Alarma!: Mujercitos Performing Gender in 1970s Mexico

In this essay, I analyze representative photographs of mujercitos' posing for Alarma!, contextualizing them through their labor as sex workers within the pigmentocratic system of Mexico. I read their gender performance as reflecting their desire to access class privilege, which in Mexico is inseparable from skin tonality. I argue that the photographs of mujercitos point to processes of subjectivation different from those outlined in prominent theories of performative gender/sex developed in Anglo North America, specifically the early work of Judith Butler.