Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

So, what can a 1995 Disney-Pixar animation film tell us about Chilean post-dictatorship politics? Here, I am trying to develop a queer feminist eye for reading materials such as films, as I am planning to include this kind of material in my actual research. As a short exercise, I do here a very exploratory and preliminary reading of Toy Story (John Lasseter, Pixar - Disney, 1995). The reason I picked this film is because it has become my toddler daughter's favorite, meaning I get to see it VERY often...and because it has very interesting narratives. I will not summarize the plot, so if you have not seen the movie, please read short summary at IMDB or Wikipedia . I welcome all kinds of suggestions and comments on how to refine this eye. Competing Masculinities This is mainly a story about masculinities in crisis. A cowboy toy —Woody— is in crisis when he feels he is being replaced by Buzz, the full-of-fancy-gadgets space ranger new toy, invoking a social eroticization of technology...

Palaversich, Diana. “The Wounded Body of Proletarian Homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán”. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 2, 99-118 (2002). Pedro Lemebel's writings effectively challenge triumphant narratives about Chilean's economic model, pointing at the marginal subjects that inhabit the city. As well, it emphasizes the "transvestism" of Chilean identity, especially in terms of class and race. He also shatters any project of unitary or global "gay identity" by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS. Moreover, Lemebel engages with three traditions and political projects —gay politics, the Left political agenda, and postmodernism— without being subsumed by any of them. Lemebel's resistance to the global anglo-centered gay identity project (which has also been adopted by Latin American homosexual groups...

Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153. Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was...

Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation. The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. This book is key to understand how intentional and deliberate was the deployment of modernizing nationalist narratives in Chile, and Gabriela Mistral's participation on them. It shows, furthermore, how Mistral was highly influential to the crafting of Chilean and Latin American gender and racial ideologies. Fiol-Matta's careful research verses on Mistral's relationship to the Chilean (and later Mexican and Latin American) state cultural politics and how she established a persona that played along with the state's gendered, raced, and sexualized deployments of "national culture." Mistral contributed to the creation of images of motherhood and nationalist womanhood while in her own life not adjusting to heterosexual patterns of sexual performance nor of national identity. The fact is that she consciously made her image to co...

Kulick, Don. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kulick presents a detailed ethnographic work on travesti sex workers in Salvador, Brazil. He is interested in the ways that travestis understand and give meaning to their daily practices and identities. Kulick argues that studying the lives of travestis can tell us a lot "about the ways in which gender is imagined and configured in Brazilian society." (11) 1. Travestis in Kulick's research do not identify themselves as women, but as homosexual men who derive pleasure from looking like a woman and triggering (masculine) men's desire. They also do not label transsexuals as women, and refuse to give up their male genitalia as a source of sexual pleasure (I suspect that also as a source of sexual power). In this way, all the analysis that want to elevate travesti subjectivity as the ultimate post-modern condition of a non-identity...

Prieur, Annick. Mema's house, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Prieur's book is based on rich ethnographic evidence and contains her reflections on the role of homosocial and homoerotic male desire in the construction of masculinities in Mexico. She argues that homophobia, machismo and male bisexuality are all at the same time imbricated in the construction of masculinities: Prieur shows the concrete ways that masculinities are constituted in the stories of 'mayates', men whose bisexual practices do not make them think of their identities as "gays" or less masculine. Since these men can retain the power of labeling others (as homosexuals) they can get involved in bisexual relations without 'losing' their masculinity. Some authors (Carrier, Lancaster) have indicated that given the extension of male bisexuality it ought to be a largely tolerated practice in Latin America. Prieur introduces mor...

Lind, Amy and Jessica Share. “Queering Development: Institutionalized Heterosexuality in Development Theory, Practice and Politics in Latin America”. Feminist futures : re-imagining women, culture and development edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian. London ; New York : Zed Books ; New York : Palgrave, 2003. This article argues for the need to challenge institutionalized heterosexism in development theories and practice. Along with this, addresses the uneasy relationship between heterosexual and queer feminists in Latin America, and the role of transnational networks of solidarity and activism, as well as globalized consumer culture in making some discourses of "gay rights" available in LA. Lind and Share analyze the dynamics of development "aid" and policies, most of which peaked in the 80's in the context of the AIDS pandemic. This allowed many gay groups to become "ONGized" and get funding for their activities. The groups stru...

