Sound Poetics of Youth Precarity in Cinema: Sound Montage as a Sensory Experience in ‘The Chambermaid’ and ‘The Dove and the Wolf

Abstract

Precarization has become one of the defining features of contemporary youth experience, unevenly shaping the labor, affective, and everyday trajectories of subjects marked by differences of gender, social class, sexuality, and racialization. Against this backdrop, this article explores the sonic poetics of precarization in The Chambermaid (La camarista, Lila Avilés, 2018) and The Dove and the Wolf (La paloma y el lobo, Carlos Lenin Treviño, 2019), two debut features of contemporary Mexican cinema that position sound as a central resource for rendering the ordinary forms of structural violence perceptible. By articulating critical discourse analysis of cinematic texts with Michel Chion’s concepts of audiovisuality and sound montage, Don Ihde’s phenomenology of listening, and Mary Ann Doane’s theory of affective listening, the study examines film sequences in which the relationship between sound and image configures experiences of labor exploitation, displacement, silencing, emotional exhaustion, threat, and violence. The findings demonstrate that both films construct distinct yet convergent listening regimes capable of translating precarization into a sensory experience. The article concludes that sound montage functions as an aesthetic and political device that renders structural violence audible in bodily and affective terms, revealing the conditions that shape the lives of contemporary Mexican youth.