Cultural agency of wounded bodies
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 expression of their natural character and not as a product of history. Even the language of economic programs as "aids" for a suffering economy invoke the idea of a prosthetic relation.
La Mujer Maya then, as imagined and constructed in Guatemala's postwar discourse, stands for something perceived as missing or lost, as they are linked to culture via ethnicity and gender (95). As modernity has been gendered as masculine, the cultural continuity of the nation is projected into the image of La Mujer Maya. However, not only the project of the nation-state relies on this image, as the Pan-Mayan movement has also depended on it as La Mujer Maya stands as a defender of traditions and language, in a discourse that also tends to naturalize women's labor and reproductive capacity. But the image of La Mujer Maya offers to concrete Mayan women more than a passive ground and more than a position as passive victims, as they engage in transnational indigenous and feminist struggles and affect the meanings attached to this image (for instance, re-signifying traditional textils as cosmopolitan).
In the sites of intersection of material gendered and recialized bodies with larger bodies politic, Nelson sees a prosthetic relationality, that cannot be described as a unidirectional relation but rather of cyborg dialectics. These are for Nelson the conditions of possibility for Mayan cultural agency: "...a complex relationality with a somewhat active participant —not a fully synthesizable, not a passive ground, and also not the rational free agent of liberal humanism, but a semiautonomous prosthetic in intimate connection with the self." (100)
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 expression of their natural character and not as a product of history. Even the language of economic programs as "aids" for a suffering economy invoke the idea of a prosthetic relation.
La Mujer Maya then, as imagined and constructed in Guatemala's postwar discourse, stands for something perceived as missing or lost, as they are linked to culture via ethnicity and gender (95). As modernity has been gendered as masculine, the cultural continuity of the nation is projected into the image of La Mujer Maya. However, not only the project of the nation-state relies on this image, as the Pan-Mayan movement has also depended on it as La Mujer Maya stands as a defender of traditions and language, in a discourse that also tends to naturalize women's labor and reproductive capacity. But the image of La Mujer Maya offers to concrete Mayan women more than a passive ground and more than a position as passive victims, as they engage in transnational indigenous and feminist struggles and affect the meanings attached to this image (for instance, re-signifying traditional textils as cosmopolitan).
In the sites of intersection of material gendered and recialized bodies with larger bodies politic, Nelson sees a prosthetic relationality, that cannot be described as a unidirectional relation but rather of cyborg dialectics. These are for Nelson the conditions of possibility for Mayan cultural agency: "...a complex relationality with a somewhat active participant —not a fully synthesizable, not a passive ground, and also not the rational free agent of liberal humanism, but a semiautonomous prosthetic in intimate connection with the self." (100)
I'm not entirely sure what's meant by "prosthetic" here, though it sounds like an interesting notion and I wonder how it would work for Chile: what stands in there for what's been lost?
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the point that the figure of the "Mujer Maya"is mobilized also by the indigenous movement shows again that feminism and anti-authoritarianism are not necessarily neatly aligned.