Inescapable prints: panoptic surveillance and violence in João Paulo Cuenca’s O único final feliz para uma história de amor é um acidente

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Olivia Holloway
United States Military Academy (West Point)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2005-0454

Abstract

Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca uses futuristic Tokyo as a venue for his antithetical love story that portrays a father ensnaring his adult son through a city-wide surveillance network. Foucault’s panopticism in Discipline and Punish (1975) reflects the wire taps and hidden cameras in Cuenca’s dystopic novel, revealing how technology intensifies the scale ranging from virtual invasion to physical brutality. Much as social media has changed the definition of “friend” and blurred the division between public and private life, the protagonist’s social web reveals that alliances are deceiving. Cuenca’s work exhibits the alarming reality in which concepts like identity and friendship are manipulated by society’s most powerful members. Cuenca’s dystopic society permits and encourages the multifaceted dehumanization of women’s bodies and analogizes media presence as a tool for personal freedom, illicit surveillance, and violence.

Keywords: Dystopia, Panopticon, Media, Gender identities, Exile, Digital footprints, João Paulo Cuenca

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