follows Latin American migrants to Barcelona who must contend with masculine identities in a location where they are divorced from their traditional sources of power. It is no coincidence that impotence becomes a central feature of these migrant stories as gender role reversals and economic and social frustration appear to demasculinize them. The migrant is the underside of the transnational business masculinity, which appears with cyborg masculinity and revolutionary masculinity as other iterations on the topic. As might be imagined, such a packed conclusion feels a bit rushed, and even less a conclusion than a continuation of the central themes of the book. But the inclusion of these additional new masculinites at the end reinforces a central argument that new Latin American masculinities are plural and refractory, resisting one dominant narrative that may have been available in a previous era.The Body as Capitaloffers a survey of the many potential directions of masculinity in contemporary Latin American cultural representation. Readers will gain a broad perspective on contemporary Latin American literature, and perhaps be exposed to novels which they can explore further. One open question from this survey is the lack of female authors considered. Certainly female authors have much to say about contemporary masculinities that would offer a rewarding point of view. A second question arises about neoliberalism, which is deployed throughout the book as the predominant vector of structural change
Masculinities Journal138transforming masculinity, but which is not substantively analyzed in its political, economic, and social particularities. (Venkatesh often gestures at the polyfunctionality of neoliberalism as it impacts many features of life.) As Latin America was the laboratory for neoliberal policies under the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been interesting to think of neoliberalism as something generatedfrom the political experience Latin America and not only something imposed on it. These questions do not detract from the incisive connections made in The Body as Capital. It is a compelling analysis of neoliberalism and gender roles in the contemporary era. Joseph Jay SosaBowdoin College
“New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film” by Vinodh Venkatesh— Recent Queer Latin American Cinema
Leave a reply
new-maricon-cinema
Venkatesh, Vinodh. “New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film”, University of Texas Press, 2016.
Recent Queer Latin American Cinema
Amos Lassen
Vinodh Venkatesh gives us an overview of the latest Latin American queer film. The most notable thing that we see here is that the trend is now to affective relationships between viewers and homo/trans/intersexed characters. Recent films that do so include“XXY”, “Contracorriente”, and “Plan B” (that are reviewed elsewhere on this site) and they create an affective and bodily connection with viewers that realize an emotive and empathic relationship with queer identities. Venkatesh considers these films as “Maricon Cinema” and says that they represent a distinct break from what once was and now deal with sex and gender difference through an ethically and visually disaffected position.
The book looks at feature films from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela. This is the first book to “contextualize and analyze recent homo-/trans-/intersexed-themed cinema in Latin America within a broader historical and aesthetic genealogy”. Venkatesh uses theories of affect, circulation, and orientations, he examines key scenes in the work of auteur such as Marco Berger, Javier Fuentes-León, and Julia Solomonoff. We then see that these films show how their “use of an affective poetics situates and regenerates viewers in an ethically productive cinematic space”. He claims that New Maricón Cinema has encouraged the production of “gay friendly” commercial films for popular audiences, that reflect wider socio-cultural changes regarding gender difference and civil rights that are now occurring in Latin America.