Bodily Vulnerability, the Human Rights of Immigrants, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful

Authors

  • Elizabeth S. Anker Cornell University

Abstract

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010) follows the final months in the life of its protagonist Uxbal as he dies from prostate cancer. Uxbal is a middleman who brokers the labor of unauthorized immigrants, yet as he confronts his mortality he also contends with the human rights abuses that have enabled his livelihood. This essay explores how Uxbal’s bodily disintegration and vulnerability foster his growing respect for human rights. As it argues, Biutiful unfolds an “embodied human rights imaginary” that serves to challenge the dual expectations of human dignity and bodily integrity that inform liberal articulations of human rights. Moreover, such an embodied conception of the human is incarnated in the film’s cinematographic form, style, and aesthetic.

Author Biography

  • Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University

    Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her first book is Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012). Anker has recently written about animal rights in New Literary History; the 9/11 novel in American Literary History; democracy and fiction in Novel: A Forum on Fiction; and sovereignty and contemporary cinema in the University of Toronto Quarterly. Her current projects include a book entitled “Our Constitutional Metaphors,” and two co-edited collections, one on “critique and post-critique” and another on “new directions in law and literature.”

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 1 (2014): Human Rights and Literature

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Anker, E. S. (2026). Bodily Vulnerability, the Human Rights of Immigrants, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 27(1), 11-26. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27400