From dog-fighting in Mexico to issues of transsexuality in Cuba, contemporary Latin American cinema covers a diverse array of topics. Lauren Mulvey, British feminist film theorist, uses pyschoanaylitics to offer a feminist critique of all classical narrative cinema. She establishes that narrative cinema is viewed from the male gaze and women are coded for their "to-be-looked-at-ness". She offers that female characters add nothing or very little to actual elements of plot and character but rather are subjected to male scopophilia, the fetishistic and voyeuristic, due to phallocentricism and psychoanalytic fear of castration. She laments the way in which women in cinema are subject to male desires, being accepted or denied and objectified only by the male will, and encourages an advancement in feminist cinema. As this article was written in 1975, it is pertinent to analyze whether cinema has been able to overcome this scopophilic degradation of the female form. In an age of female protagonists-like in Disney's newest animated musical feature Frozen-and even male objectification-like the trailer for the new feature Magic Mike XXL-there may be hope that contemporary narrative cinema has found a way to free itself from phallocentricism and objectification of its female characters.
Four contemporary Latin American films, Memories del Subdesarollo (1968), El Mariachi (1993), Amores Perros (2000), and El Yuma (2012), seem to show the transition of cinema into an era where female roles are not subjected to such phallocentric notions. From a tertiary level the female characters seem to gain more respect and authority as the years progress, but these scopophilic elements still persist through all the narratives. However, these particular films, to varying degrees, contain a self-referenciality to and awareness of the concept of scopophilia and subjection to the male gaze in cinema itself.
