Everyday invasions: Fuckland, geopolitics, and the (re)production of insecurity in the Falkland Islands

Abstract

Academic and popular debates examining the geopolitics of the Falklands Islands/Islas Malvinas have focused overwhelming attention on the 1982 war and its aftermath in ways that foreground (in)security in predominantly militaristic terms. Notwithstanding these tendencies, this paper seeks to think through another example of ‘invasion’ of the Falkland Islands that has been important in provoking and sustaining insecurity among Islanders. The film Fuckland (2000), directed by José Luis Marqués, was shot covertly in the Falklands without the consent of Falkland Islanders who unwittingly star in it. By examining the scales, sites, practices and shifting temporalities of Fuckland, as well as the everyday insecurities it (re)produces, we show how the bodies, homes and community of Falkland Islanders have been territorialised in the Argentine geopolitical imagination, and therefore subject to modes of violence. Fuckland also exposes the enmeshing of practical, popular and everyday geopolitics in productive ways that allow us to address popular geopolitics’ approaches to ‘the cinematic’ (and other media). Rather than treating Fuckland’s production and consumption as distinctive temporal moments, we seek to account for how film can linger and reverberate in often subtle and sinister ways long after fading from mainstream public attention. We position the film as a lively geopolitical object with ongoing emotional and other effects/affects that have the potential to ‘feed back’ into practical/everyday geopolitical and diplomatic relations. Examining these kinds of events can be useful in understanding why the Falkland Islands Government (and the Islanders themselves) continue to be so cautious in their management of contemporary diplomatic relations with Argentina.