Gender in Blasco Ibáñez’s El paraíso de las mujeres and the movie El sexo fuerte

• In Event: Crossing Genres and Crossing Boundaries in Latin American Science Fiction

Abstract

In this paper, I will examine how women are represented in two versions of the same story, one literary and the other cinematographic. While in the US, Valencian author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez wrote El paraíso de las mujeres (1922), a novel loosely based on Swift’s Gulliver Travels. Blasco’s novel portrays an island inhabited by small women who rule a society where men are the subordinate sex. Although the book was originally conceived of as movie script, the film was never made due to costly special effects. Apparently forgotten, El paraíso de las mujeres, was, however, loosely adapted and made into the movie El sexo fuerte (1945) by Mexican director Emilio Gómez Muriel, who changed the role of Blasco’s sole protagonist into a pair of handsome men, a Mexican cattle-rancher and a Spanish bullfighter. After a shipwreck, both men arrive at an island ruled by beautiful life-size Amazons who keep men as slaves, yet eventually the Queen falls in love with the Mexican. While Blasco conceived of his novel to represent the freedom of women in the US, suggesting that a revolution would bring about a more just and equal society, the Mexican movie does the opposite, with a revolt changing the society back into what the protagonists consider to be the “natural order of things.” The conservative nature of the film’s message and the progressive concern for gender equality in the novel will provide a basis for discussion of how different media affect the portrayal of gender in science fiction.

Author

• Miguel Angel Fernandez Delgado, University of South Florida