Visual Dystopias From Mexicos Speculative Fiction

Abstract: There exists a corpus comprised of speculative fiction texts written and published from the early 1990s until the 2008 that express an urgency regarding the way vision and visuality function in Mexico. Among other notable elements, these texts feature a male cyborg who repairs his lost eye by gaining an ocular prosthesis that becomes a signal of his warrior masculinity, a female cyborg whose lost eye becomes an emblem of her lack, ocular reporters whose vision is coopted by mass media corporations, cyborg rejects owned by corporations whose lives becomes a reality-show segment, and a cancer-riddled president whose multiple operations are made into media spectacles. Aside from a recurrent interest in the interface between human and machine, these fictions also appear particularly concerned with television as a device that contains enough gravitational force that sucks the viewer into it in the privacy of his own home, and a public sphere-turned-virtualized reality that visual manipulates the Mexican masses. The motif that recurs in these narratives expresses a kind of deep suspicion of vision, a profound deception in new media visual technologies and the forces that make them possible. Often, the protagonist loses his or her eye, frequently having it replaced with some kind of technology that ostensibly enhances the loss of visual perception. But in all of these cases, the enhancement ultimately carries with it an unanticipated form of subjectification to or control by some larger force. These forces trace back to either power embodied in the form of political figures or transnational corporations. These dystopian, allegorical literary expressions are responding to larger, complex changes occurring in the social, political, economic and technological realms within Mexico under neoliberal economic policies instituted by the state, all of which can be read in the construction of these imagined subjects. These narratives express a profound distrust in the contemporary situation of Mexico, the political figures that run it and the mediascape that dis-orders their lives. These narratives register how Mexico may be undergoing a larger transformation within its current (micro-)scopic regime, shifting from a modern visuality of photography and film toward a more postmodern one of the electronic/televisual and the cybernetic/digital. They also suggest how subjectivity in Mexico is coming to be affected and altered by these visual technologies, seeing them as invasive of the culture as they are as penetrating to the body.