Adapting Gender

Adapting Gender offers a cogent introduction to Mexico's film industry, the history of women's filmmaking in Mexico, a new approach to adaptation as a potential feminist strategy, and a cultural history of generational changes in Mexico. Ilana Dann Luna examines how adapted films have the potential to subvert not only the intentions of the source text, but how they can also interrupt the hegemony of gender stereotypes in a broader socio-political context. Luna follows the industrial shifts that began with Salinas de Gortari's presidency, which made the long 1990s the precise moment in which subversive filmmakers, particularly women, were able to participate more fully in the industry and portrayed the lived experiences of women and non-gender-conforming men. The analysis focuses on Busi Cortes's El secreto de Romelia (1988), an adaptation of Rosario Castellanos's short novel El viudo Roman (1964); Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardan's Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda (1996), an adaptation of Berman's own play, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (1992); Guita Schyfter's Novia que te vea (1993), an adaptation of Rosa Nissan's eponymous novel (1992); and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's De noche vienes, Esmeralda (1997), an adaptation of Elena Poniatowska's short story 'De noche vienes' (1979). These adapted texts established a significant alternative to monolithic notions of national (gendered) identity, while critiquing, updating, and even queering, notions of feminism in the Mexican context.