About this Event
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The European Languages and Cultures stream in the school of Humanities and Languages is hosting a seminar series in term 3, that brings together scholars from French, German, Greek and Spanish Studies, as well as related fields including literature, cinema, pedagogy, linguistics, and cultural studies.
Click to view the full program and all upcoming events in this series.
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Join the European Languages and Cultures studies and the School of Humanities and Languages at this talk by Prof. Alfredo Martínez-Expósito (University of Melbourne).
Civil Body/Crisis: the Alpha myth and male embodiment in post-crash Spanish cinema.
Prof. Alfredo Martínez-Expósito
The 2008 global financial crisis triggered deep structural fractures across Spain and was followed by political instability, regional tensions, and legislative challenges to traditional patriarchal authority before the outbreak of the 2020 global pandemic. This talk explores how post-2008 Spanish cinema dismantles the myth of the Alpha Male body as a site of socio-political negotiation and symbolic re-articulation. Drawing on cultural studies, visual theory, and gender studies, the analysis treats somatic performance as an enlanguaged medium, i.e. a visual vocabulary that expresses socio-economic trauma, institutional collapse, and ideological crisis.
The contested mechanics of the Alpha Male archetype are discussed in three key films: Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211 (Celda 211, 2009), Santiago Zannou’s Scorpion in Love (Alacrán enamorado, 2013), and Salvador Calvo’s 1898: Our Last Men in the Philippines (1898: Los últimos de Filipinas, 2016). In Cell 211, spatial confinement and physical transformation illustrate how institutional failure forces a hyper-masculine performance for survival. In Scorpion in Love, the disciplined, violent body of a neo-Nazi boxer serves as a literal canvas where post-crash working-class disaffection, radicalization, and masculine anxiety are inscribed and contested. 1898: Our Last Men in the Philippines employs disease, somatic decay, and corporal exhaustion to offer a decolonial critique that destabilizes long-standing imperial mythologies.
Rather than treating the Alpha Male as a static trope, the discussion establishes a typology of crisis-era masculinities, tracing its genealogy from Francoist imperial myths to post-crash precariat survival. While dominant mainstream US screen narratives often recuperate the threatened alpha man through redemptive violence or reasserted economic dominance, contemporary Spanish cinema highlights the failure inherent in this model. By staging the multiple anxieties of the physical body, these films show how the myth of the unshakeable alpha breaks down into somatic performance, where the body becomes an expression of economic austerity, institutional impotence, and decolonial critique.
For more information
Please email [email protected]
Event venue & nearby stays
UNSW Sydney, Morven Brown (C20) Room 209, High Street, Sydney, Australia
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