Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

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