Deco Body, Deco City

Anyone who has strolled the lush curves of Mexico City's Condesa neighborhood might subconsciously have internalized the way that its striking art deco architecture echoed the stylized figures of contemporary female performers: both featured spare, machinelike, elongated forms that came to mark the city's landscape and visual culture by the 1930s. In this evocative book, Ageeth Sluis draws together the seemingly distinct revolutionary discourses about urban development and architecture, gender and sexuality, and race and nationalism, demonstrating fluidity in their respective disciplinary traditions. The principal argument is both nuanced and complex: that “building a utopian, revolutionary city was an aesthetic project that looked to female bodies for its inspiration, but it was also a moralistic project that attempted to contain women's mobility” (p. 296).Sluis argues that from the final third of the Porfiriato through the period of revolutionary reform and state building, Mexico City saw a transformation in the construction of physical spaces that ran parallel to evolving gender norms and practices. Fashionable neighborhoods, modern market complexes, and renovated performance venues proclaimed the Distrito Federal's emergence as a cosmopolitan city that drew aesthetic inspiration from a new transnational female form increasingly visible on the bataclán (a performance phenomenon imported from Paris) stage and in glossy magazines. Yet alongside these physical and cultural modernizing developments, official preoccupations with the increasing visibility of women in urban spaces—as performers and market vendors alike—yielded policies that subjected women's bodies to both traditional norms and heightened government regulation. Such urban reforms underscored the binary legibility of women's identities as either the risqué deco actresses or the market women who represented “rural anachronisms” (p. 19).Deco Body, Deco City delivers a new lexicon that will undoubtedly become standard in modern Mexican historiography. Sluis defines the lean, androgynous “Deco body” as a feature of visual culture that privileged form over race or color and therefore provided an opportunity for a wide variety of women to engage in the performance of modernity. The Deco body coexisted with romanticized and idealized versions of indigenous beauty, rendered as voluptuous and brown. Sluis signals an ambivalence from official sectors about the female body: nude Deco bodies on the one hand were deemed pornographic but on the other hand heralded the global modernity that Mexico so desperately sought. Likewise, the nude indigenous body, when strategically framed, was considered wholly nationalist. This introduces a second major contribution: “camposcape,” or urban artistic and popular understandings of Mexico's multifaceted countryside codified as markers of an imagined collective history and identity. The most important feature of camposcape was that “with its emphasis on mexicanidad, authenticity, and indigenismo, [it] taught Mexicans that artistic nudity, bodily integrity, and health belonged to the countryside” (p. 103). Camposcape appeared in the scenarios for theatrical performances, in murals that adorned urban markets, and in magazines that circulated among the urban middle-class populations. Outside of its popular depictions as part of camposcape, the indigenous female body—increasingly prevalent in the city in the decades following the revolution—was subject to increasing regulation on the part of the state, especially as female market vendors claimed more power and space in the urban sector.Sluis provides two case studies that serve as excellent examples for her argument about the feminization of urban space and the official regulation that this phenomenon wrought. The first is a chapter on the downtown Mercado Abelardo Rodríguez, a market that was renovated in the early 1930s to optimize the social function of public space along revolutionary lines. The market included not only a day care center, hygienic waste disposal systems, and beds for vendors to rest in but also a theater for the presentation of ideological and political performances, all under revolutionary murals, which rendered the mercado an “outpost of the campo in the city” (p. 255). The second case study is a chapter on the iconic Palacio de Bellas Artes, which transformed in form and function over the trajectory of its 30-year construction. By its 1934 inauguration, its multipurpose spaces, including an artisan market and halls for political union meetings, along with the idealized revolutionary nationalist programming that its patrons funded led to debates over which social groups should have access to the public space of a national theater.This book contributes to our understanding of how urban space was organized in gendered ways to both feature and control the female body depending on how that body conformed to the competing ideologies of beauty and morality operationalized in the early twentieth century. One of the book's strengths is the extent to which it is grounded in the interdisciplinary and intersectional historiographies on which its multiple assertions rely: feminist history, urban planning, modern Mexican political history, and cultural studies are all thoroughly drawn into the analysis. Sluis's astute reading of buildings and bodies as cultural texts constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the contested emergence of Mexican modernity

Aesthetics · Art · Human sexuality · Modernity · Political science · Sociology · Spectacle · Visual arts · Architecture · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Gender Studies · Law · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Photographic and Visual Arts