Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives

8. Queering Gender in Graciela Iturbide’s Juchitán de las mujeres

90 J uchitán has had the good fortune to maintain its integrity as a Zapotecan city, while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunities the outside world has provided to it. This is in no way a common occurrence in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America among the countries that have considerable indigenous populations (Royce 203). “The women of Juchitán”: hardly any other phrase in Mexican culture —at least feminine/feminist culture—enjoys greater resonance than this one has. The phrase conjures up images of the so-called profound Mexico, of a Mexican Other that, many would insist, is threatened with disappearance under the unsustainable weight of globalization, neoliberalism , the effect of hybrid cultures, new border realities, and so on. The image Iturbide provides is of these often hefty women taking care of the business of their world as they see fit, preserving something like a primitive communism that is in strident disaccord with the national narrative, with Zapotecan roots and inhabiting a socioeconomic space in which the elements of capitalist society are episodic and precarious. There is a certain romantic or sentimental patina surrounding the cultureme (the min- – 8 – queering gender in graciela iturbide’s juchitán de las mujeres ◆ ◆ ◆ 91 – graciela iturbide: queering gender – imal unit of cultural knowledge) identified as “Juchitán” that the aforementioned considerations continue to promote. The social, political, and economic singularity of Juchitán de Zaragoza has provided much work for anthropologists, and it is recycled in the popular, and international, imaginary. Juchitán has been the subject of a considerable scientific bibliography dealing with the remarkable lives of its women.1 The popular imaginary holds on to the images of women who enjoy a close-knit homosocialism in their lives that allows them to dance together as though they were sweethearts or lovers, a homosocialism that would seem to hold traditional Mexican machismo at bay but permit, in turn, a behavior in and among men that questioned the law of masculinity far before the phrase “crisis of masculinity” was first formulated. Much is also made of the strong matrilinearity between mothers and daughters and between young women and their grandmothers that would seem to model and solidify a version of the bonding between women (comadrismo ) that exists elsewhere in Mexico and among Mexican women in the United States, even when the latter is often now much more a matter of traditional formalisms without the extensive transmitted social language attributed to the women of Juchitán. In this way, the Juchitecan woman stands out as something like a ground zero for an alterity that is deeply seductive for a society characterized by the homogeneity surrounding the project of modernity. When Juchitán de las mujeres was first published in 1989, with photography by Graciela Iturbide and texts by Elena Poniatowska, two of the most outstanding women producing culture in Mexico today, not only was a long-standing enthusiasm for this Mexican microsociety rekindled, but it became the most sought-after photographic dossier in Latin America . Juchitán de las mujeres not only struck a chord in the long process of questioning the projects of modernity in Mexico, but it also connected with an enormous feminist current in Latin America, especially what we might term a “radical” current that called into question in a particularly intransigent way patriarchal paradigms. Feminism and postmodernism can be two sides of the same coin, which becomes, perhaps, somehow tridimensional when it incorporates the ideological parameters of the queer. It is a matter of a feminism that not only questions masculinist privilege, but also challenges additional concepts of being a woman in Mexico by undermining the postulates of heteronormativity that are part of the social hygiene of Mexican society. Based on the refocusing of the gaze of two female artists from the iconic Latin American megalopolis to an almost inaccessible corner of the country, the book portrays a world that, even if 92 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography – it is not definitively matriarchal, stands at a considerable distance from prevailing national patriarchal values. And in examining closely other allegiances and alliances of gender, sexuality, and desire that are markedly different from the narratives of metropolitan heterosexuality, Juchitán de las mujeres is perhaps a unique book in Mexican culture. All one has to do is to consider the title, which is an eloquent trope of the anthropological...