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Our analysis of Y tu mama también foregrounds contemporary tendencies of transnational cinematic production, the history of film production in Mexico, and the recent political and economic transformations of the Mexican nation-state. We demonstrate how Cuarón's film share certain cinematic traits, such as an emphasis on contingency and coincidence, with other successful international co-productions and how it responds specifically to national concerns. Our analysis of the film's production context also addresses the history of the state support for cinema in Mexico. In our interpretation of the film's form and content, we focus on its use of a disembodied male voice-over as well as its portrayal of gender roles and homosexuality. We argue that the film ultimately reinforces a conventional, oppressive representation of Mexican society, foreclosing upon its potentially progressive narrative trajectories. Though Cuarón's film is definitely a product of globalized era of film production, it exhibits we conclude, a marked nostalgia for a more properly national framework for defining Mexico.

During the past decade, the German-speaking world has witnessed both a new wave of writing by women and a resurgence of interest in and debate about feminism…

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This chapter examines a boundary-crossing archive of popular and countercinematic West, East, and post-unification German films that all focus on precarious intimacies: Dörrie’s Men (1985); Wortmann’s Maybe…Maybe Not (1994); Carow’s Coming Out (1989); and Grisebach’s Longing (2006). Shifting focus onto a consideration of men and masculinity in the postfeminist era, I analyze how these films subject the heteropatriarchal family to scrutiny, often exploring homosocial bonds and queer relations. In addition to investigating the precaritization of gender, sexuality, and intimacy pictured by these four films, this chapter sheds new light on the much vaunted “return to genre” in the German cinema of neoliberalism.