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

Abstract

This dissertation examines representations of femininity and political economy in Mexican sound film. I contend that the Mexican film industry’s longstanding fascination with the nuclear family and sex work is an extended biopolitical commentary about capitalist development’s reliance on a gendered division of labor. My understanding of biopolitics departs from Michel Foucault’s work on the topic as an expression of sovereignty that emerged alongside capitalism. My analysis of this gendered division of labor derives from Marxist feminist accounts of social reproduction in which gender norms are used to assign women responsibility for reproductive labor, or the work necessary to replenish and sustain the workforce and social sphere. This project is a departure from past scholarship on Mexican film that has emphasized femininity’s connections to maternity and sexual desire and undertheorized its 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. Emilio Fernández, 1951) suggest that these films advocated for a gendered form of labor similar to the one described by Silvia Federici and other Marxist feminist scholars in their work on primitive accumulation. It argues that this is emblematic of the emerging biopolitical state under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and shows how state power and economic development were 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. Arturo Ripstein, 1977), and Bellas de noche (Dir. Miguel M. Delgado, 1975). It suggests that films made during the Echeverría presidency (1970-1976) rework tropes and narratives from earlier periods to suggest that the state and economic elites were excluding segments of the population for 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 Huáscar Salazar Lohman’s community weaving to suggest that these films highlight the failures of the Mexican 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. I argue 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 a contemporary version of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics that is a new, neoliberal form of sovereignty that it not limited to the state. I read these films’ refusal to prescribe a clear solution to the political violence they document as a demand to reprioritize social reproduction in public life in a way that is neither state-based nor organized around gender.

My analysis revolves around close readings of each film read in conversation with theoretical concepts. Each reading is heavily contextualized politically, economically, and industrially 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 broader conversation about how reproductive labor is organized and imagined in relationship to state power and economic development.