Mythical reiteration and gender: The representation of women in the Mexican political cartoon, the case of Elba Esther Gordillo "La Maestra"

Abstract

This paper's goal is to make an analysis of some Mexican political cartoons, the argument of this is that they tend to represent Elba Esther Gordillo, a woman with political power, as a monstrous and manipulative being, in a reiteration of the archetype of the terrible mother through the myth as an extra limitation of the "natural" order. This will be done through the interpretative analysis of three political cartoons elaborated by cartoonists Helguera, Filón, and Rocha. For this we will be using a qualitative methodology that focuses on the clues provided by the image; the intention is neither to create generalizations nor to present a representative work of all the women-related images in the Mexican political cartoons, so we took only these three political cartoons of various authors corresponding to the years 2006, 2007 and 2009 and whose theme is reiterative. These cartoons were analyzed from the categories proposed by Gombrich, the mythical reiteration, and gender theory. By studying these images we identified the reiteration of founding myths of different cultures such as the Greek, Sumerian, and Hebrew which are expressed in the representation of the former leader as Medusa, Lilith, and the black widow. Thus reiterating the return of myths that tried to explain the "natural" order of the world in ancient times. We understand that within this order there were also the traditional gender roles so that the excess of these was related to the perverse, the fearful, and undesirable. Hence the representation of women with power could result in something monstrous and frightening. These myths, as Carretero-Pasín (2016) and Jung (2019) point out, tend to be reiterated over time and permeate the imaginaries of every culture.