The "Amazonas" in Macho Tips: Women and Femininity in 1980s Queer Mexican Publications

While recent scholarship has focused on Mexican male queerness within Macho Tips, Mexico’s most popular 1980s gay magazine, little has been written about women within the magazine. In this paper, I analyze the magazine’s “Amazonas” section that focuses on women with same-sex desires, “clasificados,” where women solicited contact from other women, and representations and images of women to understand desires and anxieties held by queer women and men in relation to gender and sexuality. By centering women’s voices as contributing writers, I show how queer women navigated 1980s Mexico marked by la crisis, a phrase that refers to a series of political and economic crises that included the 1968 student massacre and the 1982 Debt Crisis, sexism from male-dominated queer organizations, and homophobia from women’s and feminist organizations. This paper also shows how women as contributors, interviewees, or as aspirational figures mattered to queer men seeking to challenge hegemonic masculinity and stereotypes against queer men. Overall, this paper shows how women and femininity mattered in 1980s queer Mexico.