Feminizing the City: Bodies and Networks in the Photographic Archive of Ana Victoria Jiménez, Mexico City, 1970–80

In light of international battles for women’s rights and in the midst of a violent decade in which the Mexican government used force to suppress social unrest while launching a reformist agenda, a group of women took to the streets of Mexico City demanding the eradication of women’s discrimination at all levels of society. Throughout the decade, these women established more than a dozen feminist collectives and organized lively demonstrations experimenting with diverse visual languages. These collectives gave rise to distinct networks of women artists and creative practices that explored and politicized conceptions of the female body making inroads in the fields of photography, performance, video and conceptual art. 

Ana Victoria Jiménez, then a young photographer, took her camera and began to document these demonstrations. She also preserved pamphlets, graphics and posters, which along with her photographs now constitute a valuable, but until recently, unrecognized visual archive of post-1968 Mexican culture. Focusing on Jiménez’s archive, this paper explores how the lives and politics of four women, Mónica Mayer, Rosa Martha Fernández, Pola Weiss and Jiménez, crossed paths producing work that reclaimed urban space as female. It discusses how their films, photos, performances and videos not only placed the female body as a point of departure for questioning hegemonic visual discourses and formulating new spatial configurations, but also as the site of social, political, and cultural violence in the context of important reforms granting equality to women. Central to this discussion is an interest for understanding and placing the practices of these women more meaningfully within the histories of post-1968 Mexican visual culture, art history, urban history, and feminism.