The rationale for the session is twofold. First, in the context of widespread gendered violence (including femicide), forced displacement, and queer and feminist activism, the home in Mexico has become a central yet unstable formation: a site of danger, care, and political imagination. Second, historical archives of cinema and nota roja (sensational crime press) reveal that domestic instability and marginal homemaking are not new. Placing these archives in dialogue with contemporary productions reveals how domestic space has long been negotiated in relation to surveillance, morality, and violence, and how current works inherit, revise, and contest these genealogies.
The session builds on work on domesticity, the public sphere, and heterotopias in Latin American cultural studies, drawing on Arendt’s oikos and Foucault’s heterotopia, as well as recent feminist and decolonial debates on gendered violence and public sphere in Mexico (for example, Rivera Garza on femicide and narrative, Rita Segato on patriarchal territoriality, Sayak Valencia on necropolitics and the body). It centers visual and narrative practices that make legible “abject homemaking” in plazas, brothels, cramped apartments, and haunted houses, complicating divides between private refuge and public exposure, house and street, human and nonhuman. Each paper treats a different medium and period, but all ask how domestic space in Mexico is claimed and contested at the margins of respectability and how these sites function as heterotopic oikoi.
Elissa Rashkin’s “‘Private’ Spaces, ‘Public’ Women: Sites of Prostitution in Mexican Film” focuses on sex work, following the novel Santa and its film adaptations to examine how the “fallen woman” plot frames brothels and cabarets as morally charged “no‑places.” Mobilizing Foucault’s heterotopia alongside feminist film theory, Rashkin shows how these films both police and trouble oppositions between public and private, especially when later feminist filmmakers shift the emphasis from punishment to female agency.
In “Gay Men’s Domesticity in Nota Roja: Mexico City, 1930s–1950s,” Víctor M. Macías‑González reads nota roja coverage of murdered homosexual men as an unexpected archive of queer domestic life. He analyzes articles that describe victims’ apartments, furnishings, habits, and ties to neighbors and coworkers. Intended to sensationalize violence, these stories nonetheless record complex domestic arrangements and affective networks, revealing forms of queer homemaking embedded within working‑ and middle‑class neighborhoods during rapid urban change, and showing how domestic respectability was negotiated along axes of sexuality, class, and gender.
Alejandro Mendoza’s “The Home Displaced: Gendered Violence and Dwelling in Paulette Jonguitud’s El mundo desplazado” examines how a haunted house, feminist graffiti, and human–nonhuman entanglements reconfigure home in the context of femicide and protest. Thinking with Latour, Heidegger, and Derrida, Mendoza argues that El mundo desplazado figures home as a more‑than‑human assemblage entangled with gendered violence and ecological crisis.
Read together, these presentations show how domestic spaces emerge in brothels, apartments, and haunted houses as contested sites where sex workers, queer men, and women and children living amid gendered violence negotiate care, kinship, and belonging. The panel offers a sustained conversation about how to read visual and narrative forms for practices of dwelling and how heterotopic homemaking generates emancipatory narratives that challenge who is allowed to feel “at home” in Mexico.
The session will consist of three 15‑minute presentations (about 45 minutes total), followed by at least 25 minutes of unstructured discussion. The organizer, who is not presenting a paper, will keep time strictly and open the Q&A with shared questions to foster dialogue among presenters and with the audience.
The panel includes participants at different ranks, from different disciplines (history, film and media, literary and cultural studies), and from public and private institutions in the United States and Mexico. It brings together Mexican, Mexican American, and U.S.-based scholars working from feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches, which is essential to addressing domestic space in Mexico as a complex formation shaped by intersecting structures of gender, sexuality, class, race, and nation.