Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Melhuus, M. & Kristi Ann Stølen. Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Verso, 1996. Este volumen es una recopilación de estudios de casos hechos por antropólogos en Argentina, México, Peru, Ecuador, República Dominicana y presentados en una conferencia en Suecia sobre el poder de los imaginarios de género en LA. Aspectos en común entre estos artículos: influencia de Bourdieu y Foucault, esfuerzo por complejizar de las relaciones de poder de género más allá de las categorías de opresor vs. víctima, uso de la nociones de discurso, imaginarios, hegemonía para explicar y comprender las relaciones de género y de raza. A partir de esta lectura, se desprenden algunas ideas importantes: a) Los discursos y representaciones sobre las diferencias de género sirven para articular diferencias de clase y etnia, por ejemplo, la representación de la sexualidad femenina (mujer decente vs fácil) sirve para vehiculizar diferencias de clase y raza

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad. Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. Rodríguez emphasizes "place" and "space" as sites for the articulation of identities, and sees place as critical to understand performative practices of identity as situated. Inspired by Foucault's notions of regulatory practices and disciplinary discourses, as well as by Judith Butler's idea of gender as performative, she regards subjectivity more as a product of discursive practices rather than pre-existing them. Also quotes Alarcón's notion of "subject-in-process" to point at the paradoxical and contradictory character of identities. Every particular space contains pre-existing discourses and narratives in which subjectivity is embodied in a —culturally specific— intelligible way; however, there is no discourse of identity that can contain subjectivity, there is always an excess of the subject that resists to

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. On the other hand, Latinidad is a notion that is subjected to different power regimes than mestizaje, and that in the context of transculturation in LA, relates more to the Western/North fantasies and to the commodification and fetishization of racialized bodies. [I had done the experiment of googling for images of "latin american" versus "latina" women and had realized about this before too, on the first case I got Frida Kahlo, in the second, Salma Hayek, JLo, and a bunch of pop-up porn ads featuring Latinas]. However, Arrizon is interested in asking for example, how can Latinidad be linked to queer desire, and to understand how different cultural productions —from Hollywood movies to experimental performance— create particular genealogies, "marking counterhegemonic systems that reassert the possibilities of culture and ideology in representation

Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror--Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497. In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population). “...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointl

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Queering relates to refusing or resistance to occupy or be identified with a single subject position. Queer subjects occupy an identity “in between” (hybrid), which is useful to de-essentialize identity. Mestizaje, as a postcolonial condition, has been both an ideology linked to nationalist narratives and to an (oppositional) identity linked to power struggles over representation, autonomy and authenticity in Latin America. On one hand, mestizaje provides a narrative that gives meaning and direction to colonial violence and processes of transculturation through the idealization of Spanish and Indigenous blood (note that the blood is the metaphor to talk about filiation and genealogies of race) and gives historical meaning to racialized bodies. This narrative represents the colonial encounter as a racialized and gendered romance between the male Spanish conquistador and

TRISTE FUNCIONARIO POLICIAL SAD POLICE FUNCTIONARY Mauricio Redolés y Son Ellos Mismos Album: Bello Barrio (1987) Que será de mi torturador? Que será de mi torturador? Habrá ganado un viaje a Panamá? o a EEUU agarro beca, quizás? o tal vez al final no pasó na' o tal vez al final no pasó na' Whatever happened to my torturer? Whatever happened to my torturer? Did he win a trip to Panama? or maybe grab a scholarship to the US? or maybe at the end nothing happened or maybe at the end nothing happened Se le habrá caído el pelo? con tanto golpe, se habrá puesto más feo? se le habrá caído un diente? con las cabras amarradas, seguirá tan caliente? I wonder if he lost his hair with so much beating up did he get uglier? I wonder if he lost a tooth? with the girls tied down, I wonder if he's still so horny Me pegaba en forma profesional quería algo confesional me pegaba en forma diligente ¡Confiesa que eres dirigente! He used to beat me up in a professional way he wanted something con

