Mexico Unmanned

Iconic images of machismo in Mexico's classic cinema affirm the national film industry's historical alignment with the patriarchal ideology intrinsic to the post-revolutionary state's political culture. Filmmakers gradually turned away from the cultural nationalism of mexicanidad, but has the underlying gender paradigm been similarly abandoned? Films made in the past two decades clearly reflect transformations instituted by a neoliberal regime of cultural politics, yet significant elements of macho mythology continue to be rearticulated. Mexico Unmanned examines these structural continuities in recent commercial and auteur films directed by Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Cuaron, Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante, and Julio Hernandez Cordon, among others. Informed by cinema's role in Mexico's modern/colonial gender system, Samanta Ordonez draws out recurrent patterns of signification that reproduce racialized categories of masculinity and bolster a larger network of social hierarchies. In so doing, Ordonez dialogues with current intersectional gender theory, fresh scholarship on violence in the neoliberal state, and the latest research on Mexican cinema.