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 purity or corruption (101). Within this period of nation building women were deemed as "too religious" and in need to be re-indoctrinated, replacing religion with the modern values of patriotism, work ethic and faith in progress. The liberal notion that the natural place of women is the domestic, the private, and that the laws are made for men to "protect" women is also present in early national literature. Likewise, anxieties brought up with the progressive urbanization and expansion of industrialized work are mapped onto women's bodies and sexuality: "In Gamboa's novel Santa, the female prostitute symbolizes the inevitable corruption of the provinces under the corrosive effect of city life" (96).In contrast, Modernist literature constructs the female body as the "luxuriously clothed body-as-commodity", where commercial interaction is seen as a sign of a modern mentality and women themselves become a commodity and a fetishistic object of desire. However, other examples in literature show that women resisted both master discourses of domesticity and capitalist modernization.

The period of the Revolution (1910-1917) associated social transformation with a model of nationalist virility. Women were constructed as teachers of the nation (Gabriela Mistral is the Latin American model), and motherhood emphasized as the reason for their existence. Of course, these were contested and resisted by many women, Franco uses the example of Frida Kahlo's painting and lifestyle and Antonieta Rivas Mercado's writing. In both cases, they attempted to inscribe their art into the Messianic nationalism of postrevolutionary Mexico, but their attempts also destabilized and subverted notions of femininity. In Rivas Mercado's suicide, Franco reads —in psychoanalytic terms— her literal understanding of the lack of a female space or the possibility a female speech in a Father's order.

The role of myths in organizing social life and national identity brings Franco to consider La Malinche as an anti-Antigone legend, where as Octavio Paz suggested, male identity is constituted violently as a rejection of this shameful mother (131). Franco analyzes how Mexican women novelists who tried to incorporate women to the national narrative ended up reproducing the figure of La Malinche. Likewise, Franco considers how Mexican cinema of the 1940's and 50's articulated the new meanings that recoded everything known in a modernist rhetoric, using a oedipal narrative to incorporate the masses to the nation under a paternal state. However, both cinema, radio and mass media had an ambiguous role in nation building, promoting both some of its values while undermining others.