Abstract
This chapter discusses how female sexuality and female gender relations are depicted and manifested in a number of gothic horror movies in Mexico up to the late 1960s. Although rather traditional in the way they address issues of female gender politics and sexuality in the country and, by extension, in many parts of the continent, these movies also show a radical shift in attitude towards women, as well as some female queer subjects, in terms of their gendered relations and the expressions of their sexuality. The main purpose of this chapter is to offer an analysis of the anti-normative female gothic—the villainess and the female monster—and to establish whether the Mexican female gothic figure continues the tradition of other classic female gothics elsewhere, or whether it departs from this and provides new readings on issues of Mexican femininity and femaleness.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of the tropical gothic does not operate as a homogenous construct across the continent. Tropical gothic narratives elsewhere in Latin America clearly adapt in different ways to the geographical settings in which the actions develop. As Gabriel Eljaiek sugguests, ‘este mecanismo implica una apropiación política de los temas así como una transformación y una transposición’ (2012: 164) [this mechanism implicates a political appropriation of themes, as well as a transformation and transposition of such themes].
- 2.
Eric Schaefer understands exploitation movies as characterised by ‘low budgets, lurid subject matter, affiliation with the most debased genres, and a subsistence at the margin of industry and culture’ (: xi). Thus in this chapter those movies that amalgamate a number of genres, be it horror and science fiction, horror and wrestling cinema, horror and sexploitation, to name a few, will not be addressed.
- 3.
The Mexican equivalent of the Western.
- 4.
The primordial earth goddess, mother of the gods, the sun, the moon and the stars.
- 5.
The ‘heart-her-skirt’ goddess.
- 6.
The political and social role that women played during the Mexican Revolution must be noted and, more importantly, the importance of the figure of the soldadera (female soldier) within the national socio-sexual imaginary after the return to democracy. La Llorona as victim in this film, therefore, vindicates the role of indigenous and mestizo women in Mexico. This vindication as national identity can be seen in the works of Mexican muralists, as well as that of Frida Kahlo, which aimed at exalting the indigenous and pre-colonial past.
- 7.
This correlation between beauty and evil can be evidenced in novels such as du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), where the lead, and yet absent, character’s extraordinary beauty is one of the pivotal themes of the novel and can only be compared to her abilities of compulsive lying and promiscuity. By the same token, the desire of evil characters to attain beauty as a commodity can be found in many fairy tales, such as the Evil Queen in the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White (1854).
- 8.
Once again, du Maurier’s Rebecca also offers in Mrs. Danvers (the cold-hearted, stern and overbearing housekeeper) a character whose less attractive physical appearance is always contrasted to the extreme beauty of the late Rebecca or the second Mrs. de Winter. By the same token, ugliness and old age are equated with evilness in the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White when the Evil Queen transforms herself into the old woman in order to trick the young protagonist into eating the poisoned apple.
- 9.
Such gender stereotypes are accurately pointed out by Donna Heiland when she argues that the plot of the classic gothic novel can be regarded as the ‘melodramatic story of an innocent young woman trapped by one man and rescued by another’ (2008: 1). To which it can be also added that other female figures within gothic narratives tend to be regarded as villainesses who try to oppress the heroine.
- 10.
Creed focuses her analysis of the castrating woman on films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi 1978), Sisters (Brian De Palma 1973) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).
- 11.
A clear example would be the many female vampire characters in El Santo’s films.
- 12.
A transformation that is also visually evidenced by her physical change, as her face transfigures into a monstrous and deformed one with hollow eyes, whose symbolism has been already suggested in the analysis of La Bruja.
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Subero, G. (2016). Challenging Patriarchy in the Gothic Horror Mexican Cinema. In: Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56495-5_1
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