A Woman’s Right to Move: The Politics of Female Walking in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

The chapter explores the notion of women’s march in the specific context of Latin American cinema in early twenty-first century. Focusing on precarity and the vulnerable conditions of the leading characters, they discuss how film narratives engender an impulse of survival and resistance that defy the constraints of the protagonist’s peripheral and historically placed gendered conditions. The authors show how a number of films weave a cartography of feminist transit, constructing an alliance of forces, a march against patriarchal domination and the immobilization produced by capitalism. Seen together, such films entail a collective—if not unified—drive, showing Latin American women ‘on the move’, drawing their own routes on the map, against the grain, and despite all the detours dictated by historical forces.

This chapter develops analyses previously published in Brandão (2008), Lira and Brandão (2012).