ABSTRACT
When I show my students Panama-born US-based Anayansi Prado’s 2005 documentary Maid in America, which features three female Latina women working as dome´sticas in Los Angeles, one scene always provokes gasps from the audience. Guatemalan Judith gives birth to her son Everest, and we watch the moment of birthing in all its realistic details: in a tightly composed frame, with the camera placed at the level of Judith’s head, we see the baby being pulled out of her, his tiny body covered in blood and other fluids, still attached to the mother by an umbilical cord. My students, bothered by the very idea of such proximity to the flesh, invariably always ask: “Why do we need to see this?” The this, involving “the taboo aesthetics of the birth scene” (Tyler, Baraitser 2013: 1), placed centrally in the frame, captures a delicate and precarious moment of intimacy that typically takes place off-screen. As viewers, they claim, we are not used to watching such scenes in full detail. We are not used to seeing such moments “so close.” The birthing sequence stages what, following Jacques Rancie`re, we may call “the intolerable image”—intolerable because it is “too intolerably real” (Rancie`re 2009: 83).