Fusco, Coco. (Ed.) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Introduction and pp. 203- 222. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fusco notes in the introduction that the body is the most suitable material for political performance in Latin America, as it is also the material and concrete site where political power is (violently) articulated. The body can be seen then as the 'stage' for the individual and the collective to come together, and the support for social reproduction and sexual domination. The performances compiled here by Fusco all construct particular versions of the body and address that violence inflicted upon the body politic. Fusco sees the problem in sustaining the existence of a sort of regional and national performance art, and the risk to equate art with a certain political project or one singular meaning (like in nationalist art), but many artists themselves are ever struggling not to become tokenized as representatives of a singular identity. It is also true h

Image from: http://www.larepublica.com.uy/mundo/256063-madres-de-plaza-de-mayo-cumplen-hoy-30-anos Taylor, Diana. “Opening Remarks”, pp. 1-16 and "Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo", pp. 275-305. In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latina/o America. Edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. In the introduction, Taylor points at the complexity and contradictions of using the terms Latina/o and Latin American, as they are themselves contested sites of signification. One cannot think "that Latino/as occupy any one positionality (be it in terms of ideology, class, gender or sexual preference, or race) or that they occupy it in any one way." (6) Taylor is investing on the politics of community —as opposed to identity— with the concept of cultural competence at core as a notion that would enable to speak across divides. The position as Latin Americans can be thought then not as an e

Nelson, Diane M. “The cultural agency of wounded bodies politic : ethnicity and gender as prosthetic support in postwar Guatemala”. Cultural agency in the Americas edited by Doris Sommer. Durham : Duke University Press, 2006. Nelson's argument is that the cultural construct of La Mujer Maya works as prosthesis for wounded bodies in the context of the national project in postwar Guatemala. The use of the prosthetic metaphor is useful to understand how imaginations in the postwar and fantasies of healing of wounded bodies are gendered. The idea derives from cyborg, feminist and disability studies, all of which challenge binaries like self/other and body/technology, and question the supposed sovereign, autonomous and complete subject of liberal discourse. On the other hand, prosthesis are not always metaphoric. Even as we think of neoliberal restructuring in Latin America, these economic changes have relied on the naturalization of women's and indigenous free or cheap labor as an

Piper, Isabel. “La retórica de la marca y los sujetos de la dictadura”. Revista de Crítica Cultural, n.32, Santiago: November 2005. Se pregunta por la efectividad política de la categoría de víctima como posición de sujeto en la postdictadura. Tiene varios puntos consistentes con el análisis de Frazier; por ejemplo, que las posiciones de sujeto disponibles delinean también las posibilidades de acción en la medida que no hay un afuera del poder. Piper identifica en las narraciones sobre la dictadura una retórica de la marca, la metáfora del trauma como principio organizador de la experiencia de la represión que ofrece una interpretación universal sobre el daño inscrito como una cicatriz (de nuevo la metáfora del cuerpo que se puede sanar de sus heridas). Por su parte, las políticas de reparación post-dictadura también han operado con esta retórica, pretendiendo borrar las cicatrices del fracturado cuerpo social y nacional. Pero en la medida que, en general, la violencia represiva perman

Frazier, Lessie Jo. “Gendering the Space of Death: Memory, Democratization and the Domestic”, in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.261-281. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007 Frazier builds on Taussig's notion of the "space of death" and thinks of it as a site of both production and destruction of subjectivities in the context of the Chilean dictatorship, a space where acceptable and unacceptable —perverted and monstrously embodied— subjects are defined. She points out that this space can be perpetuated or dismantled by practices of memory, as it is a contested field, critical for struggles over political power. According to Frazier, "[i]n authoritarian regimes of state terror, the space of death is a patriarchal, bourgeois, and domestic space." (262) Through the experience of torture, a perverse kind of intimacy between oppressor and oppressed emerges. And beca