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...