Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Los desafíos abiertos por los movimientos de mujeres y las diversidades sexuales han transformado las agendas de debate y buscan remover formas anquilosadas de participación política. En este diálogo con InMediaciones de la Comunicación, Flavia Freidenberg –investigadora del Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Directora Académica del Observatorio de Reformas Políticas en América Latina– y Virginia García Beaudoux –investigadora del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas y codirectora del Centro de Opinión Pública de la Universidad de Belgrano de Argentina– reflexionan sobre los cambios que están teniendo lugar en el área de la comunicación política y la violencia política que cruza y limita la discusión democrática de la agenda de temas impulsados por las mujeres en América Latina.

El libro Alternativas: condiciones y estrategias de las radios y los canales sin fines de lucro desde la sanción de la Ley Audiovisual es resultado de una investigación de cinco años financiada por el Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) y la Defensoría del Público de Argentina. Siete autores de cinco provincias –María Soledad Segura, Alejandro Linares, Verónica Beatriz Longo, Natalia Vinelli, Agustín Espada, Natalia Traversaro y Ana Laura Hidalgo– evalúan el impacto de las leyes y las políticas públicas destinadas al tercer sector durante la última década. El libro se destaca desde la forma –por el modo de escritura colectiva y partes escritas por los actores que son parte del objeto de estudio–, por el contenido –un relevamiento denso y profundo sobre el tercer sector en todo el territorio nacional– y por su potencia política –en tanto aporta elementos para volver a poner en la agenda pública el debate por la democratización de la comunicación y la perspectiva de derechos humanos para pensar los medios.

La virtualización de la vida social y la explosión de las redes caracterizan el nuevo ecosistema mediático-digital. En un escenario dinámico y cambiante, el vínculo entre comunicación y política también se ha visto transformado. En diálogo con InMediaciones de la Comunicación, Juan Bogliccini, Doctor en Ciencia Política y miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de Uruguay, retoma la investigación volcada en el libro Twittarquía. La política de las redes en Uruguay –escrito junto a Ignacio Borba, Cecilia Giambruno, Martín Opertti y Rafael Piñeiro– y expone su visión sobre las posibilidades y los desafíos que generan los cambios tecnológicos contemporáneos, las adecuaciones de los medios tradicionales, la concentración de la información y el uso político de las plataformas interactivas.  

El libro de Brenda Focás, El delito y sus públicos. Inseguridad, medios y polarización, inscribe el abordaje sobre la recepción de información securitaria en una construcción teórico-metodológica cuya perspectiva comunicacional no queda escindida de las discusiones más amplias de las ciencias sociales: la sociología de los problemas públicos funciona como un articulador de las distintas aristas de un asunto complejo que requiere investigaciones a la altura de esa complejidad. Este libro se construye como un gran diálogo con la literatura anglosajona y argentina sobre el tema, y propone leer juntos y en tensión la perspectiva de los productores de información con la de los públicos. De este modo, permite dar cuenta de convergencias y divergencias entre una propuesta mediática –al menos, con lo que intentan proponer estos actores al interior de industrias y rutinas sumamente complicadas– y lo que hacen con ella quienes la consumen. Incorporar la polarización política del escenario cultural argentino como una dimensión central del análisis –y no como un mero dato– permite situar y darle carnadura al modo en que se configura localmente el vínculo con los medios: a partir de allí, se vuelven comprensibles el sentido que los públicos construyen sobre la información securitaria y cómo se articula con otras dimensiones de la vida cotidiana y con la gestión de los riesgos.

