Between automoción patria and maternal combustion: Driving through change in Sor Citroën (1967)

Critics, fans and bloggers have recently articulated a polarized set of responses to the 1967 film Sor Citroën alongside a growth in nostalgia for early models of smallformat Spanish cars. This article uses key texts by Virginia Scharff and Deborah Clark on the history of women's automobilism to posit that the dissonances and paradoxes that have previously been identified in Sor Citroën reflect not only the contradictions of a stagnant desarrollista politics but also the ambiguities and paradoxes of a car culture that has its roots in a patriarchal paradigm of automobile production and consumption. The article further posits that Sor Citroën reflects an inflection point in Spanish automotive culture and that its central character anticipates debate over the relationship between cars, reproduction and female autonomy. Dialogue with post-transitional Spanish film asks if Sor Citroën was a decisive departure from automoción patria or simply a brief detour from its trajectory.