Nesvig, Martin. 2001 “The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality”. Hispanic American Historical Review 81(3-4): 689-729. Nesvig argues that it is relevant to look at the sexual mores of the colonial period as many of these notions persisted into the modern period in Latin America. He notes that homosexuality was considered the ultimate sin against Nature, God, and the Crown. However, this did not stop the fact that it was a fairly common and semi- institutionalized practice. Because cities offered more opportunity for anonymity and for the development of a clandestine subculture with its own slang and codes it was rather an urban phenomenon. Reviews historiographies of homosexuality, informed by the paradigm of honor/shame, where sexuality is a key component. The metaphor of penetration is contained in the myth of La Malinche, makes being penetrated something that equates being colonized, degraded and defeated. Nesvig argues that scholarship on male homosexuality have been...

Lopez-Vicuña, Ignacio. “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies”. Latin American Research Review - Volume 39, Number 1, 2004, pp. 238-253 . University of Texas Press. This article reviews scholarship on gay and lesbian studies in Latin America. The growing body of research has been more marked by diversity and complexity than by confluence. Literary studies have started to "queer" the canon by reading texts through queer desire. Queer studies from the social sciences, have tended more to build bridges between homoerotic desire and narratives of nationhood, between discourses of national identity and sexuality. They pay attention to the interplay of power, desire and race, including the analysis of the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Vargas Llosa's work. The fact that many of the writers of the Latin American literary "boom" (1960's and 70's) rejected dominant masculinity and machismo does not m...

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...

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Queering relates to refusing or resistance to occupy or be identified with a single subject position. Queer subjects occupy an identity “in between” (hybrid), which is useful to de-essentialize identity. Mestizaje, as a postcolonial condition, has been both an ideology linked to nationalist narratives and to an (oppositional) identity linked to power struggles over representation, autonomy and authenticity in Latin America. On one hand, mestizaje provides a narrative that gives meaning and direction to colonial violence and processes of transculturation through the idealization of Spanish and Indigenous blood (note that the blood is the metaphor to talk about filiation and genealogies of race) and gives historical meaning to racialized bodies. This narrative represents the colonial encounter as a racialized and gendered romance between the male Spanish conquistador and ...

Cano, Gabriela. “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles's (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution”. In Jocelyn Olcott,; Mary K. Vaughan, Gabriela Cano (Eds.). Sex In Revolution. Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Cano analiza el caso del coronel Amelio Robles, nacido Amelia Robles y quien desde su adolescencia y al descubrir la "libertad del campo de batalla", vivió casi toda su vida como hombre, luchó en la Revolución Zapatista y se ganó el respeto y legitimidad de sus pares como modelo de hombría, valor y masculinidad zapatista. Gracias a que Amelio se ganó éste reconocimiento en el campo de batalla, su sexualidad era raramente cuestionada o rebatida en público, en un acuerdo tácito entre los que lo rodeaban de que era un tema del que no se hablaba. Amelio una vez mató a dos hombres de un grupo que lo atacó para verificar en forma violenta su genitalidad para resolver el misterio que de todas maneras...

Lancaster, Roger N. 1998 “Transgenderism in Latin America: Some Critical Introductory Remarks on Identities and Practices”. Sexualities 1(3): 261-274. Lancaster's article is an introduction to a series of study cases that deal with gender power, sexual resistance, corporeal norms, and performative subversion in Latin America. To the question of how and when do transgendered performances deconstruct or re-stage normative gender identities?, Lancaster warns us about reading all transgendered and transexual practices as already subversive because this depends always on the specific context that they take place. Along with this, Lancaster makes an argument against a global agenda of international gay politics based on a unitary gay identity imported acritically from an urban, middle-class, North American context. In this sense, Lancaster reminds us that identities are always contingent and a product of specific practices. "When we say that a practice either ratifies or subverts ...