Microspaces of deployment of Pinochet's cultural violence in Bello futuro and La Victoria by Gerardo Oettinger

Abstract

The article examines the dramas Bello futuro (2013) and La Victoria (2014) by Gerardo Oettinger. These works portray a realistic representation at a time when such aesthetic trend was not dominant within Chile’s dramatic production, with the purpose of mapping the microspaces where Pinochet’s military-civic dictatorship exercised its power. This form of representation would resort to a phenomenology of hunger as a distinctive feature of the deployment of dictatorial power in Chilean history. For doing this, the dramas focus on the representation of the daily life of the subjects who experience economic, political and gender marginality produced by the dictatorship, and on how it seeks the ideological indoctrination of women in order to keep the exercise intact of his power. The interest in reviewing the expressions of violence and marginalization that the dictatorship produced in Oettinger’s dramas is based on the need to build an image of the origin of Chile’s characteristic contemporary cultural violence.