Alarma!: Mujercitos Performing Gender in a Pigmentocratic Sociocultural System

"This research project examines the photographs of mujercitos and hombrecitas in the exemplary Mexican nota roja periodical Alarma!, from 1963 to 1986. The photographs of mujercitos, "effeminate men" and hombrecitas, "masculine type women" (as defined by Alarma!) are not what one expects from a nota roja periodical. Nota roja is a particular news genre for the narration of violence characterized by its gruesome and cruel photographic content. Within these photographs, mujercitos and hombrecitas are shown posing and taking the center stage of the camera for 23 consecutive years. Through an analysis of how the photographs of mujercitos and hombrecitas featured in the nota roja periodical Alarma! inform and participate in the larger national imaginary in relation to peripheral sexualities in Mexico, my dissertation contends that these photographs work as a site of resistance to and a subversion of many different forms of violence in Mexico. Moreover, this analysis reveals a process of subjectivation and subject identification informed as much by class/skin tonalities as by gender/sex. As such, my dissertation maps some of the zones of tension between the main Anglo North American theories of performative gender/sex within the pigmentocratic sociocultural system of Mexico."--