Mexican feminist stand-up comedians joke about Machismo

Activist Itzel Arcos, creator of Standup FeministaMx, explains that this literary stage discipline seeks to deconstruct the Macho, misogynist, classist and racist prototype with the laughter that has characterized Mexican humor.

Itzel Arcos considers herself an artivist determined that women appropriate their voice and tell their stories, making violence visible as actors of change.

Trained in Hispanic Letters at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM, this writer and actress is a protagonist of Mexican feminism that burst since 2016 to assume that the personal is political.

Outstanding workshop leader of the autobiographical monologues that hundreds of women have built under her conduction, Itzel is also a pioneer in feminist standup as an author and promoter.

Standup FeministaMx has been in existence for five years and has graduated more than 300 students in the challenge of deconstructing the sexist, misogynist, classist and racist laughter that has characterized Mexican humor to give way to the artivism of women who take the stage and bravely give an account of the paradoxes they are protagonists of in a society that always asks more of them.

In an interview with Excélsior, Itzel Arcos, her students and a scholar from the academy of these aesthetic expressions reflect on a unique experience in Latin America of raising awareness that has resulted in diverse routines that publicly socialize the daily cost of motherhood, breastfeeding, taking care of menstruation, fighting with beauty stereotypes, to carry a colitis that synthesizes work and domestic tensions, to explain to others a conjugal condition, to face the free exercise of sexuality, the normalized mistreatment of the family or the partner and the contradictions of the patriarchal culture that from different ways tries to strip women even of their own bodies.

TYT Newsroom