Virtual Youtubers (Vtubers) are streamers who use an animated avatar instead of using their own face. By hiding their identity, they are free to recreate themselves as fantastic beings. This is possible thanks to the images used by these strstreamers’ bodies to approach each other with the objective of grasping our attention, given that they need to be seen to avoid being forgotten, as affirmed by the iconophagy theory of Norval Baitello Jr. New technologies allow Vtubers to interact with other people directly through a chat service, and this interaction is produced constantly. Thus, the line separating “I” and “You” blurs completely. Vtubers can be the best example of what Vilém Flusser calls the artificial man, one whose life is deliberate. Regarding this, the article focuses on observing communities online with the objective of analyzing Vtubers’ practise and establishing whether it carries any change in the relationship with the “other” and with the image and whether that image has new characteristics. As a hypothesis, we hold that Vtubers are a new type of image that becomes meaningful only when it is near to human bodies. Owners of these bodies become part of a fantasy world where their physical characteristics do not matter and they can be whatever they want. Therefore, Vtubers would be creatures who move between body and image.

The main objective of this article is to explore the transgender cultural configurations in recent legal frameworks from Spain and Chile. This research investigates how cultural narratives of transgender mediations cope, shape and are enactively shaped by these representative normative texts. Besides, this study is based on a mixed research methodological approach providing qualitative and quantitative insight into the conceptual architecture of the two norms analysed. Our findings are landed on transgender people mediations in Instagram and the phenomenon called Mirror Syndrome. Finally, our article aims to establish a fruitful discussion on how better-informed decisions, based on higher situational and system awareness, can contribute to centering the current and future legal developments and support citizens' equity and well-being at the core of future human rights-focused policy recommendations.

Women constitute almost 53% of the Argentinian population. Even though the national constitution and specific legislation protect their rights, they are disproportionally affected by poverty, discrimination, and violence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their already precarious situation worsened. Moreover, it became extremely difficult to organize mobilizations in public spaces, which in recent years had reached unprecedented collective power. How did women’s everyday communication practices change during the pandemic? And what was COVID-19’s influence on the problems that affect women and lead them to mobilize? Based on a qualitative online survey conducted between June and August 2021, the article explores the everyday communicational practices of women in Argentina during the pandemic and analyzes the role of digital technologies as ambivalent tools for the promotion of gender justice.

We try to demonstrate that to understand Communication as a transdisciplinary space does not resolve its epistemological status. The praise of the trans is typical of our times as postmodern and attached to the mix of genders. This is the base for the pretens of being “transdisciplinar” that is usually ascribed to Communication research. Such ascription responds to the difficulties for stablishing the epistemological status of Communication, given that it lacks its own theoretical object, and refers to contributions made from other disciplines. But in these cases there is usually no theory about transdiscipline, and about its relationship with the disciplinary and the multidisciplinary. Thus, the presence of other disciplines in the formation of one of them (Communication) is confused with the transdisciplinary condition, which is the consequent to the previous formation of the intervening disciplines, and which implies levels of inter/theoretical integration that do not occur between the disciplines present in Communication. An additional problem is that in the name of transdisciplinarity no limits are proposed to the topics that Communication may take on, which entails important epistemic and ideological inconveniences.

La sociedad mundial, con sus diferentes particularidades, se encuentra en un proceso de transformación profunda. Una transición acelerada orientada desde el neoliberalismo (Laval & Dardot, 2015) y que abarca todos los aspectos de la vida humana.

During the 1960s, there were media images –such as war photographs– which had an impact on the development of artistic practices in latitudes which were different from the ones in which the pictures had been taken. This article follows this hypothesis to analyze images of war events which portrayed wounded soldiers and men bending at their enemies, broken on the battlefield. Such images were printed in massive media and resounded with the work of artists who were exploring the representation of alternative masculinity, linked to the vulnerability that violence brings about. Particularly, the article will approach the work of the Chilean artist Félix Maruenda, who included the images of the Vietnam War in Peligro (1969), a collaborative work from the old Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile, in which he explored through dancing, sculpture, image and sound projection the transcorporal scope of battle horrors. The article states and analyses how Maruenda’s artistic imaginary, intuitive and experimental at the time, became influenced by images which captured, from an unfathomable physical distance, the corporal condition of other men. This is done by holding the hypothesis that the aforementioned allowed the development of a hybrid practice when discussing materiality, and a novel practice regarding the performative dimension.