Vea: Projecting Pornography in Mexico City, Transnational Bodies, and Acting Across the Sexual Frontier

This paper examines the articulation between the embodied city and changing gender norms in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, when the new state sought to reinvigorate and civilize Mexico City through urban reforms and public works. An analysis of the pornographic magazine Vea shows how views of "public women" were crucial to larger debates on gender and urbanization in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s. In the context of post World War I, a new, global ideal of the New Woman emerged through which women claimed both political and social mobility. Moreover, this ideology was articulated through a radically different aesthetic of femininity that postulated a new way of discerning physical beauty.