Melodramas de movilidad: Relaciones de clase y género en el cine argentino de 1937 a 1956

This dissertation explores class and gender issues in a number of films produced in Argentina between 1937 and 1958. The 1930s and the early 1940s are often identified as the aesthetic and commercial peak of Argentine cinema. The period can also be defined as one in which political changes consolidated the power and identity of the newly created middle class while also modifying the social position of women. I pay special attention to the ideological shifts brought about by the country’s industrialization, by the emergence of political rights for women, and by the rise and decline of Peronism, for all of these phenomena affected conceptions of social and gender roles and relations. One of the common denominators of the films that I analyze in this dissertation is their persistent reference to the conflicts surrounding women and their social rank. My analysis emphasizes the contradictions that lay at the core of the Argentine patriarchal ideology and that appear in each of these films alongside important complications of traditional female figures and class discourses. One of the key conclusions of this dissertation is that the principal tensions of early Argentine melodramatic film have to do with its attempts to convey its historical capacity to act as an agent of revolutionary change during times of intense turmoil while simultaneously attempting to serve as an instrument for the dissemination of more traditional discourses of gender and class.