Queer temporalities in Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo/Bad Hair (2013)

Abstract

Sometimes criticized for the film’s emphasis on delay and ‘dead time’, the present analysis suggests a reading of the seemingly stagnant plot-line of Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo/Bad Hair (2013) as an effective rhetorical strategy for interpellating viewers into the ‘sideways’ time of queer childhood – a theoretical framework established by Kathryn Bond Stockton – to explore the intersectional processes at work in the subject formation of Junior, the film’s 9-year-old Afro-Venezuelan protagonist. In contrast to most contemporary Latin American films with child protagonists that serve as embodiments of history, Rondón refuses viewers this temporal distance to depict a child undergoing ghostly erasure by the patriarchal mechanisms that dictate the terms of a nation’s history and citizenship.