Plotting the nation through women
Franco, Jean. Plotting women. Gender and Representation in Mexico. “Part II. The Nation”. Pp.79-228. New York, Columbia University Press, 1989. Franco builds on Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities to document the emergence and development of national ideologies in Mexico, emphasizing the racial and gender hierarchies within this discourse: for instance, to see the peasants and indigenous as backwards is a necessary idea for the notion of national industrial progress; likewise, women, peasants and indigenous are seen as children —pupils— by the male intellectual elite who promise to incorporate them to national progress through education. The development of a modern subjectivity, akin with the modern nation, required instilling the ideology of the modernized family: one that did not challenge patriarchal authority but situated women as the imagined mothers of the nation, and linked them to the realms of the domestic stability and decency (81), either as sings of purit