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11. Performing Masculine Heterosexuality in Stefan Ruiz’s Photography of Mexican Soap Operas
- University of Texas Press
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128 S oap operas in Mexico,1 especially the vast programming undertaken by Televisa, which dominates the Mexican market and exports its products extensively, have replaced film as the mirror of a hegemonic social ideology in that country.2 The great chroniclers of Mexico City, Carlos Monsiváis and Carlos Bonfil, maintained, with considerable eloquence and a persuasive documentation, that Mexicans during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, following the Mexican Revolution of the second decade of the twentieth century that created contemporary Mexico, went to the movies to learn how to live and love as good citizens. Imposing a rigid code of morality, unswerving nationalism, and unquestionable heteronormativity, Mexican filmmaking, no matter what social class was dealt with in a specific film, conveyed a social model that unambiguously rewarded the faithful and punished the deviant.3 While recent work on the filmmaking of this era, which began to crumble in the 1970s and effectively ended in the 1980s, has now begun to point out fissures in the edifice and suggest the compelling consequences of unresolved contradictions (such as the lesbianism of the redoubtable Sara García, – 11 – performing masculine heterosexuality in stefan ruiz’s photography of mexican soap operas ◆ ◆ ◆ 129 – stefan ruiz: performing masculine heterosexuality – who made almost fifteen films touting conventional heterosexist Mexican motherhood), Mexican filmmaking of the Golden Age nevertheless presents an ideological unity integral to the confirmation of revolutionary (i.e., post–Revolution of 1910) Mexico. U.S. filmmaking was also ideologically hegemonic during the thirtyyear reign of the Hayes Code (ca. 1930–1960). But in Mexico the government closely controlled film production in a direct fashion, allowing for an enormous range of artistic creativity and experimentation (one thinks of the magnificent camerawork of the ubiquitous Gabriel Figueroa), as long as filmmakers did not deviate from a conception of the revolutionary integrity and unity of a greater Mexico, the primacy of the Spanish language , the cult of mestizo identity with its roots in a rural, nonurban primeval tradition, and the unreflective heterosexist imperative (“Haz patria, ten hijos” [Be patriotic and have children]), with its equally unreflective sexism and macho primacy.4 However, by the early twenty-first century, there is very much a sense in Mexico that the hegemony imposed in the early twentieth century has become severely fragmented. Certainly, as has been noted, that hegemony in Mexican filmmaking had been very much undermined by the work of a new generation of independent creators who chose to defy and work outside the government-sponsored studio system, with the admirable results of the New Mexican filmmaking of recent decades, including directors (important women and queers among them) who have gone so far as to work in English outside the national confines of Mexico, giving rise to serious concerns about where, exactly, the locus of contemporary Mexican film is to be situated. In any event, filmmaking in Mexico during the past fifty years has yielded some outstanding, internationally recognized works in terms of themes and cinematographic experimentation, along with a host of vibrant actors, directors, and support personnel, all of which continue Mexico’s important place in the realm of Latin American filmmaking. Yet, while that filmmaking unquestionably addresses itself in the main to the vital issues of contemporary life in Mexico, especially in terms of urban tensions, political corruption, emigration to the United States, and the matter of narcotrafficking, Mexican film no longer enjoys the status of being, in Monsiváis’s words, the mirror of Mexican society. That role has been largely assumed by the soap opera genre. Evolving out of radio and assuming importance in the 1960s–1970s, precisely at the time the hegemonic edifice of filmmaking was crumbling, the Mexican soap opera may be said to enjoy a prestige and influence second to those of no other entertainment medium in Latin America. To [3.236.234.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:02 GMT) 130 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography – be sure, soap operas are an important staple of television programming throughout the continent, and in major markets like Argentina and Brazil they have displayed many innovative features, accompanying the return to constitutional democracy in those two countries (in 1983 and 1985, respectively ), and modeled significant changes in social values, particularly with regard to sexual ideologies (especially in Argentina) and racial and ethnic ones (particularly in Brazil), as well as major urban issues in both countries. But it is in...