Aggressions with the scent of women. Female Domestic Violence in Cinema

Abstract

A metaphor, "violence" can have both a masculine and feminine surname. In other words, it can be exercised by men and women. We are interested in this last case: female violence. Its analysis involves reviewing how it is conceived and understood in social terms: it is a set of acts that, from certain perspectives closet o feminism could be classified as justified, romanticized or even desirable, as it would be synonymous with female empowerment. In Mexico, cinema is one of the platforms where domestic violence perpetrated by women has been represented in its various forms. To interpret it, we theoretically conform to the visions of two scholars of the psychology of the subject, Eric Bern and Michael Foucault, who have decoded the games of dominance exercised in couple relationships. Empirically, we take up films from the golden age of Mexican cinema, since there is a widespread idea that it is a cinema that only showed patriarchal values. It was not like that: it also showed the way in which female violence was exercised against men or other women. The tone of comedy in some of the films analyzed here is striking, as we start from the hypothesis that seeing the comic side of female domestic violence, in a patriarchal society, is a way of relativizing its seriousness.