Silver Screen Sovereignty: Mexican Film and the Intersections of Reproductive Labor and Biopolitics

Mexican film;Social Reproduction;Biopolitics;Reproductive Labor;Feminism;Romance Languages and Literature;Humanities;Romance Languages & Literatures: Spanish

Herbert, LauraNemser, Daniel J ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Mexican film;    Social Reproduction;    Biopolitics;    Reproductive Labor;    Feminism;    Romance Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Romance Languages & Literatures: Spanish;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/140841/lmhmich_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines representations of femininity and political economy inMexican sound film. I contend that the Mexican film industry’s longstanding fascination with thenuclear family and sex work is an extended biopolitical commentary about capitalistdevelopment’s reliance on a gendered division of labor. My understanding of biopolitics departsfrom Michel Foucault’s work on the topic as an expression of sovereignty that emergedalongside capitalism. My analysis of this gendered division of labor derives from Marxistfeminist accounts of social reproduction in which gender norms are used to assign womenresponsibility for reproductive labor, or the work necessary to replenish and sustain theworkforce and social sphere. This project is a departure from past scholarship on Mexican filmthat has emphasized femininity’s connections to maternity and sexual desire and undertheorizedits relationship to economic development and state power.Chapter 1 explores the cabaretera, a subgenre of melodrama from the 1940s and 1950s.Close readings of Aventurera (Dir. Alberto Gout, 1950) and Víctimas del pecado (Dir. EmilioFernández, 1951) suggest that these films advocated for a gendered form of labor similar to theone described by Silvia Federici and other Marxist feminist scholars in their work on primitiveaccumulation. It argues that this is emblematic of the emerging biopolitical state under thePartido Revolucionario Institucional and shows how state power and economic developmentwere being rhetorically linked to gender during this period.Chapter 2 examines representations of sex work and land reform in Las Poquianchis (Dir.Felipe Cazals, 1976), Tívoli (Dir. Alberto Isaac, 1975), and El lugar sin límites (Dir. ArturoRipstein, 1977), and Bellas de noche (Dir. Miguel M. Delgado, 1975). It suggests that filmsmade during the Echeverría presidency (1970-1976) rework tropes and narratives from earlierperiods to suggest that the state and economic elites were excluding segments of the populationfor their own political and financial gains. It draws on Giorgio Agamben’s concept to bare life,David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and HuáscarSalazar Lohman’s community weaving to suggest that these films highlight the failures of theMexican state and call to think of new, non-state-based ways to organize the social sphere.Chapter three examines films made in the neoliberal present about violence in Mexico. Iargue that Sin dejar huella (Dir. María Novaro, 2000), Traspatio (Dir. Carlos Carrera, 2009),Miss Bala (Dir. Gerardo Naranjo, 2011), and Las elegidas (Dir. David Pablos, 2016) represent acontemporary version of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics that is a new, neoliberal form ofsovereignty that it not limited to the state. I read these films’ refusal to prescribe a clear solutionto the political violence they document as a demand to reprioritize social reproduction in publiclife in a way that is neither state-based nor organized around gender.My analysis revolves around close readings of each film read in conversation withtheoretical concepts. Each reading is heavily contextualized politically, economically, andindustrially in order to connect the content of each film to its historical context. Read together,these films suggest that representations of gender in Mexican cinema invite a broaderconversation about how reproductive labor is organized and imagined in relationship to statepower and economic development.