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Latency, biopolitics and the reproductive arena : an alternative masculinity in Ricardo Larraín's 'La frontera' (1991)

Despite many awards and achieving the highest box office takings for a Chilean film at the time of its release (1991), La frontera has only been subjected to one extended study (by Deborah Shaw in 2003), and a few shorter analyses. None has dealt directly with the specific relationships between latency, exile, violence, biopolitics and masculinities. Whilst latency, or ‘hiddenness’, is a key aspect of the allegorical nature of La frontera’s treatment of the Pinochet regime’s political repression, the act of hiding dissidents is the principal aim of the punishment of relegación, or internal exile, by that regime. This act of exclusion is a form of Johan Galtung’s ‘structural violence’ (1969). Larraín exploits the formal potential of the latency trope to reveal how his protagonist Ramiro, having been subjected to internal exile, makes a virtue of his condition of being hidden by rebuilding his masculinity within what Raewyn Connell would term the ‘reproductive arena’ (1995), based on power, productive and cathectic relations. The article explores the critical role that a reading based on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics can play in this interpretation of the film, especially since the film itself is concerned very much with the suppression and re-assertion of certain physical bodies, including that of Ramiro. This concern expresses itself principally on the level of form, especially camera angles, costume and mise-en-scène, but also in terms of content, as Ramiro recovers from a state of exclusion and fear to one of confidence in his identity and in his body. The article concludes by arguing that Ramiro’s re-asserted masculinity represents a challenge to the hegemonic, largely military, masculinity of the time and, at the very least, an alternative model for gender relations in post-Pinochet Chile.