The Abjection of Patriarchy: Ibolya Fekete’s Chico and the Transnational Feminist Imaginary

Abstract

One of several interrelated challenges presented by a recent film directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete is her choice to collaborate with, to take as her primary interlocutor, a man, whose life story provides most of the film’s events and who plays the film’s fictionalized version of himself. I would argue that both the film, Chico (2001), and the collaborative mode of production that brought it into being enact a profoundly feminist epistemological, political, and aesthetic project, and that the film vigorously interrogates, as Rosi Braidotti has urged Western feminists to do, “the very conceptual structures that have governed the production of the theoretical schemes in which, even today, the representation of women is caught” (1994, 185). Fekete’s choice of a male collaborator, though, appears to fly in the face of Braidotti’s definition of the feminist subject as one who “fastens on the presence of the other woman, on the other as woman” (1994, 183).

Normally, the female film used to be concerned with so called “female issues.” I was accused of not being a real woman because I wasn’t dealing with those things. …I think if there is a female feel to the film, and I think there is, it is not the story, it is not the theme, it is the touch of the material, how you handle your heroes, how you handle the scenes, the events.

—Ibolya Fekete

Home is where your toothbrush is.

—Yareli Arizmendi, Nostalgia Maldita: 1-900-MEXICO