Primed for Suffering: Gender, Subjectivity, and Spectatorship in Spanish Crisis Cinema

Abstract

Examining three fiction films (Techo y comida, Ayer no termina nunca, and Magical Girl), this essay illuminates the traces of the economic crisis in recent Spanish cinema, focusing on how it is inscribed on female-gendered bodies and subjectivities. In exploring how female pain accumulates across the boundaries of genre in these disparate films, it asks what kind of gendered subjects these films construct, and what work women's suffering is asked to perform, both for the benefit of the film's plot and the spectator's engagement. It shows how, even in cinema sympathetic to those devastated by crisis, women are cast as disposable raw material, as it were, “primed for suffering.” At the same time, it argues, these films bring to light and embody experiences that are seldom revealed, enacting an ethical gesture of potential solidarity with those devastated by multiple forms of crisis.