Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño has a doctoral degree in history and a graduate degree (magíster) in Theatre Studies as well as in Argentinian and Latin American Film from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). She is actively teaching and pursuing research in both Germany and Argentina. She was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the PBI of the UzK, where she is currently a Guest Researcher, and was selected for the post of Research Assistant of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). During her doctoral and postdoctoral career, she has received various grants to carry out research in Argentina, Brazil, and Germany on Argentinian and Brazilian film in the early sound era, in addition to gender and violence in the works of Carlos Hugo Christensen and Walter Hugo Khouri. She is also a Guest Researcher at the UBA’s IAE, where she is involved in various projects on classic Argentinian film and audience behaviour. She is the author of El mercado del deseo. Tango, cine y cultura de masas en la Argentina de los ´30 (Teseo, 2015) and Negocios de cine. Circuitos del entretenimiento, diplomacia cultural y Nación en los inicios del sonoro en Argentina y Brasil (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2019), both of which garnered awards from the Argentinian FNA, the Argentinian Association for Audiovisual and Film Studies (AsAECA), and the National University of Quilmes. She has developed and continues to pursue cultural and art projects, such as festivals and artist residencies in Argentina, Brazil, and France.
Project: “No escurinho do cinema”. Sexuality, urban space, and cinema rooms in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo (1940-1950)
Abstract:
The project aims to analyse cinematographic experience as part of urban modernity, focusing on sexuality and gender relations in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo during the 1940s and 1950s. Film theatres played a decisive role in establishing normative sexuality as much as they were a space of transgression for women and non-normative sexualities (disidencias). As such, these theatres constituted contexts of conviviality between unequal and heterogenic groups in which a range of interactions took place, such as inclusion, negotiation, and tensions between classes, ethnic groups, generations, and genders. The project takes a comparative approach to the role of these spaces within different urban cartographies of sexuality while taking into account the muddling and destabilising effect state censure and social repression had on their borders. The analysis of maps of places where entertainment and sexuality converge concentrates on the pornographic film circuit and their capacity to act as the grounds for sexual transactions and homoerotic social interactions; as a dark space where women experienced sexual awakenings; and as a dangerous place marked by the threat of sexual harassment.
Main Discipline: History