Militancia feminista, fenómenos culturales y violencia de género en MéxicoUna historia visual (1970-2002)

Résumé

The purpose of this this Ph.D. dissertation is to present research on the feminist movement in Mexico during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. It will focus on the close links between different types of gender violence and political aesthetic strategies from the visual arts field since the emergence of the first neo-feminist groups. The main hypothesis of this research project is that feminist activism and its visual culture production impacted not only the political movements but also the development of the history of art in Mexico. The progressive conceptualisation of feminist art opened new creative pathways that impacted many other artistic productions during the neo-avant-garde period of the eighties and nineties. However, the evolution of feminist art in Mexico cannot be considered progressive or lineal and, during the nineties, the impact of these new perspectives shifted considerably. Despite some considerable exceptions over that period, pioneering artists from the seventies and eighties laid the foundations for the indissoluble links between cultural production and condemnation of gender and sexual violence in Mexico. In order to show this, we will look into the context of the significant social, economic, political, and cultural changes that took place during these three decades, taking as a reference the viewpoint of some of the visual producers who were protagonists in the production of singular aesthetic-political strategies. The first part, “‘Is this the prelude to a revolution?’: Mexican Neofeminism and Aesthetic Strategies (1970-1979),” will present the formation of the first neofeminist groups. This will include their main struggles including the right to elective maternity and free abortion, the fight against sexual violence, and the denouncement of unpaid domestic work (or double workday). Also in this chapter, we will pay special attention to the tensions that arose with other traditional activist spaces, such as political parties and unions (of which some of the feminists were a part). From the perspective of the photographic camera of Ana Victoria Jiménez, we will focus on the main feminist manifestations of the decade and the aesthetic strategies they deployed, as well as the editorial and cinematographic practices of dissemination of their political approaches. The second part, “The recipe: Feminist Art and new conceptual media (1978-1987)”, presents the process by which the proposal of feminist art developed in Mexico and how it slowly began to infiltrate the country's cultural institutions. The relationship between the development of conceptual art and feminist art will be shown, especially through the artistic proposals of Mónica Mayer as its main exponent. With this, Monica Mayer together with Maris Bustamante in their feminist art project Polvo de Gallina Negra managed to denaturalize forms of violence internalized by Mexican society related to maternity, labor, and cultural spaces. We will also see how the artists turn to the struggle against rape and sexual violence through public art proposals with an innovative sociological methodology that will have a strong impact on feminist artists of the next generation. Finally, in the third part “The NAFTA Era: Cultural Field and Feminisms in Mexico during the Democratic Transition (1987-2002)”, we attend to the birth of new gender conflicts that began to intersect with other class struggles and popular collectives. During this period, the economic crisis and the subsequent neoliberal economic deployment triggered by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement led to an extraordinary expansion of the feminist struggle, but not without the appearance of ideological conflicts within the movement during the latter. We will also focus on the policies of cultural domination deployed by Salinas de Gortari’s government and the impact that the creation of new institutions and new financing systems for national creators had on the cultural field. In this context, we will pay attention to the historiographic debate on the alleged “depoliticization” and “individualization” of artists during the nineties. Finally, we will analyze the figure and early work of cultural activist Lorena Wolffer as a pivotal figure between the previous generation of feminist artists and the full inclusion of feminist artistic proposals on gender violence in Mexican cultural institutions from 2010 – 2019