Descripción:
The masculinities of contemporary Mexico can’t understand outside of the historical processes that constructed and delimited them, in this way one of the inheritances that forged them was the cultural sediment that left the Mexican cinema of the Golden Age, or more specifically the one of the forties. Much of the studies that have been done around the cinematography of the period or even some reflections regarding cultural processes that affect the construction of the Mexican masculinity identity, have made a great emphasis on the legacy around stereotypes like charro or macho, proposing that both acted as elements that forged normative notions that legitimized male hegemony in Mexican society. Our research considers that it is indispensable to recognize not only whether or not cinema paid for the legitimation of masculinity, but also how it happened. In this regard, we propose that thinking about Mexican cinema in the terms already mentioned institutionalizes an extremely partial, homogeneous and inoperable view that it is essential to rethink, observing the representations indicated as part of a broader process regarding the struggles around the intended meaning to give to the practices, and for that reason tensions that involved the power. Thus our reflection is about the historical construction of the genre through the analysis of cultural representations of masculinities in two films La familia Pérez and La oveja negra (1949), which were chosen because of the cultural roots of their protagonists, to a "typical" of the production of the period and by the way in which they seem to approach subjects that were cause of anguishes also in their historical space. To carry out this we return to the concept of collective representations constructed by the historian Roger Chartier, according to which they act as true social institutions that forge the identities; as well as the film analysis proposal of the sociologist Pierre Sorlin that, from our perspective, achieves a methodology that allows us to weave the film with its historical space. In the end, the research concludes on the most subtle changes around a series of practices related to the exercise of manhood such as fatherhood, work, domination of women and erotic experiences, emotional or sexual, which were originated by the way in which modernity shook traditional processes of constitution of the male gender.