On Queering Mestizaje 2


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" (10).

Arrizon also points at the performativity of race, as "the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved" (12). That is why she suggest we pay attention both at the ways that the nation-state is mapped onto racialized bodies (through the notion of mestizaje) and how transculturation provides a site for not only subjection, but for the political performative agency of the body. After all, we must remember that queer mestiza identity is not a post-modern fantasy, but a late-global-capitalism and neocolonial reality that provide space and call for political initiatives that articulate living in-between cultures, racialized bodies and queer desire (like the politics of disidentification that JE Muñoz advocates for).

Comments

  1. JonSeptember 8, 2009 at 12:49 PM

    OK, so we have queering and we have mestizaje as different notions of hybridity, and now we have transculturation, too. What are the overlaps and the differences between these concepts?

    ReplyDelete

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