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theses

In this dissertation I study the different ways that women are represented as “feminine,” or the different ways of being a “woman” in Mexico. I situate this study in questions of how womanhood is depicted in contemporary Mexican fiction and art, how the female body is used in such fluid representations of womanhood, and how gendered performance through the body helps define a woman’s identity. The unifying thread is that of women who enact femininity that goes against the traditional archetype of passive motherhood found in la Guadalupe and la Chingada: they avoid becoming mothers; seek sexual pleasure; avoid maternal, care-taking relationships with men; and enact alternative production rather than reproduction through their bodies. The corpus includes canonical and recent literature by female authors, fiction written by men, letters, corridos, poems, photographs, calendar cromos, paintings, drawings, letters, and lithographs, spanning materials from 1903 to 2004. The first two chapters explore the women of the Mexican Revolution in a female counter-archive in photographs and calendar cromos prints and corrido ballads and novels written by women, such as Cartucho by Nellie Campobello and Hasta no verte, Jesús mío by Elena Poniatowska. In the third chapter I deconstruct the submissive figure of the mujer abnegada through feminist re-readings of the novels Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela by Elena Poniatowska and Demasiado amor by Sara Sefchovich and the protagonists’ journeys of resisting selflessness and motherhood. Beyond a rejection of the maternal abnegada, in the fourth chapter I look at women who enact sexuality without maternity through suffering and bleeding in the paintings of Frida Kahlo and the novels Santa by Federico Gamboa and Duerme by Carmen Boullosa. In contrast to sexuality without maternity, the final chapter examines beauty, body image, and female sexual desire in Señorita México by Enrique Serna and Vapor by Julieta García González and how the protagonists resist male desire directed at them and enact their own. The thesis creates a counter-archive of womanhood that moves women’s bodies beyond the limits of traditional spaces for women, and contributes to constructions of womanhood in and outside of Mexico.

ETD_6226

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mia Lynn Romano

doi:10.7282/T33T9K2N

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.