Chapter 3 - The Star as Archetype: Extending the Range of the Mujer sin alma

Summary

María Félix was often called upon to play characters who had sexual pasts or used their sexuality in ways that fell outside the rigid norms of the time. These characters have been variously labelled as mujer sin alma, femme fatale, and la devoradora. As I will discuss, the literal and se-mantic meaning of each of these archetypes is freighted with judgements that were intended to control women's public and private behaviour. Therefore, none of them is entirely satisfactory to reproduce nor uphold. Nonetheless, I am choosing one, mujer sin alma, to examine and extend because it not only works as a placeholder and point of reference. Félix herself used it to describe some of her roles inscribing it with subversive potential.

As shorthand, this label risks being dismissive of her work. But, as I discussed in Chapter 2, Félix made it clear that thanks to her performances the mujer sin alma she played was, ‘atractiva, talentosa, triunfadora y se divierte mucho en la vida’ [attractive, talented, successful, and she really enjoys life]. The flamboyance in such assertions in Félix's memoir and interviews is consistent with a form of camp as a resistant ‘aesthetic strategy […] achieved through stylistic exaggeration, excessive theatricality, or other forms of overarticulation’ which are intended to challenge ‘normative notions of gender and sexuality’. Through her theatrical self-evaluations, Félix is enacting a layered discursive game. She is literally upholding her own skills in ways that are so overt that refuse contrary opinion, but they are also nods to a camp style that speaks to a queer community that recognises her achievements as powerful and against the odds. Félix was a woman in a male dominated working environment which means that her place in it was a series of negotiations, well-chosen alliances, and artful reframing of the details of these experiences. In this way, she can be read as a camp queer icon. Thus, when she asserts that her mujer sin alma characters are appealing, have agency, and, by implication, are aspirational, she is not only speaking of her achievements, but she is also addressing and recuperating the under-appreciated and poorly understood mujer sin alma as representative of marginalised communities with whom others can identify.