“MUJERES QUE SE VISUALIZAN”: (EN)GENDERING ARCHIVES AND REGIMES OF MEDIA AND VISUALITY IN POST-1968 MEXICO by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (History) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) August, 2014 © Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, 2014 ABSTRACT This study analyzes the fundamental role played by a group of artists and feminist activists including Ana Victoria Jiménez, Rosa Martha Fernández, Mónica Mayer, and Pola Weiss in developing and transforming regimes of media and visuality in post-1968 Mexico. It considers this process as indicative of larger and potential transformations in historically constituted fields of power and knowledge in the context of the emergence of new wave feminisms and the broad shift in Mexican intellectual sectors away from an exclusive emphasis on literate-print culture and towards an embrace of audiovisual communications. Throughout this dissertation, the concept of visual letradas is developed to describe women who by the second half of the twentieth century became more openly concerned with performing and recording audiovisual information about how their bodies were visually construed and politicized. Using recently opened archives of the Mexican secret services as well as photographic documentation on feminist demonstrations, oral testimonies, interviews, videos, performances, and films, this study shows how visual letradas transformed intellectual spheres of influence previously conceptualized as privileged masculine territory, the space of the letrado. The term visual letradas is also used to map out how the increased participation of women in Mexico's mediascapes shaped the emergence of competing political subjectivities that posited the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence at the forefront of public debates during the last decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, in contrast to the closed disciplinary focus and national parameters that have characterized the twentieth-century Mexican historiography of feminisms, media, art, and women's history, this dissertation emphasizes the interconnections between these fields by focusing on three main categories—the city, the archive, and the media. By bringing an interdisciplinary, local, and transnational lens to bear on these categories and by showing how visual letradas appropriated them as key spheres of action, this project narrates how normative representations of the female body (visually and in formal politics) were contested throughout Mexico City and how, in turn, such challenges affected and effected politics. ii PREFACE Dr. William E. French, Dr. Alejandra Bronfman, and Dr. Jessica Stites-Mor supervised this work. Parts of Chapters Four and Six were published in "Feminism as counter-archive: The collections of Ana Victoria Jiménez Mexico City, 1970-1990". Views from the Edge, 18(1), 56-71. A version of Chapter Eight was published in “¿Cosas de Mujeres?: Film, Performance and Feminist Networks of Collaboration enunciated from Mexico in the 1970s" in Artelogie Recherches sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l'Amérique latine, No. 5: "Art et genre: femmes créatrices en Amérique Latine" (Septembre, 2013). Available at: http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article230 All research was conducted in compliance with the Behavioral Ethics Review Board at the University of British Columbia. Certificate Number H09-00778. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... ii PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................ iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................. iv LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF ACRONYMS .................................................................................................................... ix AKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................... x INTRODUCTION. THE OUTLINE OF THE VISUAL LETRADAS ............................................................................. 1 Feminizing the letrado sphere of Influence ................................................................................ 20 Archival frameworks ............................................................................................................................ 24 Feminism as keyword .......................................................................................................................... 33 Feminism(s), art, social movements and media as categories of exclusion ................. 35 Gender as category of analysis ......................................................................................................... 39 Structure ..................................................................................................................................................... 45 SECTION ONE. FEMINIZING THE CITY ............................................................................................................. 50 A preamble: the battle for the city .................................................................................................. 60 CHAPTER 1. Map one: the official city ................................................................................................ 73 Controlling women’s bodies: gender equity and family planning .................................... 75 La mujer en el arte or feminist art? ................................................................................................. 83 Reforming the visual arts .................................................................................................................... 89 CHAPTER 2. Map two: the media city .................................................................................................. 95 Television broadcasting in 1970s Mexico ................................................................................... 97 Women and television broadcasting in 1970s Mexico ........................................................ 102 Video: from la caja idiota to la caja mágica ................................................................................ 109 Women behind the camera: competing approaches to politically committed film .......................................................................................................... 116 La mujer liberada ..................................................................................................................................... 124 CHAPTER 3. Map three: the embodied city .................................................................................... 131 La (re)cámara de diputados: the personal turns political .................................................. 145 Fed-up women and beauty pageants: unacknowledged legacies in Mexican theater and performance .................................... 149 Miss revolución .......................................................................................................................................... 159 Fed-up women take over the mother’s monument: fronts and artistic coalitions ........................................................................................................... 169 SECTION TWO. THE ARCHIVAL PRACTICES OF A VISUAL LETRADA ...................................................... 185 CHAPTER 4. The archival and political awakenings of Ana Victoria Jiménez ................. 190 CHAPTER 5. Secret documents and feminist practices ............................................................ 221 CHAPTER 6. Performing feminist art: Tlacuilas y Retrateras and la Fiesta de Quinceaños ............................................................................................................. 244 iv SECTION THREE. THE VISUAL LETRADAS PROTEST THE MEDIA ARCHIVE ............................................ 267 CHAPTER 7. Interrupting photographic traditions: the photographs of Ana Victoria Jiménez .......................................................................................................................... 273 Cross-dressing as indigenous and the gendering of photographic practice .............. 281 Women wielding the camera: images and genealogies of photographic practices ..................................................................................................................... 292 Mexican visual letradas: archival practices and the excavation of revolutionary moments ...................................................................................................................................................... 306 Photojournalism, images of women and the ethics of seeing .......................................... 312 New photojournalism ........................................................................................................................ 320 CHAPTER 8."¿Cosas de mujeres?": feminist collaborations in 1970s Mexico. ................. 328 “¿Cosas de Mujeres?:” breaking the silence on “women’s issues” ................................... 331 Critique, reception and mechanisms