ABSTRACT
Partha Chatterjee discusses in his essay "The Nation and Its Women", the ties between nationalist discourse and a patriarchy that, in his words, "combined coercive authority with the subtle force of persuasion". Chatterjee's insights adequately illuminates the way in which Mexican post-Revolutionary culture used gender and the representation of women in order to construct a "cultural essence" that defined the nation in relation to both foreign culture and the life of subaltern subjects. In this chapter, the author raises the question as to how the figure of woman as part of the repertoire of icons for nationalist hegemony becomes problematized into a set of images that seek to reconfigure her once the nationalist social contract breaks. The author focuses on the ways in which the nationalist articulation of the female body withers and gives way to new forms of the elite body politic in the context of neoliberal cinema.
