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 ...