Feminist activists and artists in Mexico City, 1970-2010

What is it about?

This book recuperates the work of feminist artists and activists active in Mexico City from 1970- 2010. It focuses on Mónica Mayer, Pola Weiss, Rosa Martha Fernández and Ana Victoria Jiménez. Using personal archives, interviews with these artists, and documents from the Mexican security services, this book argues for the importance of feminist activists and artists in changing discourses and practices in formal politics, visual arts, media, and activism. It describes the full range of ways in which self-identified women and feminist activists and artists transformed the traditional representation of female bodies, gender roles, and how women's reproductive and legal rights were discussed in public.

Featured Image

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This research recovers the critical and often overlooked role that feminism (s) played in developing visual arts, media and politics during the second half of the 20th century. It conceptualizes the work of Mónica Mayer, Pola Weiss, Rosa Martha Fernández and Ana Victoria Jiménez as contributions to the Archive of 1970s Mexico. It argues for their roles as agents of the archive by conceptualizing how their visual productions and embodied practices constructed a different range of archives, both in content and form and from which alternative histories could emerge and also spoke to the ways normative representations of the female body both in media and about the urban landscape of Mexico City were being contested in the last decades of the 20th century.